Tahitian language

Tahitian is the most prominent of the indigenous Polynesian languages spoken in French Polynesia (reo mā’ohi).[2][3] The latter also include:[4]

• Marquesan, spoken by about 8,000 people in the Marquesas Islands, with two sub-divisions, North-Western (’eo ’enana) and South-Eastern (’eo ’enata)
• Pa’umotu (reo pa’umotu), spoken by about 4,000 people in the Tuamotu Islands
• Austral, spoken by about 3,000 people in the Austral Islands
• Rapa, spoken by about 400 people on Rapa Iti
• Ra’ivavae, spoken by about 900 people in the Austral Islands
• Mangareva, spoken by about 600 people in the Gambier Islands

When Europeans first arrived in Tahiti at the end of the 18th century, there was no writing system and Tahitian was only a spoken language. Reports by some early European explorers including Quirós[5] include attempts to trascribe notable Tahitian words heard during initial interactions with the indigenous people of Marquesa. Aboard the Endeavour, Lt. James Cook and the ship's master, Robert Molyneux, transcribed the names of 72 and 55 islands respectively as recited by the Tahitian arioi, Tupaia. Many of these were "non-geographic" or "ghost islands" of Polynesian mythology and all were transcribed using phonetic English spelling.[6] In 1797, Protestant missionaries arrived in Tahiti on a British ship called Duff, captained by James Wilson. Among the missionaries was Henry Nott (1774–1844) who learned the Tahitian language and worked with Pōmare II, a Tahitian king, and the Welsh missionary, John Davies (1772-1855), to translate the Bible into Tahitian. A system of five vowels and nine consonants was adopted for the Tahitian Bible, which would become the key text by which many Polynesians would learn to read and write. John Davies's spelling book (1810) was the first book to be printed in the Tahitian language. He also published a grammar and a dictionary of that language.

Tahitian features a very small number of phonemes: five vowels and nine consonants, not counting the lengthened vowels and diphthongs. Notably, the consonant inventory lacks any sort of dorsal consonants.

There is a five-vowel inventory with vowel length:

Next follows a table with all phonemes in more detail.

The glottal stop or ’eta is a genuine consonant. This is typical of Polynesian languages (compare to the Hawaiian ʻokina and others). See Typography below.

Tahitian makes a phonemic distinction between long and short vowels; long vowels are marked with macron or tārava. For example, pāto, meaning "to pick, to pluck" and pato, "to break out", are distinguished solely by their vowel length. However, macrons are seldom written among older people because Tahitian writing was never taught at school until 1981.[7]

Finally there is a toro ’a’ï, a trema put on the i, but only used in ïa when used as a reflexive pronoun. It does not indicate a different pronunciation. Usage of this diacritic was promoted by academics but has now virtually disappeared, mostly because there is no difference in the quality of the vowel when the trema is used and when the macron is used.

Tahitian syllables are entirely open, as is usual in Polynesian languages. In its morphology, Tahitian relies on the use of "helper words" (such as prepositions, articles, and particles) to encode grammatical relationships, rather than on inflection, as would be typical of European languages. It is a very analytic language, except when it comes to the personal pronouns, which have separate forms for singular, plural and dual numbers.

’Eta letter forms
	The ʻeta (currently encoded as the ʻokina), as it appears in the Lucida Sans font.

In former practice, the glottal stop used to be seldom written, but today it is commonly spelled out, although often as a straight apostrophe (’, see below) instead of the turned curly apostrophe used in Hawaiian. Alphabetical word ordering in dictionaries used to ignore the existence of glottal stops. However, academics and scholars now publish text content with due use of glottal stops.

Although the use of ’eta and tārava is equal to the usage of such symbols in other Polynesian languages, it is promoted by the Académie tahitienne and adopted by the territorial government. There are at least a dozen other ways of applying accents. Some methods are historical and no longer used.[8] At this moment, the Académie tahitienne seems to have not made a final decision yet whether the ’eta should appear as a normal letter apostrophe (U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE) or a turned letter apostrophe (U+02BB ʻ MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA, called ʻokina in Hawaiian).

As the ASCII apostrophe (U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE) is the character output when hitting the apostrophe key on a usual French AZERTY keyboard, it has become natural for writers to use the punctuation mark for glottal stops, although to avoid the complications caused by substituting punctuation characters for letters in digital documents, the saltillo (U+A78C ꞌ LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO) may be used instead.

Today, macronized vowels and ’eta are also available on mobile devices, either by default or after installing an application to input vowels with macron as well as the ’eta.

In many parts of Polynesia the name of an important leader was (and sometimes still is) considered sacred (tapu) and was therefore accorded appropriate respect (mana). In order to avoid offense, all words resembling such a name were suppressed and replaced by another term of related meaning until the personage died. If, however, the leader should happen to live to a very great age this temporary substitution could become permanent.

In the rest of Polynesia tū means to stand, but in Tahitian it became ti’a, because the word was included in the name of king Tū-nui-’ē’a-i-te-atua. Likewise fetū (star) has become in Tahiti feti’a and aratū (pillar) became arati’a. Although nui (big) still occurs in some compounds, like Tahiti-nui, the usual word is rahi (which is a common word in Polynesian languages for 'large'). The term ’ē’a fell in disuse, replaced by purūmu or porōmu. Currently ’ē’a means 'path' while purūmu means 'road'.

Tū also had a nickname, Pō-mare (literally means 'night coughing'), under which his dynasty has become best known. By consequence pō (night) became ru’i (currently only used in the Bible, pō having become the word commonly in use once again), but mare (literally cough) has irreversibly been replaced by hota.

Other examples include;

• vai (water) became pape as in the names of Papeari, Papeno’o, Pape’ete
• moe (sleep) became ta’oto (the original meaning of which was 'to lie down').

Some of the old words are still used on the Leewards.

• Lord Monboddo
• Swadesh list of Tahitian words

• Charpentier, Jean-Michel; François, Alexandre (2015). Atlas Linguistique de Polynésie Française — Linguistic Atlas of French Polynesia (in French and English). Mouton de Gruyter & Université de la Polynésie Française. ISBN 978-3-11-026035-9.
• Y. Lemaître, Lexique du tahitien contemporain, 1973. ISBN 2-7099-0228-1
• same; 2nd, reviewed edition, 1995. ISBN 2-7099-1247-3
• T. Henry, Ancient Tahiti – Tahiti aux temps anciens
• Darrell Tryon, Conversational Tahitian; ANU 1970

• 1851 Tahitian–English dictionary
• 1898 Tahitian-French dictionary
• Tahitian Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
• Académie Tahitienne – Fare Vāna’a
• Puna Reo – Cultural Association, English section too
• Index cards of plant and animal names from the 1960s archived with Kaipuleohone

Tahitian edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia