Basic monkey knowledge

We had a very productive day today. We have all the terminology fixed for the Bible stories and have started a bit on Mark, somewhat ahead of schedule. I spent the whole morning with Sarah going over unclear terms. She has the number for a lesser chief in Sepopa (in the Okavango Delta) who spends all day at the kgotla and has made his cellphone number available for consultation in the Bible translation process. May I take a moment, please, to point out how incredibly cool that is (there – it’s done). Anyhow, she spent a lot of time with him on the phone today, asking about various words. Here are some of my favorites, given as word pictures:

tiirwa - Monkeys like to come into your house. They will come in through any window that is open just enough for them to fit through. If you have something that a monkey can see on the shelf that he wants, he’ll just come through the window and take it. So, you take a piece of wire and make a circle and hang it in the window so that, if the monkey tries to come through the window to get that thing on the shelf, you will get him. In this scenario, the monkey is tiirwa. (used in Mark 1:13, reminds me of James 1:13-14)

We’re currently having a dickens of a time checking the Shiyeyi phrase in Mark 1:4 for baptisma metanoias eis aphesin amartiohn, a.k.a. ‘baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins’. It is currently rendered in Shiyeyi as inwengiso ye yi ku ldiikha shi ku patirwa zibi. Roughly back-translated, that means ‘baptism for the purpose/location of repentance related to sins being forgiven’. The phrase ‘Related to’ here has the sense of ‘having something to do with the concept that precedes it in an unspecified way’. It could mean that the ‘sins being forgiven’ is either the purpose or essence of the ‘baptism for repentance’. This would be a nice map for the ‘eis + ACCUSATIVE’ construction present in this phrase which can substitute for a predicate nominative (Wallace, p47). That means that the first thing in the pairing becomes or is essentially the same as the second thing. It could mean that the ‘baptism of repentance’ happens because of or by means of the ‘sins being forgiven’. Basically, though, I think the important thing is that the meaning of shi is as inclusive as the Greek term eis. I like that.

Sticking you with the rent

This morning was tons of fun. We were going over all the stories and working out the finer points, differentiating different words semantically where we could, adding onfirmation where necessary for clarity, cutting things that didn’t add to the stories, etc.

Cool Shiyeyi word of the day: ikhiamina – “stick with the rent”

OK, that’s not the actual meaning. I’d be hard pressed to put it in the dictionary as follows but here is the conversation that clarified the meaning for me:

ME: What does it mean for someone to ikhiamina?

SARAH: It’s like if you and I were living together. We were always together and then, one day, I move to Maun [geograpical note: at least a full day’s drive away]. I don’t tell you that I’m going, I don’t call you with an address, nothing. I can’t be any help to you now. Finally, you call me and say, “Why did you ‘ikhiamina’ me?” You see?

ME: And did I leave without leaving you any money for my share of the rent?

SARAH: [laughing] Exactly.

It’s the word we’re using in the Bible Story “Jesus is crucified”, in the part taken from Matthew 27:46.

On being "yaramuned"

Cool Shiyeyi word of the day: yaramuna – turn upside down (literally), to answer in a way that ends the discussion (figuratively)

‘Yaramuna’ shows up several times in these translated Bible stories. Today’s example is when Pilate writes ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ on a sign on the cross. When the Jewish leaders ask him to rewrite it, Pilate ‘yaramunas’ them by saying, “What I have written, I have written.” In today’s parlance, if you heard someone being ‘yaramuned’, you would make a hand gesture (flicking the hand sideways at the wrist at head-level) and say, “Snap! DE-nied!”

You have to admit that the Shiyeyi language totally rocks.

There have also been some amazing birds outside my window all afternoon. Every time I have looked up upon seeing movement out there out of the corner of my eye, I have seen a totally different bird from what was out there a minute before. I told Rob and he got the camera for me. Therefore, I haven’t seen a bird out there since he brought me the camera. [sigh] Ah well. If I were taking crazy bird pictures, I wouldn’t be getting much work done, I suppose.

Eating money

There are some fabulous turns of phrase in Shiyeyi that just tickle me when I see them being used for biblical stories:

From ‘The Prodigal Son’:
- Kopaa ka ldi maropa ake koongo, shi idze ngaho. (There, he ate all his money, with only happiness.)

- Ta kati dzera zilduwa za wangiri umoyo. (His heart needed pig’s food.) I like the way this reflects the Greek word used for how he felt about the pig food, usually translated throughout the New Testament as ‘lusted’. In the NASB (like the NRSV), it says ‘And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating’. Loses a bit of punch there, does it not? Other English translations include ‘longed’ (NIV,NET), ‘wished’ (Good News), and ‘would fain have’ (KJV). The King James is my favorite translation of this word here as, for me, it at least conjures up swooning maidens and stampeding knights. I’d use a modern word, I think: feen. ‘He was feening to get hooked up with the carob pods that the pigs were eating.’ Feening, in case this is a new word to you (as it was to me when I first heard it in 1997), is the kind of longing that comes from dependency, such as accompanies a cocaine addiction. Coke addicts feen for coke.

Larger than life

I literally don’t have enough working hours in the day to figure out this language before starting to exegete Mark in a couple of weeks. Today’s task is to take a stab at various uniquenesses of Shiyeyi syntax, find out what are orthography deviations and what are genuine new words. That’s a complication that I underestimated in my exegetical plan: spelling corrections. The stories were done pre-orthography finalization. The thing is, a ‘word’ like akyanii may not just be a combination of akya and nii. It may be a whole new thing. Like short cut and shortcut or bad mitten and badminton (thanks, Rich and Abson). That’s what I need to determine for each word that I don’t understand… which is 90% of the words. I really am jumping in midstream here. Ah well. All I can do is what I can do before my time runs out. And, while the term indicated by time runs out is still very much in flux, I can only hope that the Wayeyi will not be horribly disappointed at my lack of speed in task accomplishment.