The Â, B, ŋ’s Of Nabak
October 28, 2018 9:09 pm Leave your thoughts
Have you ever wondered how a spoken language is turned into text? It all starts by listening. Linguistics, the study of language, involving an analysis of form, meaning and, most importantly in context, is how it begins.
In the Rotoka’s language of Papua New Guinea, there are 12 letters in the alphabet (a, e, g, i, k, o, p, r, s, t, u, v), the fewest of any language in the world. Cambodia’s official language, Khmer, has 74 letters in its alphabet, the largest number of any in the world.
When my husband and I first went to PNG, we needed to develop a written language for the Nabak people because theirs was an oral language. In order to develop a written form of Nabak, we first needed to listen carefully to the Nabak spoken words and put together an alphabet based on the sounds they used. As you know, our English alphabet contains 26 letters; 5 vowels and 21 consonants. In Nabak, 6 vowels (a, â, e, i, o, u) and 16 consonants (b, d, g, gw, k, kw, l, m, n, ŋ, p, s, t, w, y, z) make up their alphabet.
Nabak vowel pronunciations are much like Spanish; e [eh], i [ee], o [oh], u [oo], with the added â used to sound [aw]. The a is pronounced similar to a short English a[ah]. In the consonants, gw sound is [gwa], kw sound is [kwa], and ŋ is [ng]. Of course this is oversimplified since the sounds are often modified in different situations, such as if they are at the beginning or end of the word.
Once we had created the alphabet for Nabak, we began putting the words together phonetically based once again on listening to native Nabak speakers. In addition to creating these words, we put a pronunciation, along with a reference to an English word and definition, on paper, to use as our translation guide.
Assembling the alphabet was just the first step on a long journey for us, but in the end the work we did resulted in the New Testament being handed to the Nabak people. The joy that was exhibited by them during the dedication ceremony was payment in full for the work we did, and the sacrifices we made, doing God’s work.