Academic Events

A celebration of Steve Nicolle’s promotion to full Professor. Steve gave an inaugural lecture, preceded by a short program. A high tea was provided. The event was recorded for those unable to attend in person.

Children under the age of 15 represent 40+% of the population in Cameroon and likewise in many other younger nations. Given the length of time needed in most translation projects, the children in Sunday School today will be the young adults who will receive the finished product. Yet, traditionally, SIL has not developed tools and strategies to target this subgroup for first-language Scripture engagement. Lessons from Luke and Lessons from Acts were developed to change that fact.

Chris Jackson has served in Cameroon since 1994 first as a literacy specialist, then in Scripture engagement. He was married to Karen for 25 years before she passed away in 2013. They have three adult daughters and two granddaughters. Chris is remarried with Carolin; they work together in the Fulfulde literacy project and Chris continues to support the growth of the children’s curriculum project.

Eight reasons to use Ajami as a bridge for engaging Muslims with the scriptures. Responses to resistances and objections will be discussed. 

Scott Clark has worked in the Sahel region for 37 years. While a church planter (15 years), he discovered that Muslims were open to engage with MT scriptures in Arabic script. After a significant amount of Muslims came to Christ through these scriptures, Scott and his wife Ruthie, joined SIL and eventually completed the Fulfulde Ajamiya (AS) Bible in 2018. Now, Scott is the TAZI/SE coordinator for the Sahel Initiative.

There are things about life on the field you don't necessarily learn in the classroom. Come hear a panel of seven people share from their experience on the field.

Our panelists are:

Dan & Vange Birtles

Jeremy Lang

Joost & Cheryl Pikkert

Kathleen Sackett

Ryan Kopke

This gives us a broad representation of areas of the world, and stages of career and family life, and mission organizations, as you will see when they introduce themselves at the event.

Through shared stories we aim to get you thinking about some of the following topics (and maybe others):

1. Funding projects, esp. local funds vs. outside funds

2. Dealing with authorities (e.g. immigration, police, revenue authorities, military, government)

3. Finding a home in the local community, including local church involvement (if there is one), including as a single

4. Finding a good mentor

5. Mental health / self care / life balance

6. Power issues, esp. solar panels

7. Financial requests from the community

8. Dating as a single,  including integrating two lives, communication to supporters, number of men vs. women, sexual purity

9. Water issues, esp. purifying, sanitizing

10. Raising children, including schooling, transitions

11. Teambuilding, including cross-cultural issues, and working with nationals

12. Volunteers (working with, or being, a non-full-time helper)

In future events we will cover some of these topics in more depth.

I encourage you to think of this as part of your curriculum!

Thank you to everyone who came out to my colloquium and for the helpful feedback. There was a large number of people who told me that they wanted to attend my colloquium but couldn't for various reasons (e.g. time zones, travel). Because I value your feedback, especially at this point just before publication, I have decided to conduct some screenings of the colloquium video recording online on Zoom, with live Q&A afterwards, just to give an opportunity for those who wanted to ask questions. I'll do three of these, to hopefully give you a daytime option and an evening option regardless of what time zone you are in.

What is the best phonological basis for a writing system that aims to represent sound as the native speaker perceives it? The phoneme and the morphophoneme, along with morphophonemic and allophonic processes, have received a disproportionate amount of attention from orthography developers, while the lexical segment along with lexical and postlexical processes have been relatively neglected.

This talk has two aims. The first is to clarify, in a user-friendly way, the relationships between the four different phonological levels of representation (morphophonemic, lexical, phonemic, and surface) - the options for orthographic representation. The hypothesis that the lexical level is ideal is the Lexical Orthography Hypothesis (Snider 2014), and there are similar (hitherto unnamed) hypotheses about the other three levels. The second aim is to propose two methods of testing these hypotheses directly, by getting native speaker judgments about whether aspects of recorded utterances based on these levels are the same or different. This study is part of a program of research that aims to build up a weight of evidence for the best phonological level to represent in an orthography.

