Common nouns

All the nouns we have seen so far are 'common nouns'.

Also, all the nouns have been ‘singular’, like te pēpi (the baby), te kōtiro (the girl), and te kurī (the dog). We've only been talking about one particular example of each noun each time,

Te and Ngā

We've seen the word 'te' in all our examples so far. 'Te' is called the ‘definite article’. In English, the word 'the' does the same job, referring to a particular instance of a noun. ‘The dog’ means a particular dog, not just any dog; the same goes for ‘te kurī'.

In English, we also use ‘the’ when we refer to more than one dog, but we change the noun; ‘the dog’ (one dog), ‘the dogs’ (more than one dog).

Māori is quite different when it comes to referring to plural nouns.

To refer to more than one common noun, we use a different definite article, ‘ngā’, instead of ’te'.

Notice that the Māori nouns do not change when they become plural.

The noun stays the same, but the definite article (’te’ or 'ngā') changes:

English is very different. ‘The’ does not change, but the noun does. Sometimes an ’s’ is added (‘the cat’ > ‘the cats’), sometimes the letter ‘y’ is replaced with ‘ies’ ('the baby’ > 'the babies’). There are a lot of different rules...

The key point is that nearly all Māori common nouns do not change when they become plural. In Māori, we change the definite article. Put 'te’ in front of a noun to make it singular, or put 'ngā' in front of a noun to make it plural.

However, there are a few Māori common nouns that do change depending on whether they are singular or plural. Fortunately, the list is nice and short.

Te or Ngā?

Should we use ‘te’ or ‘ngā’ in front of these special plural nouns?

I am not at all sure. I have heard people use ngā; ‘ngā tamariki’. But I have also read that - strictly speaking, ‘te’ is used:

te whaea > the mother
te whāea > the mothers

It seems common to use the plural determiner (ngā) with the plural versions of the nouns, so I am going to do that from now on. However, go with whichever feels right until you get advice from your teachers or other Māori speakers.

He - the indefinite article

‘Te whare’ is 'the house' and ‘ngā whare’ are 'the houses'.

How do we say, ‘a house’ or ’some houses’ in Māori?

We use another article, 'He'

‘He’ is the ‘indefinite article’, it refers to an unspecified instance of a noun. The words ‘a’ and ‘some’ do thesame sort of job in English.

If ‘I kai te kurī i āku tōtiti’ (the dog ate my sausages), I know which dog isn’t getting any more supper tonight.

But if ‘I kai he kurī i āku tōtiti’ (a dog ate my sausages)

I don't know which dog has been very bad.

Here are some examples

As you can see, we use ‘He’ for both plural and singular.

This means that the exact meaning depends on the context of the sentence rather than on the words themselves.

There are other ways to refer to indefinite nouns, that do specify plural or singular, but that is for another day.

Here are some example sentences using ‘He':