What with all the language letters in The Sun this month, I thought I’d best be not too hasty. But I think we can safely start by stating unequivocally that New Zealand English is already full of Maori words, so that shouldn’t bother us – ‘Tauranga’ for one, is Maori for resting place of the Mataatua canoe for this particular spot, if you want to know, anchorage, fishing spot, and so on. Whakatane is the place where the daughter of the chief of Mataatua canoe took command when all the men were ashore exploring, leaving the women and children on-board the canoe and a storm sprang up. “Kia whakatane au i ahau,” the chief’s daughter said – “I’ll act the man, I’'ll take command” and ordered the other women to grab the paddles and get the canoe out of trouble.
And others...
Secondly, English is full of borrowings from other languages, and sometimes it’s even been changed by those borrowings; the two largest being the Old Norse, which changed Old English rather dramatically after King Alfred the Great made the invading Danish-Norwegian army surrender and set them up in a little subordinate kingdom the Danelaw. And the next being the Norman Conquest, which imported thousands of good Old Norman French words into English. Old Norse doubled up on some common words, so we have word-pairs like Shirt-Skirt, Ship-Skiff, where the ‘Sh’ words are Old English and the ‘Sk’ words are Old Norse. Norman French doubled up on other common words, so the common English villager ate cow and sheep, while his Norman lord and lady ate beef and mutton. Plus there are words like Chutney and pyjama, which we picked up from the East India Company and the British Empire of India... some friends say that English doesn’t so much borrow words from other languages as mug other languages and rifle their pockets for loose words...
All in all, just a storm in a teacup.
How many people knew the story behind the name ‘Whakatane’?
I’ve found it fascinates Australians and others.
Wesley Parish, Bellevue.