Beginning to wind down

This week, I (finally) finished checking through a post-literacy book “How the Jews lived”. Completing the book was an important goal before leaving. I can draft Kovol reading books and Bible portions on my own in front of my computer; but there is a good chance the result isn’t very good!

I finished language study 9 months ago. Since then, I have been working full-time in Bible translation and literacy, preparing written Kovol material. I’ve certainly improved from where I started in September. While checking through my “How the Jews lived” yesterday, I found that perhaps 40% of what I had drafted communicated naturally, and 60% of the sentences needed complete reworking.

Basically, any sentence with some complexity was one where I didn’t quite hit the nail on the head!

So, it was important to finish the checking process of this 100-page book, as it’s something I can’t do away from Kovol. I also don’t fancy returning from Europe in 9 months with rusty Kovol and picking it up again! Much better to finish it!

I’m glad to say that yesterday I finished! 10,500 words have been translated and it only took 35-40 hours total 😀 This book has been particularly challenging as it dives into things like the differences between Pharisees and Sadducees. It talks about false (contrary to the Bible) ideas about spirits which Rabbis had at the time of Jesus. The challenge has been that these complex topics 1. all require new vocabulary, and 2. are covered in a single short paragraph each.

I’m sure we’ll need to revisit this book once we cement the vocabulary we’ll be using in our Bible teaching. New phrases include Old and New Testament. We’re trying out “hobol hume lumo isig” and “hobol hume lumo soguwa”, which literally mean ‘talk together to tie new/old’, and a more dynamic translation ‘old/new talk promise’.
The section on Angels and Demons confirmed for me what I had found in Kovol culture study. The Kovol people use the word “hubi” to mean angels, demons, spirits and Satan. In one sentence, I had to translate that the demons don’t follow God; they follow Satan. It translates as “the bad hubi follow hubi”. That is currently the “correct” Kovol way to say it. Here is somewhere where we might need to introduce new vocabulary into the Kovol language to properly distinguish a concept that is culturally quite fuzzy. In Kovol the hubi are just the hubi: mysterious, singular and plural at the same time, a blend of ancestral Kovol myths and snatches of Bible teaching layered on top.

That rounds off post-literacy book number 15 😀 The other books are all shorter!

One last task remains before leaving: an orthography revision. Kovol is (was) an unwritten oral language without an alphabet. We phonetically transcribed thousands of words and then analysed the patterns in the language to see which sounds carried meaning and which sounds were variations of other sounds. One decision we made was that our mb, nd and ng sounds were indivisible single sounds rather than two sounds coming together in a consonant cluster.

As I have worked through literacy and have been required to write stories that make use of these sounds, we’ve noticed real difficulty writing stories that illustrate syllables starting with mb and nd. We knew that ng only ever finished syllables but we thought that nd and mb could start them. I was prompted to relook at that after the difficulty we had using them syllable-initially.

As we’ve found new words and tightened up our spelling on old words, it seems I was mistaken to conclude that these sounds were indivisible units and individual letters required in the alphabet. We’ve also had a better look at our vowel sounds and concluded that the contrast we were maintaining between o and oo, e and ee was unnecessary and complicated spelling. Ee and oo are better explained as minor variations of e and o in polysyllabic words, or as glided vowels we can write using ow and ey, which we mistakenly wrote down as pure vowels.

The suggested changes bring some differences. Rat we now need to write as “singasim” rather than “sinnasim”. It gets a little less pretty for “they threw” which is now “pusilim tangg” rather than “pusilim tang”. At least it goes along with the national language that writes sing for the same sound we previously had as “nn”.
That change is neutral, just different, but there is a vast improvement for words like “smoke” which we were writing as “hoowug”. It is now “howg”. “I held” was “ooboogoolom” and it is now “obogolom”. It takes an awful lot of guesswork out of spelling! We were fine as we have spellcheck on our computers, but thinking about new Kovol readers, we think the changes will help streamline spelling for them.

Before leaving, I’ll need to write a quick Python programming script to go through our lexicon and make the changes. We have 6800 entries so we certainly don’t want to do it by hand! As the team programmer, I should get that done before I leave so Philip doesn’t get stuck with the job of doing it manually!

Unfortunately, the changes will mean rewriting the literary program! Groan. It will change which graphemes need to be taught and the order they come in, so quite a big rewrite of the lessons will be needed. Better to do it now while there is time rather than mid-way through the first teaching class, though! The Bible translation will need changing, as will all “finished” literacy books – but that was always the case. Our spelling frequently changes, and the correct spelling last month isn’t the same as this month, but changes are becoming less frequent.

Those changes can be made at my leisure during our home assignment time, though. Any short stories that need to be checked can be sent to Philip and Natalie for checking. With only one important task yet to do, I am starting to wind down. After finishing the book yesterday, I felt elated and ready to start putting my mind on our upcoming transition.
Gerdine is certainly going to be glad to have me focusing less on computer work and more on packing, that’s for sure!