Max,
Your posting about Maori place names interests me. It has some similarities with what is happening here in Australia, but also some key differences.
I gather that Maori is a uniform language NZ-wide. Was this the case historically, or have a number of distinct languages or dialects been unified in some (artificial?) way to produce an official indigenous language?
The native inhabitants of Australia had hundreds of 'tribes', each with its own language. In fact, anthropologists tend to use the term 'language groups' to distinguish them, apparently since 'tribes' didn't cater well for the extent of mixing and territorial sharing amongst the various nomadic groups. Whilst some Aboriginal people seem keen to rid themselves of the Western-imposed generic label Aboriginal and come up with their own word, there is no one word that does the job. In my region (SE Australia), they call themselves Koories; in other regions there are words such as Murris, Nunga and Anangu. Each of these names applies to many language groups in a large geographical region. Some people prefer to be referred to by their language group and reject the more widely applicable label. To complicate matters further, native inhabitants of the Torres Straits islands, which lie between Australia and Papua New Guinea, are referred to not as Aboriginals but as 'Torres Straits Islanders', leading to frequent references to 'Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders'. Unfortunately, the problem of nomenclature seems to have left indigenous and non-indigenous Australians confused as to the PC term to use for the original inhabitants of our country. I guess this is similar to the dilemma of the indigenous peoples of North America - Indians/American Indians/etc and various tribe names, as touched upon elsewhere on the board.
I was also surprised to hear that there is a Maori equivalent for every city or town in NZ. I understand that traditional places of significance would have an original Maori name. In Australia, when control of Ayers Rock was officially given back to the local Aboriginal people, it reverted to its original - and beautiful - aboriginal name Uluru. Is that well known outside Australia? (As an aside, the transfer has posed a dilemma for tourists, because Aboriginals disapprove of people climbing their sacred rock, but have not prohibited it outright). There are certainly a lot of Aboriginal words used in place names, although many of them are apparently a result of misunderstandings by explorers/settlers of the local Aboriginal language. There is a push to change some placenames to original Aboriginal ones, but it's not a widespread phenomenon.
Getting back to NZ, I am intrigued by the existence of a Maori word for cities and towns that have sprung up in the last 200 years. Are you now applying a traditional Maori word to refer to the region occupied by the "new" settlement, and is there really a one-to-one correspondence between them, or have Maori names been invented recently to cover the gaps?
