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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 37, Number 2. 13th March 1974

No Pidginisation for Maori

No Pidginisation for Maori

Dear Sir,

I would like to make one or two comments on two passages from John Brooke-White's letter in the March 6 issue, and on one passage from Hemi Potatau's reply to it. The passages are these:
1)"He goes on about pidgin English. This does not seem to have any relevance, surely no-one has described Maori as a pidgin language. At any rate his theory about the creation of pidgin English is plainly in error." (Brooke-White)
2)"Maori has no similar sources. It cannot reach back to its roots and come up with a phrase for "computer-assisted systems engineering". It can only, as Hemi Potatau admits, Maoriise English words. Isn't this getting dangerously near pidgin? Brooke-White)
3)"Somehow and somewhere I have felt that some pakeha people have been trying to inculcate into the minds of my people and children that our Maori language is not a language at all, but a pidgin language, hence my reaction and defence." (Potatau)

First of all, JBW (let's use initials for brevity) clearly wants to have his cake and eat most of it up at the same time. The question "Isn't this getting dangerously near pidgin?" seems to me (to be intended to be?) dangerously near saying that in fact Maori is a pidgin language. It's rather like saying "no no no Maori isn't a primitive language but it is a very under-developed language isn't it."

And HP is absolutely right in his feeling that there are those who have indeed been trying to inculcate the notion that Maori is a decidely inferior kind of language. Take for example this passage from page 42 of Maori Children and the Teacher, re-issued in 1972 by the Department of Education: "The finer shades of meaning of words are often blurred for Maori children, perhaps because their home language uses one expression for a group of allied meanings. Perhaps the word 'road' has to serve for 'path', 'highway', 'track', 'motorway'. Their vocabulary is partirularly inadequate when they want to express ideas. They are used to getting by with a minimum of words and they are lost when they have to express anything more complex than actual reality. There is also a cultural factor involved here, exemplified by the difference in humour of Maori and Pakeha. Many Pakeha jokes depend on an understanding of subtleties in semantics, that is subtleties of human activities and relationships. Thus, semantics is important for Pakehas, but not very important for Maoris."

Note how the writer has effected a seemingly easy transition from the loss of "finer shades of meaning" for Maori children, through to inadequacy in expressing "ideas", then to inadequacy in expressing "anything more complex than actual reality", then to "a cultural factor", and finally to Maoris and their language in general with the statement that "semantics is important for Pakehas but not very important for Maoris". Now since the word semantics means "meaning" (of all kinds), this particular writer is asserting that meaning is not very important for Maoris. And this, it seems to me, is very close indeed to saying that the Maori language itself is not exactly—how shall we put it?—not exactly very meaningful. Which is absolute and unadulterated rubbish (the whole of the quoted paragraph is rubbish—for more comments you could take a look at my forthcoming article entitled "Maori children and Bernstein: a linguistic appraisal", in Education).

We are dealing here in effect with a large set of terms, each one carrying its own connotations, vaguely defined though these may be. You could say that language x is a "primitive" language (in fact there is no such thing), or "not language at all" (ditto), or a "pidgin", or "under-developed", or "tribal", or a (mere) "vernacular", or a kind of "patois", or maybe just a "dialect", or... etc. One of the many difficulties in labelling like this is often that of locating cut-off points on a continuum, indeed in realising in the first there is indeed a kind of "basic English adapted to the indigenous patterns of thought" in many parts of West Africa (as BW points out), but this type (or types) of very non-standard English is not by any means the only alternative to vernaculars on the one side and (regional) standard English on the other side. The most authoritative brief statement to this effect is probably the following, from J. Berry "Pidgins and creoles in Africa (in "Current Trends in Linguistics," Vol. 7, p. 513): "In nearly all the areas where creoles and pidgins are spoken in Africa, a European language is also learned in more or less substandard form." And in fact, West Africa (though to a lesser extent than in some other parts of the world )present a picture of various language continua in this case from regional standard English (or Englishes) at the one end to vernacular African languages at the other. Pidgin languages are very frequently almost unintelligible to native speakers of their European "parent" language. But what exactly pidgins are, how exactly they arose (and still arise), what arc the social and linguistic significances of language continua, how to analyse them, how they change, these are difficult theoretical problems which bear upon the very nature of language itself.

Finally, on borrowing and development. First of all, who is to say that Maori is not very much better off if it can't manage "computer-assisted systems engineering" without borrowing? And to suggest that in any language which can't do this is therefore "dangerously near pidgin" amounts to saying that many thousands of other vernacular languages in the world today are also "dangerously near pidgin".

JBW chooses a phrase which for him must be in some way critical, a sort of yardstick, for language development. But it is, after all, a merely lexical (vocabulary) yardstick that he's using, and HP is quite correct in pointing to English as having borrowed in its time a vast number of lexical items from other languages while being (at the time of borrowing) grammatically and phonologically and semantically otherwise fully developed (did Chaucer write in "dangerously near pidgin'?). Again, processes of borrowing are linguistically complex and culturally rather subtle; one fairly dogmatic point that seems however (on the evidence) to be defensible is that the language that does not reach outside itself for new words is either already very widely used indeed (like English) or in real danger of stagnation. But of course English does still borrow; it borrows concepts for the most part (rather than forms), and tries (often unsuccessfully) to achieve "translation equivalents" Even so, my feeling is that Maori could render JBW's phrase, and other computer-assisted analogues, if it really wanted to. Somali is an interesting language for this sort of thing: for example, the Somali word for "tying the leading rope of a camel to the tail of the preceding camel in a caravan" plus definite article plus the Somali word for "deceit" plus another definite article gives you the Somali phrase meaning "diplomatic relations". How long Somali can keep up this sort of thing I don't know; one could surmise that the Somali's insistence on retaining the "purity" of their language in this way will do it no good in the long run...Correspondingly, Maoris would be well advised not to listen to those who, on the one hand, would urge them not to borrow, or on the other hand, would taunt them with having to borrow. Maori will survive only if it docs borrow; pidginisation will not necessarily be the price to be paid.

J.B. Pride,

Professor of English Language