First, a Farewell
My time in New Zealand has come to the final chapter. And good riddance!
I’m only kidding. New Zealand has been a fantastic country, but I have to say that it was a country of comfort, and not much of a country of growth. It was, as Darth Vader once put it, “all too easy.” Thus, I am ready to move on to a more challenging domain.
The final entry for Aotearoa will be on the topic of language and culture, and I will insert here my typical preamble. I am not an expert in these matters. I have not spent years learning Maori language and culture, and am bound to get it wrong. As always I encourage you to report any corrections, but in the meantime I’ll move on to the thesis of today: Maori particles indicating possession!
Talking About Language
Still awake? That’s the type of topic that typically knocks people out right away. But language can be interesting. I’m no polyglot, but I always appreciate the way that language is constructed. This is one of the reasons that I’ve been drawn to writing and reading in my life. Language is one of the things that separates us from the other creatures on this planet. It is the thing that allows us to cooperate, to commiserate, to inspire, to deceive, to declare, to demean. It is the tool that enables every achievement of mankind, because it enables the transmission of knowledge. Without language, I could barely know what kind of food I wanted to eat, much less how to make it, or catch it. Or where to find it.
And yet, when it comes to the study of language, most of us scoff. We know it, it makes sense to us in an intuitive way, why worry about it? Who cares how it works, so long as it works? Here we have the catch. So long as it works. Our words are often misunderstood, sometimes intentionally I must say, sometimes due to lack of good faith on the receiving end, but sometimes because we are just plain vague in our speech. Sometimes we use language in a bad way, and it is at those times when we should consider whether we could say things better.
Then there are, as mentioned, the bad uses of language. Deceit, bullying, gossip in most forms, behavior like this often gets us ahead but at the cost of our dignity and self-respect. Such uses are well-known to be crude, and yet we participate in them because it seems easier, because it gets us a brief advantage, or because it simply feels good. Our tendency to misuse language, both in the sense of speaking vaguely and saying morally indefensible things, is a habit for most us – myself included. It is worth paying attention to the language you use to spot both tendencies, and to root them out as best you are able.
But I pontificate. And I should get on to whatever the hell I’m supposed to be talking about, shouldn’t I?
Possessions, and Possessive Forms
As I said before, I’m no polyglot – a fact about myself over which I feel some weak sense of regret. I say weak because I do regret it, and yet I haven’t done anything about it. The 900 pound woman could be more motivated, it seems, to run a marathon than I could be bothered to learn Spanish, despite the fact that dozens of countries speak the language, and likely soon most of mine will as well. But though I don’t speak any other languages in their entirety, I have picked up bits and pieces of several languages as I travel and interest takes me. Thus I know a bit of Russian, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and now, Maori.
Kia Ora! Means hello or greetings, a fact which any traveler will shortly learn upon landing in New Zealand. And once I learned that I dusted off my hands and rolled my sleeves down, content that my work here was done. Cultural exchange complete. Box checked. Of course I’m joking.
I can’t tell you much about Maori words, because I didn’t gain much traction there. Hini means woman. Nui means great. That’s as far as I get. But I did pick up an interesting bit of language that I thought I’d share with you. It has to do with the way the Maori talk about possession.
In English we have two main ways to indicate possession, which are almost interchangeable. We can add an apostrophe and an ’s’ to the end of a noun, except for the word “it” to which we simply attach ’s’, because “it’s” is actually a contraction which means “it is”. I point this out because it’s a common error, as anyone with an internet connection knows.
We can also swap the positions of the possessed and possessor in the sentence, add the word “of” and find the second form of English possession. Thus “Mary’s lamb” becomes “the lamb of Mary”. I shall not belabor the point.
In Maori we have two particles that kind of serve the same function as the word “of”, but which indicate two distinct classes of objects. “O” denotes big things, things that are either physically large or that have some sort of power over you. A car is marked with o, so is a building, or an older sibling or authority figure. “A” denotes small things, things that you control, such as a pen or piece of paper, or a junior member of the family.
The particles, in other words, tell us in a vague way what our relationship is with these objects, or people. Do we control them, or do they control us? It is an interesting little window into the mindset of the Maori culture that they divide the world in this way. There are also a few specific examples that may surprise you (there’s my clickbait-worthy title). I’ll include the top 10 here (that’s a joke. I have two).