Bruce Wiebe did an MSc at SFU in computational phonology. He taught phonology at CanIL 1998-2010. He then assisted projects in Cameroon and Nigeria with phonological analysis (especially tone) with a view to orthography development. He currently is a consultant in training, specializing in the same, for projects in Mexico, and research officer at CanIL.

What is the best phonological basis for a writing system that aims to represent sound as the native speaker perceives it? The phoneme and the morphophoneme, along with morphophonemic and allophonic processes, have received a disproportionate amount of attention from orthography developers, while the lexical segment along with lexical and postlexical processes have been relatively neglected.

This talk has two aims. The first is to clarify, in a user-friendly way, the relationships between the four different phonological levels of representation (morphophonemic, lexical, phonemic, and surface) - the options for orthographic representation. The hypothesis that the lexical level is ideal is the Lexical Orthography Hypothesis (Snider 2014), and there are similar (hitherto unnamed) hypotheses about the other three levels. The second aim is to propose two methods of testing these hypotheses directly, by getting native speaker judgments about whether aspects of recorded utterances based on these levels are the same or different. This study is part of a program of research that aims to build up a weight of evidence for the best phonological level to represent in an orthography.

Bruce Wiebe did an MSc at SFU in computational phonology. He taught phonology at CanIL 1998-2010. He then assisted projects in Cameroon and Nigeria with phonological analysis (especially tone) with a view to orthography development. He currently is a consultant in training, specializing in the same, for projects in Mexico, and research officer at CanIL.

Kanise Khumi is a minoritized indigenous language in Western Myanmar. The language community has language development goals that include literacy, which requires a standardized and accepted orthography, or writing system. There must be a good understanding of the language's sound system when developing an orthography, but the Kanise Khumi language has been understudied and underdocumented. In tonal languages where pitch affects meaning, tone marking is an important consideration when deciding on the representation of sounds and spelling conventions. This research contributes to understanding the tone system in the language, describing the tones in Kanise Khumi nouns.

Grace Baleno is a Master of Arts in Linguistics student at CanIL.

See canil.ca/btexpo for details.

The process of translating linguistic taboos in the Bible needs to evaluate the impact the taboo had on the audience of the source language (SL) text, and the impact that a proposed translation will have on the audience of the receptor language (RL) culture. This thesis proposes an approach with a focus on questions and considerations for translators to utilize through the translation process. A concept may be taboo in both the source and receptor languages, or it may be taboo in either the source or receptor language. In order to provide an accurate, clear, natural, and appropriate translation for the community, translators need to analyze the linguistic taboo expressions used in the SL text with a focus on emotional impact of the expression on the SL audience. This impact needs to be considered as a factor when translating for a RL and checking the translation in the RL community.

Lindsey Holt is a Masters of Arts in Linguistics and Translation student at CanIL. She has a Bachelors of Arts in Bible from Houghton University in New York, USA.

(Please do not distribute this further, as it is prepublication material.)

A topic of recurrent interest in phonological theories, particularly within theories of feature representation (e.g., Van der Hulst 2018), is feature value assymetries. This talk looks at ATR vowel harmony in Chumburung [ncu], a Guang language spoken in Ghana, and examines several ways in which the system manifests dominance of [+ATR] over [−ATR]. These include: aggressive spreading of [+ATR] to roots within complex and compound stems and across word boundaries, greater frequency of [−ATR] lexemes over +ATR lexemes, [−ATR] being the default feature value, [+ATR] spreading allophonically (/a/ has a [+ATR] allophone derived through [+ATR] spreading), and [+ATR] being the feature value that surfaces when vowels coalesce.

Keith Snider received an M.A. in Linguistics (1980), then moved to Ghana with his wife, Ruth. Together they worked on the Chumburung Bible translation project (1982-87). After completing a doctoral program at Leiden (1990), Keith served as the Linguistics Coordinator for the Cameroon Branch of SIL (1993-1999). He taught full-time at CanIL from 2000 to 2010, and then part-time until 2022, especially in the area of tonal languages. He has written two books that have impacted the area of tone analysis: 'The Geometry and Features of Tone' (2nd ed., 2020), and 'Tone Analysis for Field Linguists' (2018). He has been an International / Senior Linguistics Consultant with SIL International from 1995 to the present. He continues to supervise students working on thesis research papers, which he finds fulfilling.

