Kia ora and welcome to the first in a series of daily lessons learning te reo Māori.
We are going to start at the very very beginning with the most basic Māori words and sentences.
So lets start with a couple of words you already know:
Kia ora!
Hello!
Ora is the word for healthy or well, and kia is a kind of gentle encouragement. So kia ora means: "May you be well!" Kia is a "mild imperative" which is very gentle command. So it is not "be well or else!" but is an encouraging way to say "be well!" or "may you be well!"
You have prbably seen this word, kia in another sentence: kia kaha, which means "be strong!"
If you meet a friend and want to say hello, you would say:
Kia ora e hoa!
Hello friend!
The word for friend is hoa - but we also have this tricky little word e.
This is a particle, which is a little word that adds meaning to the words around it. A particle of sand is a little wee bit of sand, and a particle in a sentence is a little wee word.
This is where te reo Māori is tricky, because there many particles, a, o, i, e... and they can have different meanings in different situations. So, sometimes, e can be a command, like e tū! stand up! And other times it can indicate the past, and sometimes it can indicate the person who did something. So knowing the particles and their various meanings is one of the difficulties of learning Māori.
But in this situation, e is a particle of address. It is used when we are talking to someone. So, if you are saying hello to a friend, you don't say kia ora hoa - we need to say: kia ora e hoa! Hello friend.
But what if you meet several friends?
In that situation, ytou would say:
Kia ora e hoa mā!
Hello frieinds!
This is another situation where a word can have several differenrt meanings. Mā can mean "white" or "clean", so kia ora e hoa mā could mean "hello white friends" or "hello clean friends", but in this situation, mā is used to indicate the plural - that there is more than one friend.
When my children were little they went to school and had a teacher who used to greet them by saying: Kia ora tamariki mā! Because all the children in the class were pākehā, I thought she was saying: "Hello white children!". But mā indicates the plural and means: "all you":
Kia ora tamariki mā!
Hello all you children!
Kia ora is an informal greeting, like "hi" or "gidday" in English and is used to greet friends or to say hello in a casual way.
However, if you are meeting someone important, or you want to greet someone formally, then you would use a more formal greeting:
Tēnā koe.
There you are.
Hello
The word tēnā means, "there, by you". So tēnā koe literally means "there you are".
It is a little bit like the Na'vi in Avatar who greet each other by saying "I see you". It is a polite way of acknowedging the other person.
A long time ago there was a plural word in English for "you" - it was "ye". Sometimes people today say "yous" as a plural form of you ("can I come woth yous guys?"), but mostly we no longer differentiate between talking to one person or many people.We just say "you".
Te reo Mōai,however, does have a different word for "you" when talking to one person (koe) and talking to 3 or more people. This word is koutou.
You have probably heard it used:
Tēnā koutou.
There you (all) are.
Hello.
This is a polite form of address to three or more people.
Another word that can be used is katoa, meaning "all". And you have probably heard this used in speeches:
Tēnā koutou.
Tēnā koutou.
Tēnā koutout katoa.
There you are.
There you are.
There you all are.
