Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Islander,
mogi/mogihi
How is it that northern forms of words like mōkihi have come to dominate, even when discussing southern things? I'm actually quite curious as to how te Reo has been standardised, and the health of the dialects.
Given your insistence on southern spellings (and presumably southern pronunciations), I wonder what you make of wikipedia's claim that the South Island dialects are extinct?
In the extinct South Island dialects
Strikes me as being an odd way to open an article that then goes on to admit the continued existence of southern word forms.
hmmm.... didn't know that Kilmog is actually a Maori word.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Scott Chris,
at Tongatapu in 1643.
In Tonga, where ocean-going waka would still have been necessary, even if they weren't voyaging quite so extensively as their ancestors back in the heyday of Polynesian navigating. Flipping a bit further through Te Ara, this page gives two reasons for Maori to switch to single-hulled waka. One is bigger trees allowing for a bigger, more stable hull, making the outrigger unnecessary. The other is that Maori built waka for navigating inland and coastal waterways. It doesn't give a date for the change, though. This image isn't terribly clear on the issue of single or double hulls, but I note at least one waka does have a sail. This page has mōkihi or amatiatia on the East Coast, and Wikipedia claims waka ama were still in use in Cook's time, although they were rare and on the way out.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Islander,
So you knew him? He seems to have been a pretty interesting bloke.
I like how he starts the Penguin History of New Zealand by looking at the geological origins of our islands and the development of the flora and fauna before humans showed up. He seems to raise the possibility that the very earth itself is just as much a part of our nation and its history as our very late arriving peoples.
You can see most of the first 101 pages here, with little notes in the bottom left of each page proclaiming it to be copyrighted material. Not enough, I know, but no amount of fancy technology is ever going to be good enough to replace the good, old fashioned book. My Mum sent me a copy (I'm almost totally reliant on her for my ANZ literature) in, from memory, 2004, and a copy of Being Pakeha Now - another fascinating book, pity about the crap binding that fell apart the first time I read it. I'm hard on books, I know, but no other book I have ever owned has broken that quickly.
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I'm just browsing through what Google Books has of Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand. Unfortunately my dead tree copy is in our village 120km away, and Google Books doesn't have all the pages. I seem to remember him describing the early phase of Maori settlement as maintaining close contacts with Island Polynesia, but I can't find a specific reference - it's either on a missing page or I'm scanning badly.
Starting on page 73 he describes a cultural shift from "unequivocally east Polynesian" to a more firmly-rooted in their own islands Maori. Page 77:
In other words, over succeeding generations the cultural focus shifted steadily away from cultures of origin to a singular awareness of and commitment to the adopted homeland.
Earlier, on page 30:
At some point in the past millenium, however, possibly around the fourteenth or fifteenth century AD, the era of widespread Polynesian voyaging ceased. This may have occurred because of the change in climate that produced colder, windier weather and rougher seas, or, possibly, because of a change in cultural priorities.
Then he has this end to "widespread Polynesian voyaging" leaving colonists in the more far flung corners of Polynesia like New Zealand and Easter Island isolated from the rest of Polynesia. He also suggests this may have brought the end of settlements on Pitcairn, Henderson, Norfolk and the Line Islands, which were apparently only viable so long as they maintained regular contact with the outside world.
Also on page 30 he mentions evidence of Polynesian visits to Enderby in the Auckland Islands, as well as the Kermadecs.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Ross Mason,
Your task, should you agree to undetake it: 1) Reassemble Earth and make me whole. 2) Convince me we are relevant.
Well said, sir. But permit me to take a Daoist approach and refuse to reassemble Earth and embrace our irrelevance. 无为, useless trees, 'n' all that. Nature will take its course. We either sit back and enjoy the ride, or try to fight it and in the process unleash our own destruction.
Settling well, up this way.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Lilith __,
There's a difference between making nice to the powerful and jumping when they say so in the vain hope that our obedience will cause them to benevolently bestow many kindnesses on us. We can and should navigate a happy middle path of being friends with everybody but letting it be known we have principles that are not negotiable, and those principles should be based on the lessons our history has to teach us.
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Capture: Ice Rink Luck, in reply to JacksonP,
Jackson, you set the sky on fire! Great shot.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to chris,
Rather than their allegiances it's a comment on their way of doing things, an ideological and managerial tepidness.
A sheepdog desperately seeking the approval of a shepherd?
Not equating New Zealanders with sheep, mind.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to chris,
"Man has to awaken to wonder -- and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Now I have to leap to the defence of science. I'm sure a NASA website somewhere has plenty of images that show clearly how wrong ole Ludwig was on that point. I've certainly seen many mind-blowing images of the cosmos. A couple of days ago a Baidu News alert sent me, among other things, images of strange critters from the depths of the ocean off the coast of New Zealand that did the same, just looking in the opposite direction. And I've seen plenty of images of thing that exist at or below the microscopic scale that should be framed and hung on art gallery walls. Science is certainly no new-fangled, high-tech opiate of the masses.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Will de Cleene,
Which is more than you can say for priests, poets and politicians.
Nonono! Don't throw poets in there! Poets are very falsifiable. Priests and politicians are after power and control, poets are after art, there's a hell of a difference. Poets speak to a different truth than scientists, but when a poet is wrong, you can say so and move on. Try telling a priest or politician they're wrong, and, well, you know the result.
And Islander, do try and stay alive.