Category talk:Maramataka

Whānuitanga o te momo (scope of category)

Individual year pages will eventually number thousands, making a category display rather unusable; so they should be just in their centuries (and decades).

Individual days of the year will total no more than 366, so they can be here.

Robin Patterson 00:59, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)

BTW Te Taura Whiri suggest wāhanga for category rather than momo. Kahuroa 06:40, 24 Haratua 2006 (UTC)

Need to fix the century categories and pages

Tua is a prefix, not a separate word, and can only attach to the numbers 1 to 9. No others. Kahuroa 11:43, 22 Haratua 2006 (UTC)

Accepted. Someone who seemed to have authority renamed two century pages that way, early last year, and after a very small (now seen as probably too small) amount of independent checking I made others suit. Robin Patterson 22:52, 23 Haratua 2006 (UTC)

I think I've found the source I checked "tua " in: Dear old Archdeacon Maunsell, whose grammar book reveals more errors and ambiguities each time I work through it: on page 26 he has:

ORDINALS.---The ordinal numbers are formed:---

1. By tua prefixed to the cardinal; e.g. tua toru, third ; tua iwa, ninth.

2. By whaka prefixed ; e.g. whakatekau, tenth.

3. By the simple cardinal with the definite article : ko te wha tenei o aku haerenga mai, ...

Giving merely "third" and "ninth" and "tenth" as examples is not a clear way of limiting method 1 (after all, tuatahi and tuarua would be excluded if one took the exemplar range to be the absolute range).

Robin Patterson 01:18, 24 Haratua 2006 (UTC)

Second point to discuss is whether we use numerals or words. Both appear in reasonably authoritative places, with not every site exclusively one way or the other (eg search Te Papa Tongarewa for "rautau"). Numerals would be less work. Robin Patterson 22:52, 23 Haratua 2006 (UTC)

Numerals is easier for sorting in lists didn't you say. That would seem to swing it for the titles of pages and maybe not get picky about it if the contributor prefers words in the text - it can look nicer. BTW 'rautau' is the ordinary word I've always known for 'century'. I think the Ngata (sometimes a bit odd) has it as two words, but I don't often see it that way in other places. Kahuroa 00:09, 24 Haratua 2006 (UTC)

Numerals then, eg rautau 21. Easier to list numerically in categories. Additional advantage of much less space in link tables such as those on "year" pages. We can reverse a few very recent redirects (leaving the long form to do its job as a redirect when some author has it in text and wants to make it a link) and finish correcting other "tua" instances. Even our Galicia and Tiamana contributors could do that!

"Rautau" - Yes, I probably used only Ngata, which has "rau tau" but (despite being a splendidly useful work on the whole) is indeed out on a limb geographically as well as dialectally (eg "kai" for the standard "kei"). I see the Reed Pocket Dictionary has "rautau". We've settled that one, with less space-typing in prospect.

Re whakatekau - this seems to mean tenth as in a tenth of a given quantity, rather than the tenth of a series. Kahuroa 06:39, 24 Haratua 2006 (UTC)