Category: News

The Rowbory/Nigeria Family Blog

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Folk Linguistics: How many tenses does English have?

How do we know how many tenses English has? Well, we’ve been taught it. What were you taught? I think normally the basic answer is past, present and future: “I came; I come; I will come.” Then someone (probably someone who did some Latin) will chime in with perfect or pluperfect: “I have come; I had …

Accordance Bible Software Updates may use up GBs of unnecessary space

Sometimes storage space just seems to disappear. I just got to the bottom of some unnecessary wasted space on my Mac which I hadn’t encountered before. Accordance Bible software (very useful) uses the Sparkle service for updates. I discovered over 15GB of old versions of the Accordance app and updaters sitting quietly in an invisible …

The Bible in Hausa: Over 100 years of efforts

I recently came across a very interesting review of the history of the Hausa Bible up to the 1979/1980 edition, by history professor Musa Gaiya in 1993. The Hausa Bible of 1980 is a notable publishing event in the history of Bible translation. The author tells the story of the leading personalities responsible for this …

Languages of Wilder Confusion: Wonderful

“The motorbike fell, and my computer was crushed and it was wonderful,” said a Nigerian friend. Now there’s nothing unusual in that statement for a Nigerian, but I think most British folk would be surprised. For Brits and Americans, Wonderful is just another way of saying ‘very good’. But in Nigerian English it means something surprising …

Naboth: A Faithful Farmer in God’s Vineyard

Just under 2 weeks ago we were shocked by the news of a colleague’s sudden death. Naboth Musa was only 23 years old, but had been a tremendous answer to prayer for the venerable Duya Bible Translation project. Most recently I had helped get him and his colleagues set up to record several books of …

Christmas & New Year Update 2017-8

Download a Printable version Sorry about the delay. I was about to send this out the week before Christmas but then — along with half of Jos — I got a bad cold that I’ve only just thrown off, which wiped me out. David. A visit to Ashe land On a Monday in the middle …

Languages of Wider Confusion: Cameliously?

Looking through a thesis for a friend at Kagoro seminary I was stumped by one particular word: ‘cameliously’. The context? “The instrument used in this research was carefully, cameliously designed…” Are you any the wiser? I wasn’t and I consulted various dictionaries and asked friends. No-one had ever heard of the word. Various possibilities were suggested including …

Scripture Listening and Reading Groups

The Scripture Engagement department of SIL Nigeria is involved in an exciting movement that is helping people engage with mother tongue Bible translations! This video introduces Scripture Listening and Reading Groups (SLRGs) and the impact they are having in language communities.

Shoutouts for colleagues…

Colleague Ben has a great blog where he writes rather interesting articles on Bible translation issues sparked by his consulting work. It’s academic in style but very accessible I think. His latest post has some of his own translation of Philippians, and there’s soon going to be something about accuracy in translation. Ben also is something …

Medals per Million

Update: as for 16 August 2016, Data from BBC, rio2016.com and Wikipedia: Rank Country Gold Silver Bronze Total Popula–tion (M) Medals per Million Golds per Million Medals per GDP $m 61 GRN 0 1 0 1 0.1 9.71 0.00 1000.00 36 ARM 1 3 0 4 3.0 1.34 0.33 371.26 40 GEO 1 1 3 …