Māori flag Duval




Duval is a web interface to the late Terry P Duval's 1995 PhD thesis, A preliminary dictionary of Maori gainwords compiled on historical principles. I am grateful to his family for their kind permission to host this interface under the GPL3 licence. Any errors or omissions in the transfer from page to screen are down to me.

The corpus consists of 120,000 words (around 6,000 tokens) drawn from citations of gainwords (loanwords or borrowings) in Māori-language publications printed between 1815 and 1899. English-speaking (and some few French-speaking) pakeha controlled the printed word up until the first Māori-controlled publication (Te Hokioi in 1861), so in fact most gainwords were imposed, and the number of gainwords listed in the dictionary therefore gives only a slight indication of Māori use and acceptance of these words between 1815 and 1899.

You can enter a word in the search box, or you may find it easier to select a specific gainword from an alphabetical list, or from a list giving year of earliest appearance.

On most GNU/Linux keyboards, the Māori macron can be entered by first pressing AltGr+Shift+] (close square bracket), and then pressing the desired letter. For those using legacy operating systems, you can cut and paste these letters with macrons:    Ā   ā   Ē   ē   Ī   ī   Ō   ō   Ū   ū