daily-reo

Me haere tātou ki te tina means: Let’s (3 or more of us) go for lunch.

The difference between today’s sentence and yesterday’s is that the personal pronoun has been changed. I mentioned pronouns a little in the posts aboutau/ahau and koe but haven’t covered them in detail.

In te reo Māori, personal pronouns are part of the group of personal nouns which include names of people, names of iwi/hapū, names of waka, names of the months, personal pronouns and the question word wai (who) which is used when the expected answer is a personal noun.

Māori, like English, has first, second and third person pronouns (such as I, you, he/she/they). It also has singular and plural pronouns (I, we), but Māori includes a more precise plural form with a dual personal pronoun which means “we two” or “those two” or “you two”.

Additionally, Māori is more precise about who is included in the plural pronouns, making a distinction as to whether (for example) “we” means “you and me” or whether it means “me and someone else, but not you” so it uses different terms based on whether the person being spoken to is included in the group referred to by the pronoun. English typically requires this distinction to be inferred from context.

The personal pronouns are:

• Singular 1st person: au/ahau - I
• Singular 2nd person: koe - you
• Singular 3rd person: ia - he/she/they
• Dual 1st person inclusive: tāua - we two (including the listener), you and I (speaking to one person)
• Dual 1st person exclusive: māua - we two (excluding the listener), he/she/they and I (including one other person)
• Dual 2nd person: kōrua - you two (the speaker is not included in this group, but the listener and one other is)
• Dual 3rd person: rāua - they two (3rd person doesn’t require an inclusive/exclusive distinction as the listener is never part of this group)
• Plural 1st person inclusive: tātou - we (more than two people, including the speaker and the listener)
• Plural 1st person exclusive: mātou - me (more than two people, including the speaker but not the listener)
• Plural 2nd person: koutou (kōtou*) - you (more than two)
• Plural 3rd person: rātou - they (more than two)

* Eastern Dialect North Island

Eastern dialects (Eastern Bay of Plenty, East Coast, South Island) tend to use tātau, mātau, rātau instead of tātou, mātou, rātou.

Māori doesn’t make use of objective vs. subjective personal pronouns such as the distinction between “I” and “me”, “he” and “him”, “we” and “us” and instead marks the word as the subject or object of a sentence using additional prepositions. For example, when preceded by the preposition ‘i’ or ‘ki’, must also be preceded by the personal article ‘a’:

• ki a Hōne - to Hōne
• ki a koe - to you.

English can use the pronouns ‘it’ and ‘they’ to refer to things. This isn’t generally possible in Māori, but you can use the determiner taua to refer to something already introduced:

• Kua kite koe i a Utu? - Have you see Utu?
• Aē i kite au i taua pikitia i te tau 1983 - Yes, I saw it in 1983.

Or you can work around this by leaving the item implied:

• Kei hea aku mōhiti?
• Kei runga [ō mōhiti] i te tēpu

Because meeting houses and dining rooms are named and regarded as people, they can be referred to with the pronouns ia, rāua and rātou.

• Ko te whare tipuna rāua ko te whare kai o tērā marae he mea whakatū i te tau 1883. - The ancestral house and the dining room of that marae were built in 1883.

There’s lots more to say about the use of pronouns, but this is a long enough post for the weekend already.