That’s a really useful explanation, thank you. Accurate or not, it sounds about right to my ears (pardon the pun). I appreciate you attempting to explain it to me.

As I say, I find elements of the language really interesting, not least the idea of the early whalers and so forth trying to learn to speak to the Maori for the first time (and obviously, more negatively, the problems arising from poor translation of the treaty).

Cheers for that Richard!

The written wh/w/f “problem” probably traces its origins to the first orthography developed in around 1820 by a Cambridge scholar (see Wikipedia) – this was based on northern dialects which tended towards “w”, and presumably didn’t have a anything approaching the voiceless labiodental fricative (ie. the “f” sound in English). Apparently the “wh” spelling was added later to compensate for the observation that many regional varieties of Maori (such as that spoken around Whanganui and Taranaki) did actually replace the “w” with something like an aspirated “f” sound.

My layman’s understanding of Whanganui dialect is that locally the “wh” is pronounced as a very breathy “w” – with characteristics of both the “w” and “f” sound in English – hence it may have been heard by early English-speaking geographers as “w”, when “wh” is probably more accurate.

Hopefully that explanation is something approaching the truth…

Presumably that’s part of the W(h)anganui problem?

Is that something that can be easily explained, or is it part of some incredibly complex linguistics?