The woman is singing (kei te with a subject)

One of the most common words in English is "the". And one of the most common words in Māori is the equivalent word: te.

This is pronounced like like the start of the word tent, and not like the English word tea. 

Te is the Māori word for "the" when we are talking about just one thing.

Kei te oma te tane.
The man is running.

Kei te noho te kurī.
The dog is sitting.

Kei te harikoa te kaiako.
The teacher is happy.

The word order is different from English. We would say: "the teacher is happy" but in Māori, the order is different. Literally, kei te harikoa te kaiako means "at the moment, happy, the teacher".

When we want to talk about more than one thing, Māori is also different from English.

Usually a word becomes plural by adding an "s" into the end:

One car, two cars.
One house, two houses.
One hat, two hats.

However, there are a handful of words in English that don't have an "s" on the end in the plural:

One fish, two fish.
One sheep, two sheep.
One deer, two deer.
One moose, two moose.
One aircraft, two aircraft.

Almost all the words in te reo Māori are like these words - they don't change in the plural. There is no "s" in Māori to put at the end anyway!

So we indicate the plural - that we are talking about more than one thing, not by changing the word, but by changing te to ngā. So we say:

te whare (the house), but ngā whare (the houses)
te potae (the hat), but ngā potae (the hats)
te waka (the car), but ngā waka (the cars)

There is one main exception! And that is children. In English, the word "child" in the singular becomes "children" in the plural: one child, two children.

The Māori word for child and children does something similar. One child is tamaiti, and two or more children are tamariki.

So:

te tamaiti
the child

ngā tamariki
the children

Quite often you will hear people put an "s" on the end of a Māori word to make it plural. For example, people often say: "Māoris" - "there all these Māoris downtown". Or "they've for two maraes".

Even Bruce Biggs, in 1969, in his famous introduction to learning Māori said te reo was still spoken "in those areas of New zealand where Maoris form a significant part of the population"!

But, of course, there is no such word as "Māoris" and "maraes" because there is no "s" in Māori, and because there is no plural - or, at least, words don't change in the plural.

There are also a handful of words where there is a slight change - and these are all words related to people.

In English, of course the word "man" is singular, and the word "men" is plural. That is, the vowel changes from "a" to "e" in the plural. One man. Two men. One woman. Two women.

A similar thing happens in Māori with the words for "man" and "woman" in Māori. The vowel doesn't change from an "a" to an "e" but it is lengthened. It changes from a short "a" to a long "ā".

Te tane (the man), but ngā tāne (the men)
Te wahine (the woman), but ngā wāhine (the women)

There are a small handul of words that also do this - all related to people, especially people in a family. We'll look at these in another lesson, but we just need to add one more now:

Te tangata (the person), but ngā tāngata (the people)

So, aside from these few exceptions, every word in Māori is like the English word for "aircraft"!

It is probably worth noting, if you haven't notices already, that the order of words in Māori is different from that of English.

We would say: the children are playing. The noun "children" comes before the verb :playing:". But in Māori the order is different:

Kei te tākaro ngā tamariki
Literally: Are playing the children.

The verb "playing" comes before the noun "children".

This is known as "VSO" - that is, Verb-Subject-Object. And about 10 percent of languages in the world, like Māori, are VSO languages. These include Irish, Welsh, Hebrew and Arabic and other languages that arer related to Māorim, like Samoan, Hawaiin, Tongan and Fijian.

But this order can seen a bit strange to us, who are used to English and the Subject-Verb-Object order, and we might be tempted to say something like "ngā tamariki kei te tākaro", because this is how we would say it in English, with "the children" at the start of the sentence. But we need to be careful to follow the correct sentence order in te reo Māori.

We know how to say: "I am going" and "you are good" and "he is sitting". 

What if we want to say "the man is going", or "the teacher is good" or "the dog is sitting"?

Well, firstly, as you can imagine, there are te reo Māori words for almost everything. A dog is a kurī, a woman is a wahine, children are tamariki - and there are thousands more to learn!

It is fairly straightforward how to make one of these sentences. We simply replace au with the person or thing doing the action. For example, instead of saying:

Kei te haere ahau.
I am going.

we can say:

Kei te haere te wahine.
The woman is going.

or:

Kei te haere te kōtiro.
The girl is going.

But we probably need to talk for a moment about the word "the".