Does Maori lack words for abstractions or for modern technology?
A11. Certainly not. Like other languages, Maori has plenty of words for abstract concepts of all kinds, and it has word-forming devices for creating new abstract words at will. Until recently, Maori did indeed lack a vocabulary for talking about things like physics, economics, and linguistics, simply because nobody had ever wanted to talk or write about these things in Maori. Today people do want to talk and write about these things in Maori, and so thousands of new words have been introduced into the language to make this possible. Most of the new and technical words in Maori have either created or collated by New Zealand’s Maori language commission, Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Maori. Modern Maori can be used to speak or write about anything at all. For example, computer science has been taught at Waikato University through the medium of Maori, since 1993.
