Dr. Cahill worked in the Koma NT translation in Ghana under GILLBT and later received his Ph.D. in linguistics from The Ohio State University. He served as SIL’s International Linguistics Coordinator for 11 years, and is now SIL’s Orthography Services Coordinator. He has a terrific wife and three wonderful grown children, and enjoys tone and labial-velars.
Not Just Any Tone Marking: Grammatical Tone Marking Makes Scripture Accessible
Abstract
People generally think of tone in a tone language as distinguishing individual words, e.g. Mono áwá ‘diarrhea’ vs. àwà ‘fear.’ This is termed “lexical tone.” But in many languages, tone also distinguishes different grammatical categories. The absence of marking this grammatical tone in the orthography creates ambiguities, such as:
• Jukun verb aspect: “i ya” could mean “we went” or “let’s go!”
• Maasai negation: “Meisisi olabaani te mbaare enye” could mean “Praise the healer for his work” or “Don’t praise the healer for his work”
• Maasai subject vs. object: “Neirorie Daudi Olaitoriani” could mean “David spoke to the Lord” or “The Lord spoke to David”
Words differing by lexical tone can often be distinguished by context; thus in many cases, lexical tone need not be marked in an orthography. However, different grammatical constructions are often impossible to distinguished by context if they are not differentiated by some sort of marking. This means that Bible translations which do not mark grammatical tone have inherent ambiguity, and makes the translation less accessible. Indeed, examples exist where a Bible is not used because the people could not read it, because grammatical tone in particular was not marked.
This presentation reviews the concept of grammatical tone, presents cases where the lack of marking it has prevented people reading the Bible, and presents several methods by which it can be represented.