Questions within questions

In Isaiah 45:9 we find the following questions:

"Does the clay say to the potter,
‘What are you making?’
Does your work say,
‘He has no hands’?"
(Isaiah 45:9, NIV 1984)

If you think about it, the first two lines of this contains a question within a question. In English, when we see the inversion of the subject and the verb, ie. "Does the clay" rather than "The clay does", we know that this is not an affirmative but an interrogative clause. The use of the question word 'What', plus the question mark at the end of the text inside the inverted commas, shows us that the reported speech within is also a question. The text is asking if the clay can (metaphorically speaking) ask a certain question.

As regards the second set of two lines, the question mark is outside the inverted commas, signalling that the reported speech is a statement (in this case an insult to the craftsman's ability). Thus only the entire clause, beginning with the subject-verb inversion and ending in the question mark, is a question (namely, whether the work would insult its maker's skill).

To make things more complicated, these are rhetorical questions which assume the answer is clear, that is to say that of course the clay won't question its maker (and the human shouldn't question his or her maker) and the work won't insult its maker's skill (and how much less should the human).

In Monkolé things just get even more complicated. Our writing system has been simplified, meaning that we don't have quotation marks, making it more difficult to recognise where direct speech ends (the beginning is marked with a reported speech marker like "he said", followed by a comma). Questions are recognised either by question words (like "who", "how", "what" in English), and if this is the case then we don't put a question mark. Affirmative sentences that are to be read as interogative sentences, where there is therefore no question word, end with a question mark.

So in our first draft we had:

Amà á yɔkɔ ku bee woo ma caka ku ni,
mii ì waa ce?
Amàu á yɔkɔ ku sɔ̃ɔ ku ni,
icɛi awɔɛ kù sĩa?

Literally:

Clay it can ask the potter to say, what you are doing [question marker]
The clay it can say to him to say, the work of your hand not good [question marker]

The difficulty is to know which part of the sentence the question marker affects. Someone who is good at Monkolé grammar would know that in the first clause, the question word shows that the reported speech must be a question, and that therefore the question marker must apply to the entire clause. But this is a subtlety unlikely to be picked up by a non-expert reader. In the second clause, it isn't clear whether the question marker should apply to the entire clause or to the relative clause.

Added to this, my colleagues tell me that direct speech is rare in Monkolé ("he said that x" being more common than "he said 'x'").

Are you confused by now? We certainly had to discuss this for a long time before feeling we understood and could find a solution. Our final solution was to erase the rhetorical questions and put negative affirmations with indirect speech. So the questions go from:

Clay it can ask the potter to say, what you are doing [question marker]

to:

Clay can't ask the potter saying what is he doing.

And from:

The clay it can say to him to say, the work of your hand not good [question marker]

to:

It can't say to him to say that the work of his hand not good.

Believe me, it makes more sense in Monkolé than the literal translation seems to in English! It is a shame to lose the rhetorical questions, but the more we turned them round, the more we realised that it was just going to be too complicated to try to keep them.

But if you ever wonder why it can take so long to translate the Bible, this might give you an idea of how long it can take just to discuss the best way to render one verse … and even when the meaning of the original text is fairly clear!

and ... and ... and ...

In the coming eighteen months, our family will be making two international moves, and travelling I-don't-know how many hundreds (thousands?) of miles to visit family, friends and churches during our Home Assignment.

Lists are my friends.

I have lots of lists. And they are wonderful. I read a productivity book recently (« How to be a Productivity Ninja ») and it talked about tools such as lists being like a second brain, freeing up your first brain from the effort of remembering things to give it more potential to do other work. Lists reassure me. With so many lists, and so much to remember, there is no way that my brain would remember it all at the right times. But as I add to my lists, sometimes over many months, I feel like a collector adding precious items to her collection.

Just a few of my current lists :

A shopping list for our trip to Parakou in March
A shopping list for our trip to Cotonou in April
A list of things to take when we travel in-country
A list of things to do on a fast internet connection when we travel
A list of clothes we have here which we want to take with us on our Home Assignment in July
A list of clothes I have already bought on ebay for the family (stored at my parents' for the moment)
A list of work for my translation team to work on during my absence
A list of books to read and films to watch
A list of Lego kits our kids already have

And now look, I even have a list of lists!  :-)

truly tri-lingual?

The title of my blog refers to the fact that I use 3 languages on a daily basis. The « try » refers to the fact that I haven't yet quite mastered Monkolé to the level I'd like to! (In fact I read Hebrew too for my work, but the play on words works better if I just count the three I speak!)

Eve, our 2 year old, has grown up with 3 languages around her. In the family we speak both French and English (but we all know who speaks which language to whom), and every weekday morning since the age of 3 months, Eve has been looked after by Hélène, our pastor's wife, who only speaks Monkolé to her. She quite clearly understands a lot in all three languages.

It is perhaps the effort of absorbing all three languages which has meant she has started to speak later than our boys did, or later than her cousins who are the same age as her have done. She has a very expressive face, and invented her own kind of sign language for the things she wanted to communicate, which meant that her lack of verbal communication wasn't much of a handicap to her. And she has been anything but silent – she does lots of singing in her own made-up language, and her games are punctuated by plenty of sound effects.

Then in the last couple of months the words started coming. Mainly in English, probably because Simon, Benjy and I all speak English to her, and she spends the most time with us. But she also has several French words and a few Monkolé words. She quickly worked out that being able to say goodbye to people in Monkolé made them very happy! (The 'hello' greetings are more complicated.)

She may not speak much, but when she does she often manages to hit just the right comic timing. As she disappeared out of the back door after tea this evening I said, "Er, where are you going?" and she missed a beat, eyes wide, before smiling and saying, "Bye-bye!", then closing the door decisively behind her.

oh, the joys of advancing technology?

Mid-January, Marc was told by our phone/internet provider that our nearest town, Kandi, would soon be connected to the 3G connection. He asked whether the signal would reach our village, and was told not. We weren't particularly surprised, but thought we would at least be able to go to Kandi if we needed to use a fast connection.

However, at the end of last week our 2G connection suddenly went weird. It kept cutting out, and another signal was being picked up, but not well enough to connect with. We figured out after a while that the 3G signal from Kandi was obviously just reaching us, so weakly that we couldn't connect to it, but it was messing up the 2G connection.

For several days we struggled to keep our anti-viruses up-to-date and to get our emails with a connection which was non-existent most of the time, and rarely lasted more than 5 minutes. I was worried about how Simon was going to be able to follow his on-line Spanish course if this continued. Finally Marc had a good look at the set-up of our dongle and discovered that it was possible to stop it from picking up the 3G connection. Finally we are back to "normal".

Honestly, I'm satisfied with the connection we have. It is better than it used to be, meaning that apart from some image-heavy sites, we can surf the internet well, if slowly. We can't watch videos, but I suspect that they would be more a source of time-wasting temptation than a help. It's a nice change to have 3G when we are staying in Parakou or Cotonou (and if we really need it we can always take our computers to Kandi now!) but I don't think we really need it at home.

Simon working on his Spanish: