Pukumahi means: Busy.
‘Puku’ is a modifier placed before/after words to mean ‘very’ or intensify the word. So you have:
- Pukumahi (busy) from mahi (to work)
- Pukuriri (furious) from riri (be angry)
- Pukukai (greedy) from kai (to eat)
This is one of the things on my “continue to research through later levels of study” list because I don’t know whether you can add ‘puku’ to new words to form a new compound word like these or whether it’s a closed group and the ones that were created historically have taken on a life of their own as their own words. (I followed up on this with my kaiako to confirm that the puku- prefix generally isn’t freely used to form new words by speakers.) I also want to better understand whether makariri/cold is constructed similarly as my kaiako suggested it might be but we couldn’t identify the etymology.
Another interesting comparison is to words constructed using ‘hia’ which is a prefix indicating a desire or wish for something:
- hiakai - hungry
- hiainu - thirsty
- hiamoe - sleepy
Or similarly ‘mate’ - be in want of, lacking:
- matekai - hungry/starving
- mateinu - thirsty
- matemoe - sleepy