Haere Mai!

This beautiful vintage-style postcard came from my brother-in-law Tristan in Hawai’i. Not only are the colors and illustration terrific, but I always love any use of indigenous and minority languages. This is of course Māori, the indigenous language of Aotearoa (New Zealand), a Polynesian language. Why might this be sent from Hawai’i, you might ask, which are 4600 miles/7400km apart (or roughly the distance from Moscow to Hong Kong)? Māori and Hawai’ian are both Polynesian languages, which means that the indigenous inhabitants of these islands share a common ancestral homeland of Formosa, better known today as Taiwan. All of the indigenous languages, and many more in the Pacific, are closely related. If you want to read more about Polynesians’ amazing spread across the planet (before the “Age of Exploration” they were the most widely spread ethnicity in human history), check out Christina Thompson’s eminently readable “Sea People: the Puzzle of Polynesia.”