|
 This is a rather doubtful member of the collection of Māori plant names inherited from earlier stages of the development of Polynesian languages, but is included here becuse it is present as a possibility in the Pollex database, and there may indeed be some link between the Fijian, Hawaiian and Māori plant names which appear to have survived. It would of course help if we knew what plant the Māori word represented, but unfortunately Bishop Williams noted the word simply as "a shrub" in the 5th edition of the Williams Dictionary, with no reference or example of its use, and we have not yet been able to find mention of the word as a plant name in other sources. There is a partial similarity between the plants referred to by the Fijian and at least one of the Hawaiian words (although for many people the Hawaiian word "nēnē" will bring to mind the goose frequenting the volcanic uplands of Maui and Hawai'i rather than a plant) -- the Fijian plant can become more of a creeper than a tree, although there the similarity more or less ends. There are no intermediate forms in Western or Eastern Polynesian languages to fill in the gaps, so the links between and among these names are speculative. But the known plants are interesting, so we can give them and the possible inherited name the benefit of the doubt!
 Hawaiian Nēnē
The Hawaiian word nēnē (like its short-voweled counterpart in Aotearoa) has a variety of meanings. Two or three of them relate to plants, and another to the indigenous goose (which we encountered at the Halema'uma'u caldera on the Big Island of Hawai'i when investigating the origin of the word Mamaku). The Pukui and Elbert Dictionary defines the word as (1) a variety of kawa, stems green with dark-green spots, and (4) the same as 'ai-a-ka-nēne, a plant", the latter defined as "a native trailing woody plant (Coprosma ernodioides), with narrow tiny leaves and black, berry-like fruits. Lit. food of the nēnē-goose." The 1865 Andrews Dictionary defines it as a "species of thick grass", or just grass in general, and the 1999 Wagner et al. Manual includes nēnē as a plant name only in relation to the Coprosma, with the variants 'ai-a-ka-nēnē, kūkaenēnē (nēnē turd), leponēnē (nēnē mess), and pūnene (nēnē tree).
The Pollex database gives the variety of kava as the likely cognate of the Fijian word and reflex of the proto-form. This of course is possible, but despite its associations with the nēnē goose if there is a link it is at least equally likely to be with the recumbent Coprosma. In any case, the kawa already has a page to itself (see the link above) so we can give most attention to the 'ai-a-ka-nēnē and the Fijian plant on this page.
The prostrate trailing shrub nēnē (pictured on the left, and in the galleries above and below) has stems two or three metres long, with short, lateral branches and very closely spaced small leaves 6-13 mm long by 1.5 to 3 or 4 mm wide. The leaves have cup-like appendages at the base. It is usually found in open sites like lava flows and cinder fields at higher altitudes (1200-2600 m), but is occasionally found in wet forests and even bogs. The small flowers have style-branches (the tubes that join the stigma -- pollen-receiving organ -- to the ovary) up to 2 cm long (see photo on the right in the gallery above). The fruits are glossy back berries about 1 cm long, apparently a favourite food of the nēnē goose. Whether the plant is named after the goose, or the goose after the plant, is a chicken and egg question for which there is no clear answer. Certainly if the plant name came first, its link with the Fijian word would be considerably more plausible. Just to complicate matters, the word also means to make a chirping or croaking sound, which may or may not be linked to the name of the bird. And there is the variety of kawa (kava) with the dark green spots -- there is a further comment on that in the next section.
Fijian Geegee, Gēgē (Ngēngē)
Maesa tabacifolia, the Fijian Gēgē, is described in Albert Smith's Flora as a shrub or slender tree 1-7 m high, sometimes becoming scandent, or a liane, found at sea-level to 600 m in dense or open forest, or at its edges, and on open hilllsides. It has white to pale yellow flowers with stamens with white filaments and yellow anthers. He does not record gēgē as a local name, but Mrs Parham depicts it as "a climbing bush with leathery leaves and very abundant inflorescence", and notes geegee as its name in the Nadroga region. It has other names elsewhere in Fiji.
The plant is also found in Samoa, and in his Flora (2022) Art Whistler notes that "The tree is inconspicuous and small, and is virtually unknown to Samoans. No local names or uses have been reported." (The Rensch - Whistler Dictionary (2009), however, gives fu'apine and fu'apini, along with lalaui, lalauta, lalamea and lalamelo as Samoan names for this species.) It has a pinkish-white drupe 4-7 mm long. The stems are dotted with white lenticels (tiny holes which allow aeration of internal tissues). This brings to mind the dark-green spots (which are probably not lenticels) on the stems of the Hawaiian variety of kava also known as nēnē.
Ngenge in Aotearoa
All we know at present about the Aotearoan ngenge is that it was a shrub. The link to the other ngēngē is made a little more tenuous by the short vowels on the Māori word -- generally, long vowels are inherited as signs that a consonant has dropped out of use somewhere along the way in the word's journey from further afield to Polynesia; for example, in Māori, rā "a sail" is from Proto-Austronesian *layaR; rā "the sun" is from Proto-Oceanic *laqaa, which gave rise also to Proto Eastern Polynesian rā "day"; and rā "over there" is a Polynesian invention -- the long vowel made necessary by the rule that only particles can have a single syllable. As always, there are exceptions, and this may be one of them, but normally one would expect words with a common origin to have similar vowel length in closely-related languages like Hawaiian and Māori.
|
