Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Spectacles"
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@elLooto When I was in primary school some 30 years ago a bit north of Christchurch, we were still taught the (a?) south island (or possibly more local?) dialect of Maori (Not that we were taught the language as such to any great degree, but various words and songs and such), where the 'wh' was to be said essentially as hw.
Various Maori place names were 'deanglicised' when they'd never been anglicised to begin with, because they didn't match the northern dialect used as 'standard'... most of them have since had their spelling reverted.
There's been a Lot of poor or questionable decisions made when it comes to the Maori language over the decades.
For example, when it was banned from being spoken or taught in schools back in the day? Yeah, that wasn't racist white imperialists attemting to suppress the native language, it was racist old Maori people insisting that for the white children to learn to speak Maori was completely unacceptable. And, of course, the standard method of punishing all but the most minor infractions in schools at the time was physical punishment, and the Maori kids were far more likely to slip up and speak Maori than the white kids who'd never learned it... Whoops?
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@elLooto When you actually break down what they are and how they work, the Maori seats aren't actually an issue, not actually granting meaningly more representation to any individual than a regular seat would.
Other matters... are a complete mess.
There are areas where the system is still actively racist against Maori.
There are areas where it is actively racist in Favour of Maori.
There are areas that run into problems because those in charge of policy somehow seem incapable of grasping the idea of poor people who Aren't Maori (or maybe pacific islanders)... make of That what you will, but it causes problems.
Then you have Maori Supremacists making a mess of things, Radical Progressives more interested in their ideological dogma than the actual reality of the situation (the UN's bit about native cogovernance makes Perfect sense when you're talking about a few native tribes who mostly don't interact with the wider nation and want to prevent them from being abused, it's complete nonsensical bullshit when said natives all but universally live in the same places under the same economic models using the same resorces in the same ways as the rest of the citizenry.), various parts of the right using rightful opposition to that as an excuse to push another round of pro-white/anti-maori racist nonsense (mind you, this is almost always as a tool, a means to an end, rather than the Goal. The NZ voting public still hasn't quite fallen far enough as to actually elect the malicious and/or deranged, mostly-american-influenced 'far right' (for want of a better term) to parliament. The parties that Do get in are all pretty rubbish regardless of supposed alignment, but none of them are That far gone.)
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@Arterexius Correction: English is a Germanic language with a couple of stray celtic bits... and it's rather unusual in that it has those celtic bits. It is part of the West Germanic sub family. It has borrowed a lot of Words from the various romance languages, of course, but Every language does That, and it doesn't change the nature of the language itself. Further, 'Germanic' isn't exactly older than Latin, as such, Latin had been around for a Long time before the Germanic tribes and the Romans encountered each other... and from what I recall, it was the Germanic peoples who were the more recent arrivals in Europe at the time. Either way, that older form of germanic aquired a bunch of Latin loan words (which then underwent various sound changes) long before it split into the various daughter languages that eventually split further to become what we speak today.
English is NOT a Romance language (that is, a Language derived from that spoken by the Romans, aka Latin), even if, due mostlyh to events in the ... 1700s, I think it was? and later, there are a Lot of French (standard for European diplomacy and nobility at the time, and thus for anyone trying to seem fancier than they actually were as well) and latin (in very common use among the scientific community, if only in the form of a source of words that wouldn't cause a fight due to being from the 'wrong' language, or the use of Church Latin, rather than that spoken by the romans in ancient times, as a sort of common tongue.)
Old Norse, on the other hand, was a Northern Germanic language. The other way English is odd is that it lost a lot of Germanic gramatical bits in a rather erratic fashion. This is because west germanic Old English and north germanic Old Norse both had the same gramtical functions, but the specific sounds used in a given slot were often different, and the difference cused such confusion in the Danelaw (the part of England conquored by the Norse), that it generally became easier to just not use either modifer in those cases. That's why English verbs are modified to agree with the subject if the subject is third person singular, but remain the same for all other subjects.
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It is interesting to note that the series of conflicts previously known as 'the Maori Wars' has, in recent times, come to be refered to as 'the New Zealand Wars'... on the basis that it was almost never 'Maori vs European' but a real mixed bag of conflicts which pretty consistently had Maori tribes on both sides of them, and frequently had various Europeans involved on the non-central government side. The whole collection can loosely be termed unification wars, but individually, some where various tribes which the central government was content to leave mostly to their own devices deciding to have a go at taking control of the whole thing, and there was a major religious uprising (by what amounts to a cult of a similar model to those seen doing similar things in other places, right down to believing that those who believed strongly enough were immune to bullets), a couple that are probably arguably more civil wars than anything, various conflicts that arguably weren't really wars in their own right but were big enought to count as skirmishes in the greater mess... and the last conflict basically amounted to the central government deciding that having a 'last village holding out against the invaders' situation wasn't exactly a great idea during World War One and sending a large group of police officers to inform them that their independance had been revoked. Not sure if I'm remembering rightly, but I believe that one didn't even involve anyone actually shooting at each other.
Arugably, there's a fair case to be made that the lot of the Maori people would have actually been substantually better Without most (though not all, quite an important distinction, that) of those conflicts.
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