Petone, New Update + Place Names

 

Petone, New Update + Place Names

The name Petone remains, as it should, and is probably safe from hereon in. The Minister of Land Information made the decision after having the issue referred to his office by the Geographic Board. At a guess the Board may have thought changing the name of a well-known area was beyond its remit and if there was to be any flak then the Minister would be the backstop to absorb it. So far there has not been any flak to remark on.

A batch of naming decisions has been detailed in the Geographic Board’s latest press release. No detail on which are decisions of the Geographic Board or which are the Minister’s decisions. Many of the decisions should never have become issues in the first place.

Along with Petone the name, Takanini also remains unchanged. The original proposal was to rename the area as Takaanini. The name was given for a nineteenth century Maori chief. A difference of one vowel “a” was to be inserted for the name correction. To what point? The name Takanini has been in place long enough for Aucklanders to know where it is. As to the matter of the Maori chief, his name carries on regardless. Takanini therefore remains at A Minus.

As in the case of Petone, the name Takanini has established itself in all cultures for generations. A Maori dictionary translation of “anini” is headache or dizziness. I sometimes think of Pooh Bear who said that big words gave him a headache. Sad to say, many in the Maori language and culture industry are giving everyone a headache by endlessly performing on the name change stage. They are now going after so-called un-named areas.

Hullo! On the Geographic Board’s list of New Zealand place names there are more than 58,000 names. It is difficult to believe there are any remaining un-named areas. The 58,000 names total averages out to one name for every four or five square kilometres of New Zealand’s area.

It is not as though we do not have sufficient of Maori language place names. Here are the statistics from a road map book. Count of all names in the index: 6170. These are not damned lies. My numbers are I estimate 99% correct. The stats method is explained below.

Maori language place names     3293

English language place names    2877

The ratio of Maori language place names to English language place names is 53% to 47%. That is close enough to a 50/50 split. My feeling is that the ratio would repeat in the 58,000 names mentioned above.

The map book is the NZ Road Atlas, published (2007) by Hema Maps. There are 6170 place names total in an index of 17 pages, at 4 columns per page averaging 363 names per page. All names commencing with characters not used in the Maori language (B,C,D,F,J,L,Q,S,V,X,Y,Z) are considered to be English language names - apart from Lake names carrying a Maori language name e.g. Lake Taupo, Lake Wakatipu.

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