The hook brings you back

If you would like to hear this article read aloud, click on Captain Hook. Arrr!

Icebreakers, like kale, are initially repulsive but ultimately end up doing something good for you. I once was begrudgingly involved in one where each person in the group (who knew nothing about each other) had to secretly write a fact about themselves on a slip of paper and then put it in a box. Then one fact would be drawn at a time and read to the group and then everyone would come to a consensus to correctly match each person with their fact.

The strategy all comes down to what fact you present about yourself to stump the others.  Usually everyone has something about them that breaks the mold.  A good strategy is to write something like that.  Like if you are a petite fashion-conscious female who can field dress a deer…then that’s what you want to put on your card.  Or if you’re a large bearded male with neck tattoos who winds down after a tough day by cross stitching Precious Moments babies….then you know what to write.

The strategies can go deeper.  Do you try the bluff method as described above?  Or do you, like a Sicilian with death on the line, decide whether to double or triple bluff?  The plot was thickening.  I’ll admit, I was no longer a begrudging participant at this point.

I ultimately decided on something unusual, something they could guess if they knew I was a missionary.  But since I look like a normal chubby American guy (and that I forgot my sun helmet in the car) I went full-Monty missionary.  I wrote,

“I once helped create a spelling rule in which African tribal leaders rejoiced.”

Now, in the end I was successful, no one had any idea who to choose and ended up blindly guessing wrong. 

There was unfortunately no time to explain properly when I inevitably had to reveal myself and some people wanted more information.

So, what they never got… I give to you.  And this is, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.”

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While I disagree with the adage, “Everything’s political.”, any problem that involves human interaction tends to involve politics.

And it’s no exception when a minority language community teams up with linguists to create a writing system for their language.

First of all, minority language communities tend to want a writing system that looks and acts like their national language.  This makes good sense as it is hard enough for people to learn one writing system in school, much more two! French is the official language in CAR where the Bhogoto live.  In turn, Bhogoto kids are taught exclusively to read and write in French in their local schools.  So, if people want to go further and learn to read and write in their language Bhogoto, it would be great if they have a writing system that is like French to smooth the transition.

Linguists usually, trained in phonology, (a course I’m currently teaching students at Dallas International University) desire to have the writing system perfectly reflect the sound system of the minority language.

Herein lies the conflict.  Good writing systems should reflect the way a language works.

But if you try to force one language’s writing system on another then it quickly gets wonky.  It’s the proverbial square peg in a round hole.  For example, one language has more consonants or vowels than the other.  Sometimes they’re different kinds of consonant and vowels, etc.  If you, with brute force, try to make it fit, you can have a writing system that, on the surface looks like French, but in the end is a system that is very difficult (or in some case impossible) to read for the minority language.

Politics…

But sometimes, the tables are turned, and the linguist finds a solution that perfectly fits the desires of both groups.

This is one of those cases.

Gettin’ all Nasal

Our problem revolved around what is called nasal vowels and how to represent them in the Bhogoto writing system.

Bhogoto, like French, has what is called contrastive nasal vowels. That is just a fancy way of saying that Bhogoto’s vowel system has nasalized vowels that make a difference in meaning between words.  Because of this, it is important to somehow mark the difference between nasal and oral vowels. To show this difference look at the two Bhogoto words below, the only way that these two vowels are different is that one is oral and one is nasalized. Check out the video below to hear them pronounced.

gara - "hangar" (oral vowels)

ga̧ra̧ - "sardine" (nasal vowels)

You can see that each of the nasalized vowels in the word ga̧ra̧ have two little hooks underneath the ‘a’s. These hooks (called cédilles in French) are the way nasalized vowels are written in Bhogoto.  While this is not the way that French marks their nasal vowels (as their way of doing that didn’t work well with the Bhogoto sound system) the little hooks are a part of the French writing system and look French. Initially this seems like a great solution, the linguist gets nasalized vowels marked and the Bhogoto community gets something that looks French!  Win-win, right?

Well...yes and no.

The hook appears rarely in French, nasalized vowels in Bhogoto, however, occur very frequently in Bhogoto.  And once you write out a text in Bhogoto, it looks as if the cédille monster sneezed all over the page. The text is littered with hooks.

Now we have a problem, a problem that wasn’t initially voiced once the community saw their writing system in translated Biblical texts…namely….it looked funny.

Yep, it looked really weird. One translator said, “It looks like someone who isn’t educated wrote out our language.”  They didn’t like it.

Now, you need to really understand, while the Bhogoto people are proud of their language, the written form of it is just getting started.  To have a bad initial showing is not helping the momentum of people accepting it.  If people think their writing system looks weird or silly, then they are much less likely to use it.  And since the Bible is the main book that the community wants to interact with, then that’s not good news.

Sometimes what holds entire peoples back from reading the Scriptures are things like this, problems that have linguistic solutions.  Problems that aren't (for a host of cultural reasons) often expressed outwardly in the community.

The team and the community leaders assumed that the plethora of hooks was just a tough pill they had to swallow.  So, they went ahead and marked every nasal vowel that appeared in every word.

A little while later, during one of our linguistic workshops where we were looking at revamping the writing systems, the issue of marking nasal vowels came up with the Bhogoto translation team.

Now, since the initial design of the orthography, one of the linguists had done a thorough study of the phonology of Bhogoto. Phonology is the study of sound systems in languages, its main application is creating writing systems.

In her study she observed and found in previous research a cool phenomenon in Bhogoto that came and saved the day.

It’s called nasal vowel harmony.

Bhogoto, it turns out, has nasal vowel harmony phenomena in its sound system.

It’s a pretty simple idea.  Sounds in a language, like people, tend to influence each other.  As far as people, in the book of Proverbs, God warns us not to hang around angry people because if you do then you start to become an angry person.

Sounds are very much the same.  One sound, if put in a certain environment, can share its characteristics with the sounds around it.

In Bhogoto, if you have one nasal vowel in the word, it makes all of the other vowels in the word nasal.  All the other vowels ‘harmonize’ the nasal characteristic within that word. There’s not a word in Bhogoto where oral and nasal vowels coexist.

So, as far as the writing system goes, if in a word, one of the vowels are marked nasal, then it is technically redundant to write the other vowels in that same word as nasal.  So if we made a spelling rule to just mark the first one as nasal and the rest can be assumed to be nasal and not put the hook on them.  

So, ga̧ra̧ could be written with one less hook like this... ga̧ra.

After talking with the team about it, they thought it was a good idea, so we tested out this spelling rule.

And that rule got rid of a ton of hooks!

After a statistical analysis, it reduced the number of hooks by 40%.

But, of course, the proof is in the pudding. What would the translators and community think how it looked?

The translators gasped when they saw a side by side comparison of a text without the new spelling rule and the same one with the new spelling rule.  They said, “That looks SO much better!”

We found out later that the Bhogoto language committee thought the exact same thing, approved the new spelling rule, and further told us that they were glad for the linguists’ advice and encouraged us to tell them of any other ideas we had.

A community satisfied with how their precious language looks on the page...that's amazing.

Removing a stumbling block for people to read of how God reigns in redemptive love… that's priceless.

I’m currently helping teach a group of students phonology at Dallas International University.

Our vision, before we return to Central Africa, is to multiply these kinds of breakthrough moments in Bible translation projects through the students I train who will be working in some of the most challenging places in the world. We’re thankful to be part of this work in the meantime, and we’re deeply thankful for your prayers and support that make it happen.