Writing down languages for the first time

Here in Mpanda, we've just had a workshop to create our first experimental rules for writing down the Bende and Pimbwe languages. I (Olly) was working with the Bende language.

This is the first workshop that I have been involved with since starting work in the office. We invited four participants from each language to attend the workshop and got started after a short delay on the 28th of August. The workshop took place at our office here in Mpanda, with a mixture of teaching the participants about features that might occur in their languages and then investigating their languages to look for them.

 To this end, one of the main activities of the workshop was sorting through cards with Bende words on them looking for various features. For example, on one of the days we separated the cards according to the first consonant in the root (the root is the part of a word that is the same for different forms of the word, for example, in Bende muhiighi means 'hunter' and bhahiighi means 'hunters', the root is hiighi). This activity helps you work out all the consonants in the language which, along with other steps, is the foundation for making a good alphabet.

As well as looking at things like consonants, vowels and vowel length, a significant feature in Bende is tone. We started looking at this in the second week of the workshop. In many Bantu languages like Bende, the pitch of the syllables in a word can be significant for the meaning so it is important to investigate these tonal features.  We had already found before the workshop words like ikala with two different meanings: 'ember' or 'mongoose' depending on the tone. What we needed to find out was how many different tone patterns there are for different length words and how often this can lead to ambiguity. We discovered quite a number of words where the tone changed the meaning and so we decided to write this difference, we decided to write 'ember' as ikala and 'mongoose' as ikāla (and other words with the same tone pattern similarly).

The other main area we looked at was word break issues. Bantu languages typically modify words by sticking on prefixes or suffixes and it's important to work out which of these are part of the word they are joining to and which are separate words (or somewhere in between). For example, ighōgho means 'log', if you want to say 'on the log' it sounds like 'kwighogho'. During the workshop we discovered that this is formed by adding 'ku' to the start of the word and also that it didn't become fully part of the word so we decided to write 'ku-ighōgho '.

Bende alphabet chart

Needless to say, a lot of these decisions will have to be tested more widely and more Bende people consulted than the four who attended the workshop. However, it was really exciting to be able to produce an experimental alphabet for the Bende language and use it to write down a story and some proverbs from their culture - the first step on the road to Bible translation!