I live in New Zealand/Aotearoa, so I use a lot of Māori both for placenames and in my vernacular.
While it is possible to tweak this system to avoid conflicts with the default Plover vocabulary, it would still interfere with phrasing. Therefore, I have decided to take inspiration from Emily's Modifiers and suffix most strokes with "-GSD" (picture the tail of a waka).
I have structured Māori words with one stroke per sylable/mora with the exception of long vowels and diphthongs. Māori sylables never have a final consonant, so these words are very left-hand heavy.
Consonants are always as written, so "wh" is stroked "WH-". "ng" is stroked "TKPW-" which is the chord for "g", as "g" never occurs on it own in a word.
Vowels are also as written, with the same chord for both long and short vowels.
| Vowel | Chord |
|---|---|
| a | A |
| e | E |
| i | EU |
| o | O |
| u | U |
| ae | AE |
| ai | AEU |
| ao | AO |
| au | AU |
| ou | OU |
Any other combinations of vowels are split across separate moras. I have added briefs for the multisylabic affixes "whaka-" and "-tanga", but otherwise have made no effort to condense the length of words or phrases.
Vowels with macrons can be fingerspelt using the suffix. All other letters use their regular fingerspelling.
The word lists I used are:
- https://www.maorilanguage.net/maori-words-phrases/50-maori-words-every-new-zealander-know/
- https://www.maorilanguage.net/maori-words-phrases/colours-nga-tae/
- https://www.maorilanguage.net/maori-words-phrases/greetings-mihi/
- https://www.maorilanguage.net/maori-words-phrases/maori-words-used-new-zealand-english/
- https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/maori-language-week/100-maori-words
- https://www.maorilanguage.net/maori-words-phrases/place-names-new-zealand-ingoa-wahi-o-aotearoa/
I have also included some other words that I hear used frequently. I have omitted single letter words and particles, as they would be identical to the fingerspelling. I have also omitted some words that also appear in the Plover default dictionaries.
Place names are in a separate dictionary. I have also included more place names for Tauranga and Christchurch, as these are the places I have lived.