Do people still know that language today and how widely spread is it among Polynesian peoples?
PAUL TAPSELL: I can’t speak for the wider Polynesian people, but for our own people, the particular person I was talking about was Hikooterangi Hohepa who passed away in 1998 just when I completed my thesis. He spoke at length with us about the communication he was able to have and the very little difference still in the shift of the ritual language. When I was growing up, I heard our people speak that language quite often, and it was almost like a foreign language to me as opposed to Maori that we speak generically and that is now common. The dialects of Te Arawa and around the Bay of Plenty in themselves are very different from the dialects around Taranaki from the South Island or from up north, and then within those dialects you also had this other language that was maintained by this learned school of what we would consider philosophers or priests. They trained young people that they picked out at a very young age to be acolytes. I would suggest that the young man travelling with T
