Talk:Aotearoa
The North Island has never been known as Aotearoa: that name was given to the South Island. The Māori name for the North Island is Te Ika ā Maui ('Maui's fish'). I have edited the page to reflect this. 194.82.100.71 13:39, 4 November 2006 (UTC) (Josisb on en:wikipedia)
- That user is incorrect. Aotearoa was definitely the name of the North Island (see http://www.maoridictionary.co.nz if you want confirmation). The South Island was Waipounamu or Te Waka a Maui. The name for the North Island has grown to represent the entire country even in Māori. 82.41.224.214 17:16, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
IPA
[edit]I've corrected the old IPA which was horribly wrong. Since the word is borrowed from Māori, New Zealanders usually try to pronounce it as it would be said in that language. People who have not learned Māori pronounciation generally use the best approximation with their phoneme set. In New Zealand English this is: ow! + tear (as in a piece of paper) + rower (as in a boat). Some New Zealanders have merged /ɛə/ and /ɪə/ so that chair and cheer both sound like cheer. The speaker on the audio sample uses /ɪə/ where I would use /ɛə/ which may be because of the merger.
The Wiktionary phoneme set uses symbols derived from English RP, so they don't really describe the way the word is spoken very well, so I've also included a more narrow transcription using the New Zealand English symbols from a Wikipedia article. The second narrow transcription represents the speech of someone who has merged /ɛə/ and /ɪə/.
There's another pronounciation variant which is more archaic, presumably because it's a worse approximation of the Māori. It was famously used in the song Six Months in a Leaky Boat by Split Enz: /eɪəʊteəˌɹɐʉɘ/. In this form, the first two letters are spelled out: eh? oh!