daily-reo

Kōrero mai means: Talk to me.

I’m going to try to start a habit of using these posts as a prompt to brush up on bits of pieces of reo.

This is an example of giving a command. The format for doing this changes depending on the type of command being given.

Kōrero is used as an intransitive verb here (it doesn’t take a direct object such as Ka kōrero ahau i te reo Māori) which means the command is preceded either by the particle ‘e’ if the verb phrase is less than two morae long or by no particle. In some uses of ‘e’, you decide whether to use it or not based on the length only of the word that follows it, but when giving commands it’s based on the full verb phrase. Other grammars describe this count as including directional particles specifically and highlight that there is variation between speakers in applying this rule.

So you have other intransitive commands:

• Haere mai! - Come here
• E tū! - Stand
• Tū mai! - Stand (no ‘e’ because the full phrase length is too long)
• E noho rā - Goodbye (by a person leaving) (rā is a special case which isn’t counted here when looking at the length of the verb phrase, so we do use ‘e’ here)

These commands can be followed by comments the same way as general Māori statements to give:

• Haere ki te marae! - Go to the marae!
• Hoki mai ā te waru karaka! - Come back at eight o’clock!

Giving intransitive commands is relatively straightforward compared to commands with transitive verbs which (if they take the ‘i’ joiner) need to use the passive construction.