Monthly Archives: September 2022

Celebrating Our First Rule of Tone Writing

Cameroon Culture, Linguistics, Missiology, Travels, ,

We took this photo at the end of the day today, to celebrate our first tone rule, resulting in our first rule about how to write tone in this language!

It took us awhile to get there together, but I think it was worth it. We found eight different tone melodies in nouns of form CVCVC (where C is a consonant and V is a vowel). In isolation, each of the melodies falls in the second syllable. The same thing happens when you put a high tone or a low tone before the word.

But when you put either a high or low tone after the word, none of them fall anymore. This happens if you’re adding one or two syllables.

The short version is that the last syllable of the phrase falls. So it looks like the words have a falling tone in isolation, but that’s just because they end the phrase. The same thing with the possessive pronouns (high and low after the noun); they fall because they end the phrase, not (necessarily) because something in those words makes them fall.

So people will certainly be tempted to write this fall, as it is easy to hear. But as it is clearly attached to the phrase (rather than any of these words), it shouldn’t need to be written, except perhaps with a period.

For this interested in what “phrase” means here, so am I.😅 This may be an utterance, a phonological phrase, or a syntactic unit. We’ll need to investigate some longer utterances to find out.

Using the Scriptures in a Digital Age

Cameroon Culture, Church, Linguistics, Missiology,

As we think about Bible translation, and how to facilitate the impact of the scriptures in the worldwide church, it’s interesting to consider the impact of recent technology. Many Americans show up to church on Sunday morning without a printed Bible (I have observed). Whatever you think of that, it constitutes a change of culture and practice, which is driven (at least) my the fact that you can store a whole, searchable Bible in no more space or weight than you already carry with your phone.

How does this impact the worldwide church? Others noted at least a decade ago that in Africa, cellular technology leapfrogged over land line telephones. That is, while I grew up learning to use a phone that was permanently attached to a wall in our house, many Africans (that I know) have cell phones, never having seen a land line telephone. I have seen cell towers in the rainforest in DR Congo, where no one would ever consider laying down wires for telephones.

In a similar way, I know people here with access to the scriptures on an Android app (as in the above picture, from church this morning), but this week I saw my first print new testament in this language –in my third workshop with this group! They are working on the old testament, having had the new testament since 1988 (if I have my facts correct; this at least sounds right).

So are people printing Bibles? And are they buying and selling them? Why would they, when installing an app on the phone they already have costs so much less in money, volume and weight? I’m not saying this is the best for the long term health of the church, but it is certainly a reality that we must consider –people may be leapfrogging over the printed scriptures, to access them digitally without ever having used them in print.

The pic above is obscure, because it was taken inside the church. For those interested in seeing more of my friend Paul, here’s another picture taken outside:

If you’re wondering why I’m working in a language that already has a new testament, this is one of a number of languages which was found to have problems with the writing system. Tone studies have come a long way since this work was done (50+yrs ago), as have writing system development studies.

So people are hoping we can come up with a way to write tone which will work better for these guys and enable more fluent reading, giving more powerful and effective scriptures.

Which brings us back full circle: how can you think of making changes to the writing system after printing your scriptures? That would be very cost prohibitive –in print. But electronically, you just put in the changes and update the app, and move on…

I personally think there should always be a place for written, printed scriptures, if only to archive them in a format that doesn’t die with electricity –or time. But for many use cases, Android makes a lot of sense, at least in the eyes of many here. So I think it’s wise to consider how to make the most of it.

POSTLOG: after reading the above, Paul informed me that his phone battery died just after I took the above picture –a risk not present in printed Bibles.

The Relativity of plumbing

Cameroon Culture, Family, Travels, ,

This is a post for my engineer friends. I took a shower this morning for the first time in days, because couldn’t figure this thing out.

This is my second stay in this compound; before I stayed in a flat that had a nice hot water system, I think from a tank on the roof, which was basically just heated by the sun. So my expectations (from here and elsewhere) led me to think that the left knob was hot.

This was further reinforced by the fact that it has special plumbing, going straight up. The right knob connects to the toilet and sink, and to another spiget off to the left –classic cold water plumbing.

Turning on the left knob, you get low pressure –still not uncommon for local hot water. But turning in the right at the same time (to mix hot and cold), the pressure guess funky, weird noises clank, and very soon there are sounds of spraying outside, like there’s a leak somewhere. Turn off the right knob, and it stops –so I did.

But the left knob by itself is just enough pressure to be disappointed, not really to shower. So I gave up, and got to work on other things, like analysing tone.

Later I noticed that there was no plumbing to a tank on the roof, as I had expected, so the left knob was coming from the attic, not a solar tank on the roof. If that was the case, then the hose spilling water in the ground should be the overflow for that tank.

So…. <drumroll\> if the right knob was causing overflow of the attic tank, then it should be that the left knob wasn’t hot, but rather attic water, and the right knob was city water.

This kind of system is important where water is scarce, and where city water cuts off a lot. That is, use the right (city water) knob most of the time, and when it doen’t work, turn it off and use the left (attic water) knob. Then when city water comes back on, open both knobs and fill the tank in the attic (just until you hear the overflow spilling out the window).

So once I figured out that normal usage was just using the right knob, I got decent pressure. Heat would have been nice, but it’s hot enough here that cold water wasn’t really a problem. And it was nice to finally figure out how to shower. 🤪