Standardizing relativization in Dinka (and other languages?)

[Mike Cahill]

Hi John,

Two issues here: how Dinkas do relative clauses, and the apparent difficulty in reading them. 

The first line of investigation I'd take is looking at natural texts in Dinka, and how relative clauses are naturally used. It may be that the translators didn't use the most appropriate form of relative clause for a particular context, and that in itself would reduce reading fluency - the reader is hit with an unexpected way of expressing things. I'd also note that different genres of texts may have quite different types of expected relative clauses. Narratives and hortatory texts should be examined separately, as a minimum. Unfortunately, to get a reasonable answer on this is going to take a fair amount of work.

For your specific example, "disciple" is one of those terms that often doesn't have a one-word equivalent in a local language. Does it in Dinka? It sounds like it may not. If not, then the translator needs to unpack the meaning, and unfortunately for your frustration level, it may be that the most natural way to express the concept is with a relative clause. Maybe; I don't know Dinka!

I'd be VERY leery of advocating a single "standardized efficient" way of presenting relative clauses, or any other syntactic or discourse structure. It's likely to distort the language's natural patterns. Variation is usually there for a reason, even if native speakers can't articulate what that might be (as most English speakers can't either).

Mike Cahill


-----Original Message-----
From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of john at research.haifa.ac.il
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2011 3:59 AM
To: Richard Hudson
Cc: funknet
Subject: [FUNKNET] Standardizing relativization in Dinka (and other languages?)

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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