Most minority language communities are strongly oral, yet traditional Bible translation programs have produced print Scriptures. This talk presents how we are using an Oral Bible Translation process to engage local church leaders in the translation process, producing both print and audio Scripture.

Brendon Yoder has served in Indonesia with Wycliffe Bible Translators for 15 years. He is currently helping facilitate Oral Bible Translation in the Abawiri and Sikari languages. In addition, he is assistant professor at the Canada Institute of Linguistics in Langley.

This is a seminar that Brendon will also be doing at the Mission Central SERVE conference (formerly Missions Fest) on Saturday, January 28. He would really appreciate your feedback, which he will incorporate into that presentation.

On that note, this presentation is geared toward the general Christian public, and will be user-friendly, so feel free to invite family and friends.

This seminar will be basically about Scripture engagement in all areas of life.

Based on her book: A head, heart, and hands approach to Christian teaching.

Description: This seminar is for anyone who wants to incarnate the Word in their daily lives, modeling Scripture engagement for others. It applies to teaching the Bible or any subject from a Christian perspective. You will learn more about how we profit from the Word of God as we study it, meditate upon it, and use it in our prayers to God so that the Word moves from our head to our hearts and finally to our hands as we live it out in our daily lives. The Holy Spirit of God makes us incarnators of the Word before the eyes of those we teach or train.

Johanna Campbell, DTh, is a retired professor who has taught in the faculty of Education at TWU. She has written a book for teachers entitled, “A Head, Heart and Hands Approach to Christian Teaching” which explains how Christian teachers, by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Word, can incarnate God’s will and Word into their daily teaching. She has been a member of the WBTC board for seven years and a member of the CanIL board for seven years.

Description: Prescience Labs is an initiative of Wycliffe Canada that provides a hub for multiple organizations to pursue creative solutions to large challenges facing Bible translation work in this chaotic and unpredictable world. Come and interact with Matt around the challenges, approaches and learnings that have been gained over the last year of Prescience Labs and the opportunities available for you to participate in this space.

Matt Merritt, director of Prescience Labs, will be at CanIL for the day (9am -  4pm). He would love to meet with staff or students to talk about innovation in Bible translation and make people aware of Prescience Labs projects and opportunities along those lines. 

You can meet with him one-on-one, or at an informal lunch and learn event at noon in the common room (bring your lunch and chat with Matt around a table (or two or three) and ask your questions. 

He has opportunities for students to participate in an all expense paid trip to engage in assessing and evaluating literacy, multilingualism and scripture impact. This could happen in breaks that the students have in the spring semester or in the summer.

You can read more about Prescience Labs here: https://presciencelabs.org/

You can view the seminar he presented in the summer at this link.

You can email him directly at matt.merritt@presciencelabs.org.

Matt Merritt is a 2008 graduate of CanIL with an M.A. in Applied Linguistics. He and his family moved to Central Asia in 2010 to serve multiple language communities in a former Soviet country, where they were able to do orthography development, language documentation, literacy and Scripture engagement. They were honoured to then participate in the launch of six minority language Bible translation projects, resulting in the birth of the church in three of the six communities, including baptism and discipleship. In 2018 Matt took on the Eurasia Area Director role for Seed Co., working with 75 projects to ensure that funding, project goals and community interaction were successful.

In January of 2021 Matt started Prescience Labs with the support of Wycliffe Canada’s leadership and has been occupied with building out a network of participating organizations (PBTI, Seed Co, Wycliffe UK & Ireland and OneBook) and a team of six individuals to stimulate innovation within the Bible translation community.

Although the world is chaotic, the opportunity for Spirit-led innovation leading to transformed, flourishing language communities is radiant.

