Munn Monthly - March 2021

Elizabeth writes:

Two new team members

We have two new members on the Eastern Bui team this year! Opel and Nat are members of Wycliffe Thailand. They had planned to start a project in a nearby country this year, but due to COVID travel restrictions, they’ve been stuck in Thailand. So in the meantime, they’ll spend a year helping us! Opel and Nat are trained in literacy and Scripture engagement - making sure that people know how to read and benefit from the translation work we do. They’ll be helping us produce more books and find new ways to get people reading the Bible.

Resource development workshop

Churches and schools need a lot of materials in order to teach people: songs, books, art, curricula... and so many different kinds! We need songs about Jesus and songs about the alphabet, Sunday school songs for kids and hymns for adults. We need Bible story books, nonfiction and fiction story books, and even poems. Many of these can be translated from English - but it’s even better if they’re written originally in Eastern Bui.

Reading is a great way to learn about the world, to see and understand things we’ve never experienced. But literacy is not just a way to learn about the world outside. It’s also a way for people to preserve, celebrate, and pass on their own culture. And if they use their literacy skills to read and write about things that matter to them, they’ll be excited about it and they’ll want to share it with their whole community. If the Eastern Bui people get involved with writing books and songs, they’ll have ownership of the process, and they’ll be able to focus on things they care about. A book about going to the forest to cut bamboo, or pounding rice, speaks to their life experience. Books of local folktales that everyone knows are great for reading practice too!

That’s why, in April, the Eastern Bui team will have a resource development workshop, and invite lots of Eastern Bui speakers - mostly teachers - to participate. This workshop will be focused on creating these materials in Eastern Bui - brainstorming ideas for stories, songs, and art that can be used in teaching kids to read. We hope not only to create resources for learning, but also to get the participants invested in the process and excited about what we’re doing. Please pray that lots of people attend, and that they’ll be motivated to write their own stories and songs!

Last month I told you about the Bloom software that helps people put together books in their own language. The resource development workshop will be using Bloom, among other software tools, to create many of the materials they will be working on.

This month, I’m going to write about ComparaLex. ComparaLex is a website where people can submit word lists and audio recordings in various languages. Having word lists of the same words in various languages is extremely useful for linguistic analysis, and it can help with deciding how many different Bible translations are needed in a region. If you listen to a list of words spoken by an American English speaker, and then a list of the same words spoken by a British English speaker, you’d conclude that these two varieties are quite similar and probably could use the same Bible translation. But if you compared an American English wordlist with a Dutch wordlist, you’d probably conclude that, even though these two are related languages, they’re different enough that they’ll need separate Bible translations.

Comparing wordlists like this can also be helpful for linguistic researchers who want to know the history of a language group. By comparing which words sound similar and which sound different, linguists can figure out when different language groups split up, and when they came into contact with each other. For example, if you listen to wordlists from English, German, and French, you’d find that the English words for animals sound a lot like the German words. English has “cow”, German has “Kuh”; English has “sheep”, German has “Schaf”; English “calf”, German “Kalb”, and so on. But English words for different meats don’t sound like German - they sound a lot more like French. English has “beef”, French “boeuf”; English “mutton”, French “mouton”; English “veal”, French “veau”, and so on. Why do we use German-sounding words for animals, but French-sounding words for meat? Even if we didn’t know the history of the Normans and Saxons in England, this would be a clue to the history of the English language. And in many parts of the world where there are few written records, these linguistic patterns are an important way for us to learn the history of a language group. ComparaLex is an invaluable tool to help us find these patterns.