Таитянский язык: история и особенности

Language of French Polynesia

Tahitian (Tahitian: Reo Tahiti, part of , languages of French Polynesia) is a Polynesian language, spoken mainly on the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It belongs to the Eastern Polynesian group. As Tahitian had no written tradition before the arrival of the Western colonists, the spoken language was first transcribed by missionaries of the London Missionary Society in the early 19th century.

When Europeans first arrived in Tahiti at the end of the 18th century, there was no writing system and Tahitian was only a spoken language. Reports by some early European explorers including Quirós include attempts to transcribe notable Tahitian words heard during initial interactions with the indigenous people of Marquesa. Aboard the Endeavour, Lt. James Cook and the ship's master, Robert Molyneux, transcribed the names of 72 and 55 islands respectively as recited by the Tahitian arioi, Tupaia. Many of these were "non geographic" or "ghost islands" of Polynesian mythology and all were transcribed using phonetic English spelling. In 1797, Protestant missionaries arrived in Tahiti on a British ship called Duff, captained by James Wilson. Among the missionaries was Henry Nott (1774–1844) who learned the Tahitian language and worked with Pōmare II, a Tahitian king, and the Welsh missionary, John Davies (1772–1855), to translate the Bible into Tahitian. A system of five vowels and nine consonants was adopted for the Tahitian Bible, which would become the key text by which many Polynesians would learn to read and write. John Davies's spelling book (1810) was the first book to be printed in the Tahitian language. He also published a grammar and a dictionary of that language.

Stress is predictable in Tahitian. It always falls on one of the final three syllables of a word, and relies on the distinction between heavy and light syllables. Syllables with diphthongs or with long vowels are both considered to be heavy. Other syllables are considered to be light. Heavy syllables always bear secondary stress. In general main stress falls on the penultimate syllable in a word. However, if there is a long vowel or diphthong in the last syllable, that syllable receives main stress. If there is a long vowel in the antepenultimate syllable, and the penultimate syllable is light, the antepenultimate syllable receives main stress. There is another type of words whose stress pattern requires another rule to explain. These include 'first', 'shoe', 'king', all of which are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable. In all these words, the last two vowels are identical, and are separated by a glottal stop. One can posit that in such words, the last syllable is extrametrical, and does not count towards stress assignment. This extrametricality does not apply in the case of words with only two syllables, which remain stressed on the penultimate syllable. In compound words, each morpheme's stressed syllable carries secondary stress, and the stressed syllable of the last morpheme carries primary stress. Thus, for example, manureva 'airplane', from manu 'bird' and reva 'leave', is pronounced Tahitian has reduplication as well. The endings of some verbs can be duplicated in order to add a repetitive sense to the verb. For example, reva becomes revareva, 'do quickly' becomes , and pīhae 'to tear' becomes pīhaehae. In reduplicated verbs, the final verb ending bears main stress while the earlier ones bears secondary stress. When suffixes are added to a word, primary and secondary stresses in the root word are maintained as secondary and tertiary stresses, and a new primary stress is calculated for the word. Tertiary and secondary stress are often merged. The suffix does not always carry main stress. For example, when the nominalizing suffix is applied to verbs, regular stress assignment results in the last syllable of the root verb being stressed. This is due to the destressing of the V in To give an example, the word 'life', from ora 'to live' and , is pronounced with antepenultimate stress. Prefixes added to a root word do not carry primary stress. For example, 'vision', related to rama 'vision', is stressed on the second syllable, and not the first, even though it has a long vowel. This can also be seen with the verb 'to be understood'. When combined with the causative prefix , it becomes , which is stressed on the penultimate syllable.

Eta letter formsThe (currently encoded as the okina), as it appears in the Lucida Sans font. In former practice, the Tahitian glottal stop used to be seldom written, but today it is commonly spelled out, although often as a straight apostrophe or a curly apostrophe preferred typographically , see below) instead of the turned curly apostrophe used in Hawaiian (locally named ʻokina). Alphabetical word ordering in dictionaries used to ignore the existence of glottal stops. However, academics and scholars now publish text content with due use of glottal stops. Although the use of and tārava is equal to the usage of such symbols in other Polynesian languages, it is promoted by the Académie tahitienne and adopted by the territorial government. There are at least a dozen other ways of applying accents. Some methods are historical and no longer used. At this moment, the Académie tahitienne seems to have not made a final decision yet whether the should appear as a normal letter apostrophe or a turned letter apostrophe (, called ʻokina in Hawaiian). As the ASCII apostrophe is the character output when hitting the apostrophe key on a usual French AZERTY keyboard, it has become natural for writers to use the punctuation mark for glottal stops, although to avoid the complications caused by automatic substitution of basic punctuation characters for letters in digital documents, and the confusion with the regular apostrophe used in multilingual texts mixing Tahitian with French (where the apostrophe marks the elision of a final schwa at end of common pronouns, prepositions or particles, and the orthographic suppression of the separating regular space before a word starting by a vowel sound, in order to indicate a single phonemic syllable partly spanning the two words), the saltillo may be used instead. Today, macronized vowels and are also available on mobile devices, either by default or after installing an application to input vowels with macron as well as the .

In its morphology, Tahitian relies on the use of "helper words" (such as prepositions, articles, and particles) to encode grammatical relationships, rather than on inflection, as would be typical of European languages. It is a very analytic language, except when it comes to the personal pronouns, which have separate forms for singular, plural and dual numbers.

Like many Austronesian languages, Tahitian has separate words for inclusive and exclusive we, and distinguishes singular, dual, and plural.

Au (Vau after "a", "o" or "u") 'I, me': 'I have eaten the fish'; 'I will go to school tomorrow'. 'you': 'You have eaten the fish'; 'You damaged our car'. 'he, she': 'He/she ate the fish'; 'Why is she here/why did she come here? '; 'He/she is not here'.

Tāua '(inclusive) we/us two': 'We (us two) have eaten the fish'; E haere tāua 'Let's go' (literally 'go us two'); 'Our friend has arrived'. Māua '(exclusive) we/us two': 'We have eaten the fish'; 'Titaua and I will return/go home'; Nō māua tera fare 'That is our house'. 'you two': 'You two ate the fish'; 'You (two) go'; 'This book belongs to both of you'. Rāua 'they two': 'They (they two) have eaten the fish'; Nō hea mai rāua? 'Where are they (they two) from? '; 'He/she and Pa stayed home'.

Typologically, Tahitian word order is VSO (verb–subject–object), which is typical of Polynesian languages, or verb attribute subject for stating verbs/modality (without object). Some examples of word order are: