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!