Ross Calman (editor) - The Raupō essential Māori dictionary = Te papakupu taketake a Raupō

Help should be sought in the more advanced Mori dictionaries that are available. Any dictionary editor is confronted with the question of regional variations. On the one hand, we did not want to bombard the student of Mori with numerous variant forms, but on the other hand, we did not want to prefer the form of one dialect over that of another. For this reason the most common variants are given and treated as separate words, eg, tehi and tahi, pwhiri and phiri, whea and hea all appear. Some transliterations have been omitted, where words based on original Mori root forms can replace them, for example hinu, originally meaning oil or fat is preferred for petrol over penehini, a transliteration of benzine. Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Mori/The Mori Language Commission has done a lot of work in this area, coining many new words based on older forms.

Many other transliterations, such as pukapuka for book are now accepted as standard Mori and, of course, are included. Unlike English, where the active form of the verb is preferred, the passive form is favoured by native speakers of Mori. Verbs with both active and passive forms have been included in the Mori-English section. Passive endings vary depending on the dialect only the most common are included here. Themed lists of words, such as days of the week, months of the year and so on, are included at the end of the book for convenience. The Mori language is particularly adaptable when it comes to parts of speech.

The same word can serve as verb, noun, adjective and adverb. For this reason parts of speech are only marked to avoid ambiguity of meaning. We would like to thank the teachers who gave up precious free time to look at our work and give us suggestions, Eric Niania and Tuteira Pohatu of the Auckland Education Advisory Service for their helpful comments, and Heni Jacob for her rigorous checking and invaluable suggestions for this dictionary. Noho ora mai koutou. Ross Calman and Margaret Sinclair October 1998