Titiro mai means: Look in my direction (of speaker).
The difference between yesterday’s post and today’s is the addition of the directional particle ‘mai’. The four directional particles in te reo Māori are:
The most common use of these particles is in combination with verbs to modify the direction of the verb in space, but they have uses outside of spatial direction as well. So you can have:
A really common example of using these particles outside of spatial direction or motion is in statements of time:
I’m sure Daily Te Reo Māori will use more of these particles in future, so I’ll save talking about them for then and instead have a long ramble about how these words fit into sentences. ‘Mai’ here is a postposted directional particle, which means it fits into the part of speech called the “postposted periphery”. Māori sentences are made up of phrases and each phrase has three sections:
The nucleus is the part of the phrase which contains base words such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, numbers. The peripheries contain particles that add more context or specificity to the phrase, or glue things together.
So the sentence “e haere mai ana te ope rā ki runga i te marae”/”That group over there is coming onto the marae” is made up of the following four phrases, broken down into nucleus/peripheries:
I did a little bit more looking into the use of iho/ake in sentences relating to time, as the exact purpose of iho/ake in those sentences is a bit beyond my level. The words with the strongest link to before/after in those sentences are mua/muri. The grammar I’m learning from just says that iho/ake in those cases tend to reinforce mua/muri.
For example, you can have ake used with both:
The larger grammar textbook I have suggests that ‘ake’ is more commonly used for future (such as in the common ending to karakia ‘ake, ake, ake’ - forever and ever, and ‘iho’ is more commonly associated with ‘muri’. Te Aka’s dictionary has ‘muri tata iho’ as “shortly afterwards” and this other grammar highlights that ‘iho’ is typically used to refer to a time in the past but moving towards the present as in: