by I’ve been watching – with a tinge of sadness – a series of lectures from an MIT linguistics course, which are available on YouTube. I say a tinge of sadness because 25 years ago it could have been me attending those lectures, if not at MIT then somewhere, but alas that’s not the path I went down. Now I know enough bits and bobs about linguistics to sound semi-knowledgeable in my lessons, but there’s so much I don’t know, having never formally studied it. At one point the impressively bearded professor apologises for being old: “You can tell I was born last century.” He taught the course last year, so I suppose all his students, or almost all of them, really were born this century. Yeesh. You can tell he’s in love with the subject in all its guises, and he can actually speak several relatively obscure languages. He interacts very well with the students, who are clearly much smarter than our bunch in Birmingham a quarter-century ago.
Long-haul travel, and spending a whole month in another country, gives you an almighty hit of linguistic phenomena. Ten years ago on my old blog, I wrote quite extensively about Kiwi pronunciation. I’m happy to report that all the traits I mentioned are still present, some of them in an even more exaggerated form. John Key’s “shtrong and stable” is now quite common; for people with this tendency, it affects words containing either of the strings /str/ or /stj/, for instance shtreet, shtupid, shtew, Aushtralia, or ashtute. If you quit smoking but then relapse, you might say that you’ve gone ashtray. I also noticed that a divide – young versus old, city versus country, sophisticated versus somewhat less cultivated – has opened up in the way Kiwis pronounce certain words, mostly those ending in the /ri/ combination.
How many syllables do these words have for you?
battery
broccoli
mandatory
necessary
pottery
For me they have 2, 3, 3, 4 and 3, respectively. But I betcha a hyper-online (and perhaps slightly woke, though I hate that term) 22-year-old student might want to replace his or her (or their?!) laptop bad-der-y, where I’d replace my batch-ree.
But the biggest linguistic phenomenon by far affecting New Zealand is the rise of Māori. If I went back there to live, I’d need to enrol on a Māori course toot-sweet, because my pronunciation would be hopelessly dated. (Dated is a word my parents love to use when browsing House & Garden.) Māori seems simple – it has a small inventory of only five vowel and ten consonant sounds – but what’s going on with combinations like ea or oa, as in Aotearoa? What do they morph into exactly, and why? (Those particular digraphs are a distinctive feature of Romanian, by the way.) Then what about au? Why is it Lake Toe-paw all of a sudden? I wonder if some of these “new” sounds are the result of phonetic changes – a vowel shift, if you will – just like what has happened with the consonant wh. The wh, as far as I can tell, is spelt that way because it was actually pronounced like the wh in wheat when it was first transcribed, but since then it has turned into an f sound. (Interestingly, the English wh has, at the same time, turned into a simple w sound for most speakers, though in some places like Scotland the old sound still proliferates. Mum’s mother used the old wh in words like white, but Mum uses the simple w.)
The increased use of the Māori language rubs a lot of people – especially older people like my parents – up the wrong way. They do have a bit of a point. At times it can actually impede communication. Writing Keep Left in Māori is downright dangerous for foreign tourists. (That raises an interesting question. Did the Māori have the concept of left and right? Not all cultures and languages do. Some don’t have the concept of relative direction at all, and you’d have to say Keep East if east happened to be on the left in that instance.) Sometimes it’s just older people not liking change, and I perfectly understand that, but often it’s part of a more general anti-Māori sentiment, which again I understand, and is starting to create a very unhelpful us-versus-them in New Zealand society.
I’ve often wondered why someone hasn’t invented a nice efficient Māori syllabary, a bit like hiragana in Japanese, in which each symbol represents a syllable. (Maybe somebody has.) You’d need 55 symbols: one for each of the 50 consonant+vowel combinations, plus one for each of the five vowels on their own. That’s just over twice what the English alphabet has, and a handful more than hiragana itself has, so it should be doable. I also think it would be quite cool. You could still use macrons (horizontal bars) to show long vowels, as you (increasingly) see in the standard Roman-alphabet version of Māori. Here’s my attempt at a start:
My choice of more angular shapes for ri and especially ki is deliberate. The i sound is a close vowel, and feels more angular than a, an open vowel.
Next time I’ll talk about some of the language phenomena I saw on the way to and from New Zealand, rather than when I was there.
