Harikoa means: Happy.
Harikoa is a stative/neuter verb which are a class of verbs describing the state of something (usually a state it got into as a result of some other action). In English, we would use the verb ‘to be’ followed by an adjective. Te reo Māori doesn’t use ‘be’ in this way, its statives are self-contained words for “to be happy”, “to be ready”:
Statives can have a comment added to describe whose action resulted in the state:
I find harikoa interesting because it’s composed of two other words which have similar meanings:
There’s some disagreements between grammars on whether statives are a single class of words or a number of subgroups with slightly different rules, but the distinction between these is decreasing over time.
The other uses of English’s “to be” are handled in different ways in Māori. For example, we could say “there are cats (in the world)” as an existential statement that cats exist. Te reo Māori would use the non-specific determiner ‘he’ - a/an/some:
Some older texts have ‘ai’ used to mean “to be” in this way:
But modern Māori would express this as: