English : Maori Dictionary

The aim of this Dictionary is to provide a more comprehensive English to Maori vocabulary than has previously been available, and also to supply grammatical information not found in earlier dictionaries. Like most other books on the language of the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand, this one owes a great debt to three outstanding linguists of a single family - W. W. Williams, his son Bishop W. L. Williams, and grandson, Bishop H. W. Williams, and to their excellent books First Lessons in Maori and Dictionary of the Maori Language. The adoption here of a grammatical scheme other than that eloped by them implies no denigration of their work, but simply reflects advances in linguistic theory that have taken place since they were writing. The classification of parts of speech adopted here is a modification of that first outlined in The Structure of New Zealand Maaori by the present writer. According to this analysis all Maori words, other than particles and interjections, are members of five mutually exclusive base classes, or parts of speech. Bases of the five classes are called Universals, Nouns, Statives, Personals, and Locatives. Statives are divided into two subclasses, A and P. Universals are those words which can be used nominally (i.e. in non-verbal phrases) and both actively and passively in verbal phrases....