Abstract:

Morphological typology (Comrie 1989: 42-46) traditionally distinguished analytic (or isolating) versus synthetic languages. Synthetic languages were said to be of two types: agglutinative, where morphemes are easily divided from each other, each supposedly expresses one grammatical category, and word structures are often described in terms of position-classes inside the word; versus fusional, where one parse-able form expresses more than one (especially inflectional) category. In Maa (Maasai, Eastern Nilotic, of Kenya and Tanzania), verbs are certainly not analytic, and at first glance might seem agglutinative. But Maa verb structure has defied a clear position class treatment, reflected in the differing analyses of Tucker and Mpaayei (1955), Wallace (1981), and Rasmussen (2002).

Multiple factors make a position class treatment difficult. These include tonal and partly tonal morphology, sometimes involving discontinuous or long-distance effects. A distinction between Class I and Class II stems (Tucker and Bryan 1966) and a cross-cutting distinction between stative and dynamic lexical aspect affect what morphological categories the rest of the verb can carry. Also, a single functionally defined category can have different forms – sometimes in different parts of the verb – depending on stem type. Further, there are co-occurrence restrictions among affixes that do not always seem semantically sensible. Finally, in some cases the combination of morphological categories A and B is expressed by a form which is phonologically unlike what expresses A or B alone. Altogether, “the Maa verb” is not amenable to a simple position-class treatment. A constructional or perhaps “word-and-paradigm” approach (Anderson 1982) is called for.

Bio:

Doris Payne received her PhD from UCLA in 1985. She is a Senior Linguistics Consultant with SIL International and Professor Emerita from the University of Oregon. Her research has focused on languages of South America and East Africa, specializing in lexical semantics, morphology, syntax, and intersections with discourse. She is currently working together with native speakers on a trilingual Maa (Maasai)-Swahili-English dictionary, and on a Maa grammar. Beyond her own research, she has consulted on analyses and grammatical descriptions of languages from many parts of the world.

Abstract:

Alternative assessment systems like Specifications Grading and Ungrading have gained popularity in higher education but have primarily been developed out of non-analytical teaching environments. For instructors of analytical courses, these approaches can seem intimidating or irrelevant and unsuitable to the types of knowledge and skills taught in analytical courses. This colloquium will give an overview of principles of alternate assessment systems, how they were implemented in the LING 330 Phonological Analysis course in Summer 2022, what student feedback said about the success of each element of the system, and recommendations for how analytical courses can implement the most effective elements. Instructors should come away with ideas and strategies to increase collaboration, student growth, engagement with feedback, and create a course structure where students have the freedom to learn through failure.

Bio:

Hannah Olney is a graduate of the CanIL MA Linguistics program, having completed her thesis in Spring 2021. She has been teaching Phonological Analysis at CanIL since 2018, but has been involved in courses as a Teaching Assistant since 2015. Her love of education started much earlier, helping fellow students in elementary school understand their math homework, and she is grateful to be in a place where she now gets to be both a teacher and a linguist. She is new to the world of alternate assessment systems, but has already seen how it impacts student learning and experience in just one semester. She is excited to encourage other instructors of analytical courses to give these methods a try!

TWU's CREATE Conference (Creativity, Research, Exploration, Arts, Truth, and Engagement) is an opportunity for students and faculty to showcase their research! The CREATE conference is a peer-reviewed research conference that is open to all disciplines, showcasing the pinnacle of academic endeavour and achievement at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels.

Participation in TWU's CREATE Conference is multidisciplinary and includes oral presentations, poster presentations, and Psychology Thesis presentations.

Schedule:
10:00 - 10:35 am:  Land Acknowledgement and Keynote Address        

10:45 am - 4:00 pm:  Undergraduate Students', Graduate Students', and Faculty Presentations

 
Attendance is open to all! Students, Staff, and Faculty will attend to find out what TWU researchers are doing. Friends and family can also attend!

