Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The standard British pronunciation is "Mow-ri", with "Mow" rhyming with "How", and that's the standard I'd expect a British narrator to use, regardless of how its indigenous speakers pronounce it.
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I tend to agree with you Harry. I grew up in a Maori majority community and that is how they pronounced it. And they pronounced the Maori name of the town of that community quite differently to that promulgated by many of those who (often Europeans) now consider themselves experts in the pronunciation of the Maori language.
The latest fashion is to place macrons on various letter "a"s in Maori place names and words as I see stuartjmz is doing with the word Maori - this is an entirely new concept. The practice has been adopted formally for the district I live in and the macroned "a" placed between two consonants in the short place name make those using it in their exaggerated pronunciation sound like coughing sheep as the macron does not really give the correct nuance. Which means, for example, that macron fanatics pronounce the word "Maori" with a first syllable one could confuse with a goat bleating.
The fact is that Maori have long been tribal and still are to a considerable extent, and so pronunciation varies considerably according to where one is (just as it does in England) and there really is no Standard Maori.
As an example I was sent to visit a business by a Maori organization and at reception I gave the name of the Maori organization who sent me. Upon which the (European!) woman receptionist proceeded to give me a curt school ma'am's type lesson in Maori pronunciation telling me I had it all wrong, to which I replied (I had to be polite) that I grew up in a Maori majority community and that is how they would have pronounced it and perhaps they had given me bad habits
. I later mentioned my little adventure to the people at the Maori organization which gave them a giggle as they pronounced their organization's name the same way as I did.
So, there are many people around who think they are experts in the matter and it is their pronunciation which stands over all others, often they are European, but their knowledge of linguistics is so poor that they do not understand that there are regional (and social) variances in all languages.
{Disclosure: I am not a fluent Maori speaker but am familiar with the varying pronunciations of many of the words I know. My wife is completely fluent in a number of the Polynesian languages and is a natural speaker of them, and is proficient in Maori).
John