Last year a fellow consultant asked the best way to use the store of glosses created by Paratext’s Interlinearizer feature. This is my answer: glossy. Not a real dictionary, but a helpful alternative view. Feedback welcome.
Five videos giving the essentials of using WeSay (for preparatory word collection in Nigeria).
A Heart
It never ceases to amuse and intrigue me how figurative language and idioms vary wildly and dangerously between languages. I say dangerously because the unwary can be very easily deceived by the ‘literal’ or ‘word for word’ meaning. Apparently in Mark 6, Herodias ‘kept/held John in her heart’. But in Nyankpa idiom we verified that means she nursed a grudge against him.
Right at the end of Mark 6 we hear that the disciples were amazed at Jesus walking on water because they hadn’t learned anything from him feeding 5000 hungry guys. Instead their hearts were hard. Continue reading
OK, I’m not Ugandan in any political sense – and probably to be honest only sentimentally – but still it’s one of the countries I’m probably proudest of. I came across this which fanned those flames again:
In the minds and affections of the home Church in modern days the place of Uganda has been unrivalled. Continue reading
I think it’s fair to generalise that Nigerians are much more likely to strike up conversation than British people and are into somewhat robust jocularity. Rebekah unfortunately doesn’t always quite understand that some rather direct an ludicrous request (such as “Will you dash (=give) me your skirt to wear?”) is actually playful nonsense. Anyway, sometimes if she isn’t completely overwhelmed, her responses are rather interesting. She was out shopping today with me and a friendly worker said “Are you Nigerian?” She thought about it for a while and eventually decided that she was, or at least she would be soon when she had growed up a little. Continue reading
Many of you will have heard about the attack on a church in Jos early yesterday morning. We and all friends are completely fine. We had good advice from our leadership in the group from soon after the attack and just stayed at home. Reasonably high security around the city has been stepped up but life mostly continues as normal for us. Do pray for those affected and thank God for his mercy in protecting people despite the schemes of evil men.
Here’s our group’s official statement:
Around 7:30 a.m. local time on Sunday morning (26 February), a suicide car bomber approached and detonated a bomb outside of a large church in Jos. Initial reports vary, but it appears as though at least five people were killed with others being injured. This attack was then followed by shooting and burning elsewhere around the city in retaliation for the bombing. There are no reports of any Nigeria Group staff that were directly involved in any of the morning’s violence, though most if not all of us have friends or acquaintances who might have been.
Please pray for the situation here, and following are a few thoughts to guide those prayers:
· Please pray for those who have been affected by the attack—whether it be through injury, death or fear.
· Please pray for the security forces as they handle the situation and the complex challenges that arise from such an incident.
· Please pray for the people of Jos. Jos has a history of tension which can flare up easily. Please pray for calm and restraint in times like this.
· Please pray for us – and our friends and colleagues living in Nigeria – as incidents like this can cause anxiety and fear. Please pray that the Lord would use us in ways that will promote peace and bring about His message of salvation.
We appreciate your prayers.
There are some tasks that the WeSay Configuration Tool doesn’t let you configure directly. But you can write your own quite easily (as someone else has discovered) since the XML configuration file format has quite a lot of scope for extension using just Notepad or another text editor. Here we show how to do this and give some sample tasks that you can copy and paste into your configuration files to fine-tune data collection. Continue reading
Here’s a disclaimer:
I first came to Nigeria in 2001 on a short term trip to help people finish off a dictionary as part of a Bible translation project. I thought that might be the last of my dictionary-making, but even though it’s not really my job now I reluctantly find myself drawn back to it.
Bible translation projects require a good foundation of linguistics to work out a decent writing system and to help writers stay as faithful as possible to the natural grammar of the language whilst staying as faithful as possible to the meaning of the biblical text. Along the way some translators and advisors collect words into a dictionary. Most are never completed, never published. Some Bible translators eventually get round to working on a dictionary after the Bible has been published. Well surely that priority is right for a Bible translator, isn’t it? Yes and no, but mostly no, I reply. Continue reading
There is a fantastic program called WeSay for facilitating dictionary development. It’s particularly aimed at helping people gather and describe words in their own language even without strong computer experience or traditional linguistic training. It doesn’t replace analysis tools like FieldWorks, but presents a complementary approach and is interoperable. Where Fieldworks lets you document a word at a time completely, or organise lists of all your entries in whatever way you like for analysis, WeSay concentrates on doing one kind of task at a time, whether gathering words, adding meanings, adding example sentences, etc. One particularly exciting feature is that as many computers as you want can work on the same database and merge changes together. This – combined with the fact it has the Semantic Domains/DDP4 list of questions built-in – makes WeSay the best way of facilitating Rapid Word Collection, by far. Continue reading
Executive summary:
‘Literal’ is a darling word for many, attractive because it suggests straightforward, direct and reliable communication. However, the fact is that it gets used to mean quite a few different things by different people and if subjected to sufficiently intense scrutiny the assurances it offers are shown to be meaningless. While carrying emotive power it lacks utility making it as dangerous as counterfeit medicine.
Is that controversial? Well I think it’s not only true but fairly obvious, and in a while I’ll explain and I’ll also go into some of the implications. Watch this post.