I’ll forwarn you that I’ll try to build these up as dramatically as I can, but I’m assuming that most of you will judge my tone and immediately figure out where I’m going with these. There’s only two choices, after all, so I can’t preserve the mystery forever. Oh well, here we go…
The first example is your name. A name is small, actually not a physical thing at all. It would seem, then, to belong to the category of “a”, of small things that are under your control. This would be supported by the fact that we can control aspects of our name. We can change it if we wish. And even if we don’t change our names themselves, we can, through our behavior, change what our names mean to other people. That is, we can alter our reputation. When others hear our names, they will think of someone who is wise and serious, who is stupid but loveable, who is dishonest, or self-sacrificing, or disciplined, who believes that family is important, or who sleeps around too much.
But there’s a simple way that all this argument falls away and we realize that our names belong firmly in the category of “o”. Imagine you are walking through a crowd anywhere in the world. Around you hundreds of voices chatter, yell, laugh, scream, and create the steady roar of speech common to any well-inhabited area. They are all unintelligible. People call out each other’s names, and you hardly notice, much less turn your head. And then someone shouts your name. You immediately stop and turn to face the shouter, arrested in your interest to know what it is that they want. But of course they were just calling someone else. Or maybe they hadn’t even said your name: you simply misheard.
The fact that our names have this ability to stop us, to make us turn, that they not only serve as signifiers of who we are to other people, but also to ourselves, means that they have power over us. That’s the least of it, though. Our names, as I’ve mentioned before, form the very basis of our identity. Though I’m sure there are exceptions, nearly everybody who exists uses this moniker given to them at birth not only to tell other people how to address them, but also when addressing themselves to themselves. They do not simply “go by” their name, they are that name. I am not simply called Max Millick – I am Max Millick. Think of how much work people do to make their name a respectable one, or the shame they feel when they tarnish the “family name”, how every advertiser dreams that their product will become a “household name.” Names are more powerful than we are, and nowhere is this more present to us than when we have a bad name in our society. How we wish we could escape the taint of a bad name, how we long to be able to just let go and move on from it, and yet we cannot.
My second example is more recent, and shows how the Maori culture is keeping up with the times. It is, you will delight to hear, the cell phone.
If you own a cell phone, you probably already know where I’m going with this. Spoiler alert: it’s in the “o” category as well.
“The things you own ending up owning you.”
But why? Phones are small, and delicate. Many of us know this, because we’ve dropped our phones, and they often seem to break in a confusingly easy way. But consider this: why are you so concerned that your phone is broken? Why is that clatter of hard plastic on asphalt the modern equivalent of a bone crunch, causing any who are nearby to flinch in sympathetic agony? No one has been so concerned with the well-being of something small and fragile since, dare I say it, the invention of babies.
A few more rhetorical questions? Why not? How often do you find yourself checking your phone, even when you don’t even know what you’re checking it for? Do you ever just stare at your phone’s app screen while thinking, as if it’s a prerequisite for thought itself? Has your phone died recently? If so, HOW COULD YOU LET IT DIE? Were you worried that it had died? Did you miss it for those hours in which it was dead?
When you are talking to the most interesting person you know, or the love of your life, and your phone vibrates, will you tell them to hold on so you can check it? When you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket, if you imagine yourself in the hospital room of your dying parent, will you check the phone?
Most people check their phone over 100 times a day, and barely realize it. Most people helplessly pull their phone out and check it even when they’re not sure whether it’s vibrated, just to check if it has. People have reported beginning to confuse their stomach growling with a phone vibration. How many times have you heard the signature beep of Facebook’s messenger app, and pulled out your phone only to be met with disappointment (it was the person’s next to you). And, importantly, once disappointed, did you take the opportunity to browse the phone for a bit?
Anyone on a crowded subway, anyone in a car (hopefully who isn’t driving), anyone sitting down, most people standing, on the toilet (no, not standing on the toilet. It’s a separate clause, for christ’s sake), on a plane, at church, at the library, in class, at the drive-thru, we are always stuck to our phones. How could it possibly be surprising that the Maori realized the power it has over us. And yet how insightful, how incredible, that they put the fact into the language itself.
So we end our trip through language with two moral truths. First, that we should be aware of what we say, for our own sakes and for others. And second, to borrow a commandment from Christopher Hitchens: “turn off your fucking cell phone.” At least now and then.
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