This month, we've got a bit of a Matariki theme. Matariki festivals are already underway in many parts of the country, and events will continue until around the end of July. A bunch of them are listed on the Matariki.com events page.

The public holiday falls on the 14th this year, with a celebration period of 11-17 July. The 2023 Tangaroa lunar period, when the rising of Matariki is observed, is 10-13 July.

I'm planning on posting up some more Matariki stuff later.

Also, if you've got an idea for next month's banner, leave a comment below.

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[–] Dave 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ngā mihi - an acknowledgement, often used like "thank you" but in this case it's more like "mihi" greeting, and ngā - plural "the"

o - from/belonging to

te - singular "the"

tau - year

hou - new

So this phrase is pretty literal. But some of the words can have many meanings and Māori can be pretty heavy in metaphors so machine translation is easily tripped up.

Edit: oh I think you meant Mānawatia a Matariki!

Mānawa - among other things, to welcome

-tia - passive ending. Just the way the sentence is phrased. "The dog ate the apple" - active, "The apple was eaten by the dog" - passive

So basically "Greetings of Matariki" (though you normally try to translate the intent not the words so "Happy Matariki" is better if not a direct translation)

[–] sortofblue 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks! I'm currently copying all the significance of each star into my commonplace book so it's good to have a bit of extra info to add :)

[–] RaoulDuke 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll admit I knew very little about Matariki before it was made a public holiday, but I've been reading about it recently and it's fascinating. I'm intending to put a few posts up about it as we get closer to the celebration period. I think one of them will be about the meaning of the individual stars. But I'll probably start off with a guide about how kiwis of all ethnicities can celebrate Matariki.

Back in the day I wrote hundreds ~~thousands~~ of Wikipedia articles and I kind of miss reading about something in depth, distilling the key info and then summarising it. No idea why I enjoy it, but I hope other people get something out of it.

Edit: Looking back on my edit history, there weren't actually thousands I wrote from scratch, more like a few hundred. I made tens of thousands of edits which is where I must be getting mixed up.