Crawford. — On the Maori Language. 55 



queer grammar; but sometimes this is diversified by " 1 sawr 

 Hm." As expletives, " My word " aud " No fear" are favourites, 

 both drawn out as loug as possible. The letter /; is frequently 

 treated in Cockney fashion, i.e., omitted where it should be pro- 

 nounced, aud put in where not wanted. 



I have often observed in London Colonial newspapers com- 

 plaints of the use of Maori names, as being unpronounceable, 

 &c. Considering that the Maori language is softer than Italian, 

 this shows how much the writers know of what they are writing 

 about. I should strongly object to displace the soft, easily pro- 

 nounced, and generally descriptive Maori names, by the Belle- 

 vues, Mounts Brown, or Smith, or Jones, or other names 

 showing the poverty of the English language for nomenclature. 

 Compare the Spanish language for this purpose. Masafuero, 

 the name of a small island outside Juan Fernandez, means 

 literally mure far, or farther of. Expressed in English the name 

 would never do, whereas in Spanish it is sonorous and euphoni- 

 ous. Similarly Cape Cow's Tongue will not answer, whereas Cabo 

 Lentjua de Vara is euphonious and appropriate. Even in Great 

 Britain the old Celtic names are generally the best, and have 

 more poetic meanings than the more homely names of the 

 Sassenach, such as Pitmuis, " the field of blood," Kilkiaran or 

 Kilkerran, " the cell of Kiaran," &c. 



The sound of the letter s has been very often changed in 

 English to that of z, as in is, iz ; was, waz. The spelling re- 

 formers would change all these into z. Cannot the original 

 sound be reverted to ? In phonetic printing the frequent occur- 

 rence of z looks hideous, almost as bad as shim. 



Some persons may say, Why should we object to the French 

 sounds in the language arid prefer the Teutonic ? The reply is 

 easy : English is a Teutonic language, and although it has 

 borrowed many words from French, it can under no circum- 

 stances be converted into a Romance language ; besides the 

 French sounds are non-phonetic — as such they do not do the 

 same mischief in French as in English, because in the former 

 language the sound is nearly constant, whereas in the latter it 

 is arbitrary and variable. 



Certainly the pronunciation of French words is peculiar. We 

 find eau, eaux, au, aux, all — o ; beau = bo, peau, pot — po, maux 

 = mo, faux = fo, chateau, chato. We adopt some of these 

 words into English and call bean, ho; but beaute we call biuty. 

 BeauUj (firth), we call Biuly. Then the French call comment, 

 commong : vraiment, vraimong ; appartient, appartieng ; pro- 

 portion, proporshiong ; maison, maesong ; bon, bong; mauvais, movae ; 

 suis, sui; es and est, ae ; sommes, sum ; etes, aet ; sont, song. This 

 is not the language on which English orthography should be 

 reformed. It is essentially a Latin patois, the rule being to cut 

 off the final syllable of Latin, thus : Rome for Roma ; bon for bonus. 



