Hauora means: Health, healthy, wellbeing.
The example sentence on Te Aka is “Mehemea e hauora ana tō tātou whakapono, kua iti haere ngā mahi hē i roto i a tātou” (If our faith is healthy, misdemeanours amongst us will diminish.) which has a number of interesting things to explore from a grammatical perspective.
Firstly, the sentence opens with “Mehemea” which is a kupu honohono (conjunction) used to introduce conditional clauses. It functions similarly to the English word “if”. This may appear in older writing as the full phrase “me he mea” but is now used as a single word. Other variations of this word include “me he”, “me mea” and “mēnā”. “Mehemea” can be used to introduce hypothetical and non-hypothetical conditions:
- Mehemea he pēnā ō kōrua whakaaro, kaua e haramai. (If that’s the way you think, don’t come.)
- Mehemea he raruraru kei a koe, me wewete e koe (A whakataukī translating to “If you have troubles, free yourself” which is used to say “if you have objections or negative feelings, share them”.)
- Mehemea nāna i tahae ngā moni, he tamaiti kino ia (If he stole the money, he’s a naughty child)
- Mehemea koe ki te whakawera i te wai, ka puta te korohū (If you heat water, steam will appear)
In this sentence, the clauses connected by ‘mehemea’ are “e hauora ana tō tātou whakapono” and “kua iti haere ngā mahi hē i roto i a tātou”
The first clause can be broken down into the following phrases:
- e hauora ana (verb phrase, ongoing or progressive nature of event “is healthy”)
- tō tātou whakapono (possessive noun phrase, “our faith”, the faith belonging to ‘tātou’)
The second clause can be broken down into these phrases:
- kua iti haere – this phrase does a couple of interesting things:
- It uses ‘kua’ in a non-past sense. As mentioned in the earlier post about kua this marker is often used for the past, but more specifically marks an action that is completed or that something has changed state.
- It uses haere as a verb modifier to indicate progressive change towards becoming ‘iti’ (small) to indicate that the subject of the sentence is diminishing (or with kua will become diminished). Haere as a verb modifier was mentioned in an earlier post.
- ngā mahi hē (noun phrase meaning “the wrongful actions” using hē (wrongful, mistaken, incorrect) as a modifer for mahi (action)
- i roto (phrase introducing a comment of location, indicating that the earlier parts of the phrase “misdemeanours will diminish” is taking place i roto (inside/among) something else. This is a locative noun which is relational, so we can add more context with a subsequent comment about what “inside/among” is in relation to.
- i a tātou (phrase introducing a comment which adds specificity to the comment of location “i roto i a tātou” [among us])