daily-reo

Rua means: two

Today the Daily Reo Maori Slackbot decided not to say anything, so I’m referring to the kupu.maori.nz Kupu o re Rā which is why we’re joining them part way through giving a number per day.

There are a few ways to talk about numbers. It’s nice to use rua for this, because as mentioned in an earlier post, tahi follows some unique rules. The handling of rua is consistent for the numbers 2-9.

If you want to ask simply questions about numbers, you can use a construction mentioned in the shopkeeper dialogue from the post about ‘hoko’:

• E hia ngā kurī? (How many dogs are there?)
• E rua (There are two)
• E rua ngā kurī (There are two dogs)
• Kia rua ngā tāra (Let it be two dollars)
• Kia rua inaianei (There are two now)

When you want to talk about ordinals (first, second, third, etc.) you can either prepose the definite article ‘te’ or you can prefix the word with ‘tua’:

• te tahi, te rua, te toru
• tuatahi, tuarua, tuatoru

If you are counting people using the numbers 2-9, you have to prefix the number with “toko” rather than introducing the number using ‘e’:

• Tokorua ngā kaiako (There are two teachers)
• E rua ngā pene (There are two pens)

You can prefix numerals with ‘taki-‘ to refer to pairs, trios, etc.

• Kia takirua mai ngā kararehe (Let the animals come in twos)
• Te haerenga o te tokotoru nei, ā, ka tae ki te kāinga i reira tō rātou whaea, a Hine-moana (The three of them departed and came to the home where their aunt, Hine-moana, was.)

You can also use the interrogative hia (also mentioned in the post about ‘hoko’ above) as part of some of these words:

• Tokohia ngā tāngata? (How many people?)
• Ko te tuahia tēnei o ngā hīmene? (Which [in order] of the hymns is this?)