Take means: Reason, cause.
You can use ‘take’ in a question with the question word ‘aha’ to ask “why” or enquire about the reason for something::
Yes/no questions in te reo Māori can be formed by altering the intonation of a statement (or in writing using a question mark):
If you want to know a new piece of information, you can use an interrogative. In English, these are words like what, which, when, where, who, whom, whose, why, whether and how. Te reo Māori uses words such as aha, wai, hia, hea, nahea, pēhea, tēhea for this same purpose. In a lot of sentences, you can simply replace the question word with the answer to create the sentence that answers the question.
The kupu ‘aha’ can be used in place of a noun or a verb to ask questions such as:
“He aha te take…” is one way to ask about the reason for something. Other ways to ask “why” using ‘aha’ include:
I’m not going to deep dive on this construction in this post, because there’s a lot to say about the particle ‘ai’, but this expression can also be shortened to “he aha ai?” as the standalone question “why?”