Distinguishing between types of nouns

COLUMN: A noun is a word that gives a name to something.

In English, nouns are classified as either ‘‘common’’ or ‘‘proper’’ – proper nouns being those that name people, places, institutions and other things, and distinguished in print by initial capital letters.

In te reo Ma¯ori, nouns are separated into three classes: ‘‘common’’, ‘‘personal’’ and ‘‘location’’. The reason for classifying nouns in this manner is that the ways in which they are used in phrases differ, one class from another.

Differences are particularly highlighted in phrases beginning with prepositions.

Common nouns never follow a preposition directly. Whenever a preposition occurs, it is always the first word in a phrase, and a definitive such as te¯nei (‘‘this’’) or te (‘‘the’’) is always placed between the preposition and a following noun. e.g. Kei te kainga / au. (‘‘At the home / I.’’ = ‘‘I’m at home.’’).

This example highlights a difference between English and Ma¯ori. The word ‘‘home’’ is a common noun in English, and no word is needed between preposition and noun in the phrase ‘‘at home’’.

Another difference is that English ‘‘at’’ is without any timereference.

The Ma¯ori kei specifies the present. Sometimes the timeframe will be further stressed in speech: Kei te kainga / au / ina¯ ianei. (‘‘Now at the home / I / now.’’). The Ma¯ ori hei specifies future: Hei te kainga / au / a¯ po¯ po¯ . (‘‘Will be at the home / I / tomorrow.’’)

A feature of personal nouns – such as a people’s names or personal pronouns – is that they may follow most prepositions directly, but (with one exception) an intervening word is required after any of the four location prepositions kei (‘‘at’’ in the present) i (‘‘at’’ in the past) hei (‘‘at’’ in the future) and ki (which suggests ‘‘motion towards’’, and is often, but not always, translatable by ‘‘to’’).

The intervening word needed here is the personal article, a (a word with no parallel in English): Homai / te waiora / ki a au. (‘‘Give / the water of life / to me.’’).

The exception to this rule is that when the first-person au ,is replaced by a variant form, such as ahau or awau, the personal article is dropped (possibly simply because it would be somewhat clumsy to include it): Homai / te waiora / ki ahau. A distinctive feature of location nouns is that they are the only base words (other than ahau and awau just noted) that may follow a preposition directly: kei runga / i te te¯pu (‘‘at topside of the table’’) kei Rotorua (‘‘at Rotorua’’) ma runga / ho¯ iho (‘‘on horseback’’).