Putting prepositions in their place

Thursday, 4 March 2021

Knowing what comes first, or last, in any language you are learning is vital to your understanding.

COLUMN: A preposition is a word that is preposed – that is, “put first”.

Correct? Well, it would seem that it should be correct – but in English, it’s extremely common, now at least, for prepositions to be put last in phrases, as in: “Where are you from?” or “What’s that for?”

The highly regarded poet W. B. Yeats could even rhyme: “Players and painted stage took all my love, / And not those things that they were emblems of.”

It’s somewhat curious that “post-posing” of prepositions seems to occur to this extent only in English.

The number of teenagers studying te reo Māori at secondary school has passed 30,000 for the first time. That's from fresh Education Ministry figures that show enrollment in international languages is also on the rise.

* Putting te reo particles in their rightful place

* Position particles put you in prime position to lift your te reo skills

* Particle theory in te reo Māori sometimes has no English equivalent

* Classifying base words in te reo

The sign says it all, but you need to know the order in which you’re speaking.

In te reo Māori, prepositions are always “preposed”.

Author David Karena-Holmes with his book, Te Reo Maori The Basics Explained.

That is, whenever a preposition is used it is always the first word in a phrase: No hea / koe? (“From where / you?”) and Mo te aha / tēnā? (“For the what / that?”)

The use of prepositions in another language is one of the trickier things to learn – even between closely related languages, such as Italian and English.

This would seem to be because it isn’t a “meaning” that needs to be understood, but rather (as noted in the last column) a grammatical function.

The function of a preposition is frequently, to link an object phrase into a sentence, as in I haere / te kōtiro / ki te kura. (Went / the girl / to the school.” = “The girl went to school.”). Here I haere is the verb; te kōtiro is the subject; and te kura is the object – and the object phrase may be translated word-for-word into English: ki te kura / “to the school”.

Would that it were always so simple!

But here is another sentence: Ka patu / te tama / i te pōro / ki te taiapa. (“The boy hits the ball to the fence.”).

Here both pōro (“ball”) and taiapa (“fence”) are objects – the first a “direct object” because it’s directly affected by the action expressed in the verb, and the second an “indirect object”.

In English, prepositions are not used before direct objects, but in te reo Māori they are used before both direct and indirect objects.

The preposition in the phrase i te pōro is sometimes called “i connective”, there being no translation for this word in this context.

A direct object in te reo is most frequently connected to the verb by this “i connective”, but there are a number of verbs with which ki is used instead. The verb mōhio (“to know”) is an example: E mōhio ana / koe / ki a ia? (“Do you know her?”).

There are 12 prepositions in te reo Māori, and more to discuss about them next time.