Standardizing relativization in Dinka (and other languages?)

[john at research.haifa.ac.il]

Dear Funknetters,
I'm currently working with some Dinka speakers one how their orthography and
writing system in general might be improved (the present system is clearly
inadequate--even native speakers who wrote one of the Bible translations
can't read their own translation at all fluently). There are many problems, but
one of them seems to be that there is no standardized efficient way to make
relative clauses--there seem to a wide variety of ad-hoc tactics which can
be understood correctly but only with a lot of work. Some relative clauses are
formally identical to sentences while others use morphemes which have a wide
variety of other functions (articles, demonstratives, the 'be' verb, personal 
pronouns, and prepositions). I know that 'that' can introduce relative clauses
and also be a demonstrative adjective and a demonstrative pronoun but this is
much much worse. The problem is even more serious because they use relatively
few nominalizations but instead use something which  looks like a relative
clause (e.g. 'Jesus' disciples' is translated every time as if it were 'the men
who were following Jesus'). I'm even finding that when I'm reading myself I
mostly identify relative clauses by the head noun which often literally means
'person' or 'thing'--for example, 'raan' and 'mony' in principle are both
translated as 'person', but 'raan' is very often associated with something
which would translate as a relative clause while 'mony' isn't. I don't really
know what to do with this. I'm thinking of suggesting to them that some
standardized ways to make relatives have to be chosen and stuck to. Do any of
you have experience with anything like this?
Thanks,
John



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