TWU's CREATE conference is a combination of what in the past was two separate conferences:

• the summer TWU Research and Creativity Symposium (faculty and grad / undergrad student research)

• the spring TWU Undergraduate Research Conference (undergrad student research)

Abstract:

For decades, linguists have assumed or overtly proposed a strict dichotomy between "lexicon" and "grammar". As described by Charles Fillmore in 1968: "The lexicon is everything speakers need to know outright in order to speak a language. Grammar is what speakers can work out based on what they already know." In this view, the lexicon is a list of stored items, while grammar consists of algorithms by which complex units may be built out of the “blocks” provided by the lexicon.

   In this paper I argue for a view of linguistic knowledge in which there is no lexicon-grammar distinction. Rather, all elements of linguistic knowledge, including complex morphology and phrase structures, are habitualized form+function composites in a very large “construct-i-con.”

   Evidence for this assertion is provided from Waray, an Austronesian language spoken in the Eastern Visayas region of the Philippines. In Waray, there are two canonical applicative constructions. In addition to their applicative functions, each applicative in Waray has extended meanings that are not predictable based on the “lexical meanings” of the individual parts.  These extended meanings include adversative (“My pig died on me”), evaluative (“I consider it beautiful”), and deontic (“I have to do something”). The conclusion is that these meanings arise because of the construction itself, rather that being “worked out” on the basis of the individual parts.

Bio:

Tom Payne is a Senior Linguistics Consultant with SIL International, and a Research Associate at the University of Oregon. He has his PhD from UCLA on discourse in Yagua (a lowland language of Peru), and has since done work, conducted workshops, and published on languages from around the world. His specialty is grammatical descriptions of underdocumented languages, and empirically based linguistic theory. Tom has taught the grammatical description workshop at CanIL for many years, and is currently assisting in it as a linguistics consultant as he passes the instructor's baton.

Bring your lunch and come watch and discuss these talks from the Bible Translation Conference in October:

Nicholas A. Bailey (past CanIL faculty) - Poetic packagings of the Psalms: Insights from the 1500s and 1600s on their translation

Although not widely known among English-speaking Christians today, there is a significant tradition of translating the Psalms in a poetic, or ‘metrical’, form that was meant to be sung corporately. In particular, the tradition of using rhyme and meter in English Psalms goes back to at least the early 1500s. Singing the Psalms was intended to fulfill the Scriptural command to ‘exhort one another, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs’ (Col 3:16).

Early metrical Psalters mixed poetic forms with a meaning-based translation style that often verged on ‘free paraphrase’, producing quality English poetry that was easily sung. Some subsequent metrical translations used a more conservative style, avoiding unnecessary freedom, but at the cost of producing poorer poetry. This is true of The Bay Psalm Book, which was produced by Puritans in 1649, and which was the very first book produced and printed in Colonial America.

Today, with a few important exceptions, the tradition of translating and singing the Psalter is barely practiced in the English-speaking world, and the most commonly used translations of the Psalms are anything but poetic. This loss can be partially attributed to theological assumptions about what is ‘good translation’ and what is the function of Scripture. But much can be learned and gleaned from the metrical tradition that is useful for Bible translation and Scripture engagement across the globe.

Nicholas A. Bailey has been involved in translation and linguistic research with SIL International since 1984. He has worked as an advisor and as a translation consultant in various translation projects in Eurasia. He has had an ongoing interest in the translation of the Psalms as poetry and song as well as in the theoretical and theological underpinnings for meaning-based translation.

Paul Kroeger - Translating ambiguous reason clauses

Luke 7:47 “Her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much.” Both the UBS Handbook and SIL’s Translator’s Notes state that a literal rendering of this verse is likely to be misunderstood, and (since the point is theologically important) recommend restructuring (e.g. "the great love she has shown proves that her many sins have been forgiven" TEV). It appears that in most languages, any conjunction that allows the correct, EVIDENTIAL reading (‘her love is evidence of forgiveness’) can also express the incorrect, REAL-WORLD CAUSATION reading (‘her love caused the forgiveness’).

