David Kārena-Holmes is a published te reo author, living in Dunedin.

COLUMN: The English language is classed as an SVO (Subject-Verb-Object sequence) language; te reo Māori as VSO (Verb-Subject-Object sequence).

The difference is readily illustrated by a simple example: “The boy (subject) hit (verb) the ball (object)”. A version of this sentence in te reo is: I patu (verb) te tama (subject) i te poro (object).

This may be a major difference between the languages – but it’s relatively easy to understand.

Greater problems arise when it’s found that this SVO/VSO difference applies only in the case of simple basic sentences.

Sentences in te reo of other patterns require other approaches if they are to be related to English constructions.

One common pattern is called the “actor-emphatic”. In sentences of this type emphasis is placed upon who (or what) is doing an action, as in: Nā te tama / i patu / te poro.

If the sentence is translated “The boy hit the ball.” it would seem to follow the same SVO sequence as English.

Bruce Biggs, in Let’s Learn Maori, and Ray Harlow in A Māori Reference Grammar offer similar explanations: that in this construction the “actor” is considered the “focus constituent” of a sentence, and whatever is acted upon becomes the subject. Effective translation might be more like ‘It was the boy who hit the ball.”

A translation, though, as: “By the boy the ball was hit” is quite possible – but it puts the English verb in the passive form. Shouldn’t, then, the Māori verb also be the passive: i patua?

Intriguingly, in The Bible Society’s recently-published excerpts of a new translation of Te Paipera Tapu (the Māori version of The Holy Bible) in the first chapter of Ko te Rongomai ki te Ritenga a Hoani (The Gospel According to John) the verse 3 text of the 2012 version – Nāna / ngā mea katoa / i hanga. (“It was he who made all things.”) – has been changed to: Nāna / i hangaia ai / ngā mea katoa. (By Him / were made / all things.) That is, the active verb – hanga – of the earlier text has been replaced by the passive hangaia.

This actor-emphatic construction (with verb in passive rather than active form) is recurrent in this new version of Hoani – and this is significant because the text of Te Paipera is regarded as setting a grammatical standard for te reo Māori.

Issues such as this would seem to present more difficulty for a learner of te reo than the relatively straight-forward SVO/VSO differentiation.