[Talk-nz] Place names

[Eliot Blennerhassett]

On 20/11/21 11:05, Michael Stark wrote:
> Does anyone else want to share their opinion?

 From the Oxford english dictionary - note the acute accent on the é :
café, n.
A coffee-house, a restaurant; strictly a French term, but in the late 19th cent. introduced into the English-speaking countries for the name of a class of restaurant.

Example of a "strictly French" word that has been introduced to English, and kept its diacritical mark.

I think the same idea applies to the NZ places that have a single, gazetted name with a macron.
The macrons aid in pronouncing the name in English or Māori.

> On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 11:46 PM Mike Kittridge <mgkittridge at gmail.com <mailto:mgkittridge at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Just because a word is used in English-language media doesn't mean that it's English.
>     The example Kyle used (when saying it made no sense) was name=Taupō + name:en=Taupo. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Taupō is the Te Reo word for the English name Taupo. This is the case for all kinds of latin and germanic languages. For example Québec and Quebec. Québec is the French name and Quebec is the english name. Again, just because in speech and media we may sometimes mix languages doesn't mean that all of it becomes english.
>     It's tricky in NZ because the the written Te Reo language was derived from English, so it becomes quite tempting to consider one as the other.
> 
>     With that said, if you've got an official NZ english language link that states that macrons are part of the NZ english written language, then I agree that macrons should be included. That really should be the decision maker ;)

Major media (stuff, tvnz, nz herald, rnz, odt) in NZ seems to be using the names with macrons. Search for e.g. Whangārei.
I don't think there can be an "official" stance on what words are or are not part of NZ english.

--
Eliot