The law is the law ... except when it's the laws

There aren't many words for "law" in Monkolé. The one I've heard most often is "wooda". It seems that it originally came from English ("order"), passed into Hausa and presumably from there into Monkolé. (A slightly awkward reminder of the colonial past.)

There are, however, many different words for law in Hebrew, and in some verses you can even find up to four of them used in one sentence :

"because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes and my laws." (Genesis 26:5, ESV)

Our consultant asked us to do a word study of the different words used in Hebrew (he suggested 8 of them) to decide which Monkolé words had the closest meanings. Of course, this abstract study then has to be applied taking context into account (there is no such thing as a literal translation).

We made one helpful discovery as a side effect of this work. For instance, in the Psalms, particularly Psalm 119, "the Law of the Lord" is often mentioned. This had been translated with a singular noun in Monkolé … but of course in English (or French or Hebrew) it is a collective noun. When I asked my team whether the collective use existed in Monkolé – ie. using "the law" to refer to a collection of many laws – we realised that it doesn't. So while the actual word was a good translation, we needed to make it plural where it was being used as a collective noun.