News from Robin and Elizabeth - Sept. 2019

Elizabeth writes: Hello everyone!

Last week, I and other members of my team attended a conference here in Chiang Mai about developing alphabets for unwritten languages. We heard from linguists who have been doing exactly that in many different countries around the world! Once the alphabet is decided on, we have to think about how we will teach it to the community so they will be able to read their language, so we also heard from literacy workers about the process of teaching a new writing system to a community that’s never had one before. We learned a lot! The presentations really made us think about different aspects of the problem, and sparked a lot of good conversations for our team.

As a result, we’ve begun to plan an alphabet workshop for the Eastern Bui people. We’ll invite important members of the Eastern Bui community — village leaders and teachers, elders, and government officials — and we’ll get their input on how the alphabet should look. Up till now, I’ve been working with Eastern Bui speakers individually to hear their ideas, but at this workshop, we’ll hear from a group, and especially from influential voices in the community. If they like the alphabet, they can convince others to learn it, but if they don’t like it, we will have a harder time convincing everyone else.

This workshop will take a lot of planning, and our team is busy with several things right now — a translation workshop coming up in October, looking for a building we can use, and so on. Then in November, most Eastern Bui people are busy harvesting their rice, so it’s not a good time to hold a meeting. We will probably be ready to hold the workshop by December or January.

In the meantime, I have two jobs. The first is to keep studying Eastern Bui! I know a lot of Eastern Bui words, but I’m far from fluent, and I want to communicate with Eastern Bui people in their own language, not just in Thai. The second is to work on the Eastern Bui dictionary. We have started work on this, but there’s a lot of checking and organizing that will need to be done before it’s ready to publish.

Robin writes:

I’m back to work at the Language Software office in Chiang Mai. Currently I’m working on the Language Forge website, which is a website that helps people put together a dictionary. (We have software for that that you can install on your computer, but the advantage of a website is that you can access it from a smartphone or an Internet café as well, without having to install anything). I’ve fixed quite a few bugs already, but we’re currently having some technical difficulties that are preventing us from updating the website with those bug fixes. Please pray that we’ll solve those technical difficulties soon so that our users can experience a website with fewer bugs.