Up The Arts

W(H)ANGANUI

I read an editorial recently disingeniously comparing the recent tizzy over the usage of Wanganui/Whanganui to the usage of Mt Cook/Aoraki. For one thing, Aoraki is the South Island dialect pronunciation and spelling (with a non-aspiratded plosive velar ‘k’), just as Wanganui (with the unvoiced labio-velar phoneme ‘w” as in ‘whom’ and ‘where’ and ‘whales’, but not ‘womb’, ‘ware’ or ‘Wales’) is the correct local pronunciation for that region’s dialect of te reo (it is not pronounced “Fanganui” with a bilabial voiceless fricative ‘f”). The ‘Wanganui’ spelling more accurately represents the pronunciation, where as ‘Whanganui’, while true to standard modern written te reo is just going to confuse people, and I expect people will be mutilating the town’s name to ‘Fanganui’ within a couple of generations in a bid to out-sensitive the Hone-Joneses.

I consider most people who go on about “PC gone mad” to merely be bigots without the manners to keep it to themselves, but in this case I’m begining to wonder.

In the North Island the familiar mountain is spelt and pronounced Aorangi (with the nasal velar ‘ng’) – just as the official iwi name Ngai Tahu (as used in Acts of Parliament) is more legitimately Kai Tahu when spoken. Now tha the precedent has been set, should the Hocken Library in Dunedin therefore be forced to change its te reo name from Te Uare Taoka o Hakena to the northern Te Whare Taonga o Hakena?
Although it horrifies me to think I might agree with Michael Laws on any point (I imagine something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, like something alien is taking over my body one cell at a time), it does seem to me ironic that there are these hard and fast assumptions and rulings
regarding an official standardised form of te reo which is really just the Waikato dialect (much as the Florentine dialect became official Italian as we understand it, or Prussian became Hoch Deutsch or modern official German) as formally established by Cambridge University Professor Samuel Lee working with Hongi Hika in 1820.
This picayune pettifogging is especially ironic given that ‘official’ spellings of a language that never had a written form of its own are an imposition of European cultural imperialism on the tangata whenua in the first place (although if this furore demonstrates anything, it is that Maori are more than capable of internal cultural imperialism unaided by patronising Pakeha at the New Zealand Geographic Board and the divine fiat of Maurice Williamson). I mean, come on; people are still arguing about whether to write long vowles as double (ie ‘Maaori’ – which I think looks hideous on the page) or to use a macron (the little line over the letter and my personal preference, though a bit fiddly to type – hence I’ve not used it here).
The real people losing out here are the Whanganui iwi, who are losing the last reminders of their distinctiveness because of this philosophy that Maoritanga is some monolithic, homogenised entity passed down from on high. If this is the official precedent, how long will it be before, in deference to standardisation, Aoraki will be only Aorangi?

If you tried to apply a similar approach to New Zealand EnglishOr for that matter,  people would start getting fined who say ‘crib’ instead of ‘batch’, or pronounce their ‘r’s with a Southland trilled burr instead of the standard English roll, because that would be the Pakeha equivalent. Imagine if we were forced to switch from British to American spelling. Ultimately this has become a trivial distraction from far more profound issues fir Maori in the twenty-first century.

Curiously, a similar  W/Wh phenomenon occured in English:

“The distinction between /hw/ and /w/ in such pairs as whales/Wales and which/witch was once universal in English and is currently a matter of controversy and sometimes confusion. In Old English, h could precede l, n, r, w as in hlāf loaf, hnecca neck, hwa who, and was pronounced in each case. Only the /hw/ now survives, normal in IrE and ScoE, wide-spread in AmE and CanE, and common among older speakers of RP. The Old English written sequence hw was reversed to wh in the Middle Ages to align it with the other h-patterns (ph, th, ch, sh). In the process, an anomalous w was added in such words as whole (Old English hāl), whore (Old English hṓre), while whelk (Old English weoloc) acquired a superfluous h. In Older Scots and formerly in Northern English, the /hw/ sound was distinctively represented as quh: quhat what, quhilk which. In who, whom, whose, w rather than h has fallen silent. The presence of wh can cause spelling difficulties for speakers who do not distinguish /hw/ and /w/: *wen for when, *wheather for weather, *whent for went. Some speakers in England use /hw/ as a self-consciously ‘correct’ pronunciation in which over-compensation produces, for example, *the Prince of Whales. ”

TOM McARTHUR. “WH-SOUND.” Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Encyclopedia.com. 29 Dec. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

 Actually, I’m not sure why people pronounce ‘Wh’ as ‘F’ because as far as I’m aware the sound does not exist in Maori – I’d love a professional linguists opinion.