This reason clause is a type of “digression” (Wendland 1983, NOT), or parenthetical comment, also called a SUPPLEMENT (Potts 2005). Supplemental reason clauses in most languages allow at least three readings (Sweetser 1990). In addition to the real-world causation and epistemic readings mentioned above, they can also serve as SPEECH-ACT MODIFIERS (e.g. What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?). AT-ISSUE reason clauses, in which the causal relation is the main point being asserted in a statement or queried in a question, can be marked by conjunctions, prepositions (‘because of’), or special causal nominalization. They always express real-world causation, but (unlike supplemental reason clauses) can have ambiguous interpretations in the context of negation and quantifier words like 'few' and 'many'. Replacing supplemental with at-issue reason clauses will not only affect the range of possible readings but also change the information packaging (prominence) of the causal meaning.

Paul Kroeger served as a translator and linguistics consultant with SIL in SE Asia, and for the past 20 years has been teaching at GIAL/DIU.

Bring your lunch and come watch and discuss these talks from the Bible Translation Conference in October:

Maik Gibson – When is a Bible Translation likely to ‘take’? The role of the type of multilingualism

This paper stems from a research project looking at which factors influence communities’ choice of languages for various functions, including their engagement with Scripture. In this paper we are asking the question “Where is a Bible translation more likely to be used?”

The data comes from 15 in-depth interviews with those involved with language communities over an extended period of time, from five continents, examining the use of multiple languages in that community over the whole time period. This, along with other data, has enabled us to test some hypotheses about the language ecology, use of writing, and engagement with Scripture.

The first hypothesis is that a Bible translation is unlikely to be widely used if it is in a language which parents are not passing on systematically to their children (i.e. shifting). The second is that a written Bible translation is unlikely to be widely used if there is not a widespread practice of literacy in that language. Both hypotheses receive some level of support from the study, and we have struggled to find other clear non-exceptional counterexamples to these generalizations. Possible exceptions will be considered, and a discussion of some of the possible implications for Bible translation strategy.

Maik Gibson is SIL's international Sociolinguistics coordinator, with a particular interest in multilingualism and its impact on Scripture Engagement and Language Development. He has field experience from Peru, and North and East Africa, with experience in translation and training others for service.

James & Janet Stahl - Oral Bible storytelling as shaped by on-the-job competency-based training and group experiential learning

Storytelling has been a recent addition to the Bible translation effort and has gained traction globally and rapidly. In this presentation we will address our experiences in designing on-the-job competency-based equipping of Bible storytelling teams, trainers, and checkers to keep pace with the growing demand while remaining flexible to new developments in oral hermeneutics, performance criticism, Bible translation, and social narratology. This training approach has allowed the developers and trainers to assess competencies and roles that were new to a discipline in its early stages, and led to the continuing growth plans for participants, trainers, and checkers and consultants. On-the-job training allows for flexible training and is focused on the designated role and work of the trainees. Group learning is essential to OBS because storytelling requires an audience and a team can be exponentially productive as compared to an individual.

Jim and Janet Stahl have worked for Seed Co since 2007 developing the Oral Bible Storytelling method to augment and be a catalyst to the work of Bible translation. They have helped storytelling teams from around 70 language groups around the world to craft Bible stories that largely represent previously untranslated scripture in those languages. Previous to their time in Seed Co, they worked for 15 years in Vanuatu with SIL in vernacular literacy, language planning, translation training using CBT, and sociolinguistics research. They currently live in Bethlehem, PA.

FLExTrans was originally conceived by SIL member Ron Lockwood in 2015. Ron had experience with the SIL legacy tool CARLA and he wanted to create a modern rule-based machine translation system for low-resource languages. He thought that for low-resource languages, statistically-based machine translation would not yield the desired results. So he sought to use the best of the existing tools to create a system that would be easy to use and that took advantage of common tools used by the field linguist. He wanted the user to be able to start with very little data and gradually grow a machine translator.

FLExTrans is linguist-friendly machine translation because a central component is the intuitive application Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx). This application serves as the repository for lexicons, the place where entries are linked and the tool for the analysis piece of the analysis-transfer-synthesis-style system. Apertium, the well-established open-source machine translation platform, is used for the transfer piece of the system and STAMP for the synthesis piece. The linguist’s role is to analyze the source text with FLEx, link lexicon entries and write transfer rules to do either word or syntactic-level translation.

