Toponyms

If someone came to California for the first time with no sense of history or language, they’d probably say something like, “Wow.  There sure are a lot of places with names that start with ‘Los’ or ‘San’ around here!”

The prefixes “Wai” and “Whaka” seem to be the Māori equivalent of “Los” and “San” because you see them in tons of place names.

“Wai” means “water” so it see it appears in lots of river and lake names.  “Whaka” is a particle which can mean “towards” so it gets slapped on a lot of other names.  (Note that the “wh” sound in Māori sounds more like an “f”.  So I suppose the title of the acclaimed Māori movie Whale Rider must sound more like “fail rider” if prounounced correctly.)