Philémon and I were talking about language change this morning. At the moment he and Pastor Samuel are going out regularly to test the comprehension of parts of our translation in other Monkolé villages. Philémon was explaining that in one village they didn't know several of the words used in the translation, and the explanation that these villagers gave was, "It's not Monkolé, it must be Hausa."
Philémon was saying that these words might have originally come from Hausa, but such a long time ago that he wasn't sure it could be said that they aren't now Monkolé words. This is the difficulty with a language evolving differently in different localities – and these villages aren't even all that far apart as the crow flies! I told him about how some European languages were taken over to the Americas and have now evolved so that, for example, you can have a German dialect which is very different from the German now spoken in Germany (which has also changed a lot over time). He said that obviously true German is the German spoken in Germany, which made me laugh because as I told him, I sometimes tell Americans or Canadians that I speak "true" English because I am English … but I only say it as a joke!
The question for our translation is how strict we want to be about this. How long does a word have to be in a language before it can be considered to belong to that language? Or should we simply decide that if there is a more truly Monkolé word which means the same, that is the word we should use, and that we should only use borrowed words if there is no equivalent Monkolé word? But then what if the borrowed word is the one everyone uses?
