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The Māori settlement of New Zealand represents an end-point of a long chain of island-hopping voyages in the South Pacific.. Evidence from genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology indicates that the ancestry of Polynesian people stretches all the way back to indigenous peoples of Taiwan.
Māori are the second-largest ethnic group in New Zealand, after European New Zealanders (commonly known by the Māori name Pākehā). In addition, more than 170,000 Māori live in Australia. The Māori language is spoken to some extent by about a fifth of all Māori, representing three per cent of the total population.
With the arrival of Europeans, surnames were introduced and soon after a Māori surname system was devised where a person would take their father's name as a surname, for example: Ariki – Maunga Ariki – Waiora Maunga – Te Awa Waiora – Waipapa Te Awa. Māori would also have translations of their names, for example:
Māori cultural history intertwines inextricably with the culture of Polynesia as a whole. The New Zealand archipelago forms the southwestern corner of the Polynesian Triangle, a major part of the Pacific Ocean with three island groups at its corners: the Hawaiian Islands, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and New Zealand (Aotearoa in te reo Māori). [10]
Aotearoa (Māori: [aɔˈtɛaɾɔa]) [1] is the Māori-language name for New Zealand.The name was originally used by Māori in reference only to the North Island, with the whole country being referred to as Aotearoa me Te Waipounamu – where Te Ika-a-Māui means North Island, and Te Waipounamu means South Island. [2]
Naming is a symbolic tradition of the islands' Maori population. Names form a link not only to ancestors, descendants, and friends, but to titles and land, as well as events and relationships. Dreamed or created, name change are not limited to events, such as birth, marriage, and death, but can also occur in association with a bad omen.
Te Raekaihau Point – Te Rae-kai-hau – The literal meaning of the name is ‘the headland that eats the wind’ (see Best, 8, Pt.5, p. 174) Te Waipounamu (the South Island) – the greenstone water or 'the water of greenstone' where 'wai' can also refer to rivers or streams or other bodies of water. It has been surmised that the name evolved ...
In Māori and in many other Polynesian languages, iwi literally means ' bone ' [8] derived from Proto-Oceanic *suRi₁ meaning ' thorn, splinter, fish bone '. [9] Māori may refer to returning home after travelling or living elsewhere as "going back to the bones" — literally to the burial-areas of the ancestors.