Colin Rawle, of Northeast Valley, questions the value of artificially supporting Maori language.
Maori language weak?
It certainly is, and if this completely anachronistic language is failing it's due to nothing but extreme old age and the inexorable tread of human/social evolution.
Are the scholastic denizens of our universities so cowed by political correctness that they dare not point out that more than 100 old languages have died a natural death in Europe alone?
And that languages, like cultures, civilisations and even races, arise, flourish and then in their proper ''season'' die away?
We call it social evolution and it never ceases to unfold before our eyes - (assuming eyes that actually see!).
Latin, the language of the great Roman Empire, which ruled the then known world, has died.
Gaelic has died, as has Aramaic, the native tongue of Jesus Christ.
The romantic wish to improperly prolong and utilise naturally dead or dying languages tends to draw one back into the old mentality or consciousness of which they are an expression - the very last thing that cosmopolitan modern societies need.
Clearly, English is the global, cosmopolitan and unifying language of the world today.
If truth were to count for anything nowadays, it would be generally acknowledged that the traditional unmodified Maori tongue was obsolete long before Europeans set foot on these shores.
It simply did not have the concepts and scope to deal with the wider world - even of the 18th-19th centuries.
The old-time, real, Maori knew this, and thus it was they who requested the schools of the time forbid Maori pupils from speaking their mother-tongue during school hours and instead teach them English.
The reasons for this are obvious to anyone with a trace of goodwill and common sense.
Nor was any attempt ever made to try to prevent Maori pupils from speaking their own language outside of school hours.
Ancient languages either die out or evolve beyond recognition.
Older speakers of the more traditional Te Reo have been saying for some years that they cannot understand much of today's ''pidgin'' Te Reo.
How many past civilisations, races and languages have synthesised and evolved to become the modern language and culture we know as English?
And this too shall pass, ''in its season''.
The demise of ancient cultures should neither be hastened nor prolonged, but be allowed to pass in dignity and gratitude and not be kept artificially alive as humiliating caricatures of their former reality - especially at the cost of untold millions of taxpayers' dollars, every cent of which could be put to better use.
Are we to assume that ''dumbing down'' has succeeded to the point that we moderns are now completely ignorant of once well-known facts?
If the present-day part-Maori agitators possessed any trace of the spiritual wisdom they pretend to, they would know that it is the fruits of the past which we carry forward with us into the future, not the trappings.
Such malcontents have no wish to arrive at the truth since they know this will not be to their advantage.
They only wish to win the argument.
All that was true and beautiful in past civilisations and cultures, including that of the Maori, we carry on with us as qualities of soul. Nothing of true worth is ever irretrievably lost. Thus mankind progresses.
• Maori Language Week was last week.
