Naming
In Māori, iwi literally means "bone". 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. Māori author Keri Hulme named her best-known (1985 Booker Prize) novel The Bone People, a title linked directly to the dual meaning of bone and "tribal people".
Many names of iwi begin with Ngāti or with Ngāi (from ngā āti and ngā ai, both meaning roughly "the offspring of"). Ngāti has become a productive morpheme in New Zealand English to refer to groups of people: Ngāti Pākehā (Pākehā as a group), Ngāti Poneke (Māori who have migrated into the Wellington region), Ngāti Rānana (Māori living in London), Ngāti Tūmatauenga, "Tribe of Tūmatauenga" (the god of war) — (the official Māori-language name of the New Zealand Army).
Read more about this topic: Iwi
Famous quotes containing the word naming:
“See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul—half a drop! ah, my Christ!—
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!—
Yet will I call on him!—O, spare me, Lucifer!—
Where is it now? ‘T is gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!—
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!”
—Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
“Husband,
who am I to reject the naming of foods
in a time of famine?”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The night is itself sleep
And what goes on in it, the naming of the wind,
Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)