Pouaka makariri means: Fridge.
Pouaka (box) is used to form a large variety of words including pouaka whakaata (TV), pouaka pī (beehive), pouaka karapu (glovebox) but rather than doing a deep dive into the word ‘pouaka’ I’m going to have today’s post follow on from yesterday’s (very briefly because it’s the weekend) which was about not knowing the rules for when a postposted particle like ‘tonu’ can follow the negating word at the start of a negative sentence.
There was a bit of a clue in yesterday’s sentence “e kore tonu au e tono i te mahi rā, ahakoa pēhea te nui o te utu” because “e kore” is structured as a verbal predicate (or a verb phrase on its own). Digging further into negatives in A Māori Reference Grammar and the Reed Reference Grammar of Māori, that’s the understanding that I’ve come to.
What is often referred to as a “negative word” as a different part of speech, functions like (and often is) a verb phrase itself, meaning that it can benefit from particles that modify verbs such as ‘tonu’.
‘Kāore’ and ‘ehara’ are derived from the verb phrases ‘ka hore’ and ‘e hara’ but have been gradually simplified into these forms.
The negative word at the start of these sentences is essential a verb phrase which takes the entire affirmative sentence as its subject, stating “this whole affirmative sentence is false”.
The thing I’m looking into now is the difference between ‘tonu’ placement in:
The understanding I have at the moment is that the first one is “Is Mere still not singing the song?” while the second is “Isn’t Mere still singing the song?”, with the former suggesting that the state of “Mere not singing” is persisting, while the second implies that Mere was persisting in “still singing the song” earlier and is not doing that any longer.