Posts by mark taslov
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As I began "Any argument either way is cultural imperialism, "
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Try explaining the distinctions between 'there' and 'their' or 'whether' and 'weather' to a ESL student--or the absence of an apostrophe in 'its'.
Jesus Geoff you make my job sound easy. Try explaining the meaning and uses of 'for'...
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I'm pretty sure the woman who invented 'h' would be very proud to know her letter still has so much influence after all this time.
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Any argument either way is cultural imperialism, Maori was uniquely oral, the alphabetization was an imposition of European imperatives on an otherwise fully functional language.
Now, the Roman alphabetization's foothold on the consciousness seems to have usurped the inherent oralness and previously unquantifiable beauty the language possessed prior to the imposition of the European system.
The underlying assumption beneath all this is that the Roman Alphabet and in turn the English interpretation of the Roman alphabet naturally has the phonemic versatility to do the Maori language justice.
In Chinese, Wanganui is written 旺加努伊 pronounced (roughly) wang(4) jia(1) nu(3) li(1) in Mandarin. To our anglicised ears it is not a sufficient representation of the phonemic characteristics of the Maori word in question, it could be argued that Mandarin lacks the phonemic variety to do this Maori word justice, and so by the same token it can be argued that the Anglicised Roman alphabet is similarly inadequate. To my ears it's also insufficient to the point that no amount of tweaking will ever truly do the Maori language justice.
To illustrate the extent to which this cultural imperialism dominates this debate, it's worth considering how much the alphabetization of an oral and fluid language could stymie that language's speed of progress, development and geographic variation, ie. to the extent that the potential development of a unique written Maori language has been essentially annexed out of contention as a viable development. It seems on this issue that people are not so much engaged in discussing how to spell something as much as how to better appropriate and impose a version of a name, ie. Eddie Izzard 'flags' an argument which is to all intense and purposes academic.
Were a sign for W(h)anganui to accord
total respect for the intrinsic features of the Maori language it would read "___________ " -
To quote p. 1873
"rate payer's money being spent voting on spelling?
that's a sorry compromise for human progress.we have all quills, we have all text input devices, we have all free will. we can to spell that schit the way we want it.
is wanga whucking vegas hard to find on the map?
every ½ ass wants a say in the official spelling these days.
to dictate how others spell their word.
whaschists.
polls have shown most people who give even the slightest fuck about the name change would only ever stop there to fill their cars with refined oil and leave a uriinary deposit,
it's not exactly Mecca.
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I see, thanks Keir.
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Nouvelle Zelande isn't a misspelling of New Zealand but the French name for New Zealand.
The French refer to the Dutch Zeeland as Zélande so there's a logic there. On English maps Zeeland is labelled Zeeland.
In English we use the Latin Caledonia, and New Caledonia despite Nouvelle-Calédonie for the same reasons as the French use Nouvelle Zelande.Wanganui, is an anglicization not a misspelling, if anything it's a misanglicization....there's been a lot of those. But as you said
"Except there aren't any Dutch people getting offended, are there?"
Currently only at the appropriation of the term Dutch and underage sailors. But I'm sure I could rile up a couple.
...racing the edit button countdown.
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New isn't Nieuw misspelt; it's Nieuw Anglicised
In fact it's Nieuw translated. As in New York, not New Yark.
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Timaru, and Temuka still have meaning, and the olds were notorious for breathing (rather than enunciating) last or internal vowels
Practising that now, that's an awesome feeling.
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For sure. And I need to hear more about the whole flag issue. Seen some saying the Maori Party are being bought off with symbolic baubles but that often seems like sour grapes from Labourites, without more context.
Yeah, not a week goes by when I don't contemplate the flag, last month was partial to a b/w version of the Canadian with a fern replacing the maple leaf, this month been thinking more about the some way to iconize the shape of the land, perhaps even turning the flag portrait wise so all poles had to hang off the sides of buildings and could be used for impromptu exercise ala chin ups and more advanced parallel bar work.