Quote:
Originally Posted by Shayne Parkinson
Maori distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive first person. "Mātou" is "we but not you", and "tātou" is "we including you".
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See, this is the kind of thing I wish they had taught us during my obligatory Maori language course while I was there. Instead, we spent a lot of time learning about who is the caretaker of the volcano or the fern roots or what have you, and what the ancestral canoe is for the local region where we were. I think they were confused about whether they wanted people to come out of the class actually being able to speak to someone (which would have been my preference) or whether they just wanted us to be culturally sensitive (which is a nice goal too but is then going to be a very different course). They mixed it all up and I feel like we didn't really learn much of anything.