Presenters:

Ron Lockwood has been serving with SIL International for nearly 20 years. He works in Eurasia where he leads technical domains, consults with teams on their language technology needs and develops FLExTrans for doing machine translation between languages. Ron recently completed his master's degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington.

Beth Bryson is Dictionary & Lexicography Services Assistant Coordinator for SIL. She has presented workshops on FLEX and Toolbox at venues around the US.

Abstract:

This talk is about a problem we encounter when an orthography needs to be developed for a previously unwritten language: because of dialect differences, the speakers happily use their language quite differently in spoken communication. Now they are asked to agree on one written standard for the whole language area. Deciding on that standard often proves to be a very difficult undertaking, and some language development projects have failed because of the inability of the language community to accept a standard. The issues that affect this decision go far beyond linguistic factors - identity, power, politics, prestige, fear of loss, and concrete disadvantages for the students in school all play an important role. These hairy issues will be considered, and some ideas will be presented that may help with this important problem.

Bio:

Andreas Joswig works as a linguistics consultant for SIL Ethiopia, and over the past 15 years he was involved as a consultant in a number of orthography decisions in that country. He further consults on dictionary making, grammar analysis, and the use of the FLEx software package in grammar and lexicography. He has an MA in Linguistics, Anthropology and African Studies from Cologne University, and a PhD from Leiden University.

Description: Prescience Labs is an initiative of Wycliffe Canada that provides a hub for multiple organizations to pursue creative solutions to large challenges facing Bible translation work in this chaotic and unpredictable world. Come and interact with Matt around the challenges, approaches and learnings that have been gained over the last year of Prescience Labs and the opportunities available for you to participate in this space.

Speaker: Matt is a 2008 graduate of CanIL with an M.A. in Applied Linguistics. He and his family moved to Central Asia in 2010 to serve multiple language communities in a former Soviet country, where they were able to do orthography development, language documentation, literacy and Scripture engagement. They were honoured to then participate in the launch of six minority language Bible translation projects, resulting in the birth of the church in three of the six communities, including baptism and discipleship. In 2018 Matt took on the Eurasia Area Director role for Seed Co., working with 75 projects to ensure that funding, project goals and community interaction were successful.

In January of 2021 Matt started Prescience Labs with the support of Wycliffe Canada’s leadership and has been occupied with building out a network of participating organizations (PBTI, Seed Co, Wycliffe UK & Ireland and OneBook) and a team of six individuals to stimulate innovation within the Bible translation community.

Although the world is chaotic, the opportunity for Spirit-led innovation leading to transformed, flourishing language communities is radiant.

Abstract: This talk presents a cross-linguistic study on the iconicity of modified reduplication (MRD). Although the iconic potential of reduplication has been addressed by researchers (e.g. Sapir 1921:79-82, Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 128, Fischer 2011), not enough attention, with some notable exceptions such as Cabrera (2017), has been paid to the distinct character of MRD in opposition to full reduplication. MRD here refers to the juxtaposition of two linguistic forms that are phonologically similar but not identical, differing in either vowel quality or initial consonant. Modification of vowel quality is also known as ablaut reduplication (e.g. English chit-chat, Lhasa Tibetan zam zom ‘careless work’, Tshangla napanopo ‘silly’) and modification of initial consonant is also known as rhyming reduplication (e.g. English hotchpotch, Finnish hyrskyn myrskyn ‘in a state of disarray’, Turkish bulut mulut ‘cloud and the like’).

Drawing data from a wide array of languages and languages families (e.g. Finnic, Germanic, Indic, Slavic, Tangkic, Tibetic and Turkic), we argue that MRD cross-linguistically has potential to express four types of iconicity in each of which the iconicity arises from the structural comparison (or perceiving the similarity and dissimilarity) of two juxtaposed similar but not identical phonological forms:

1) Duality/plurality of similar but not identical sounds

2) Duality/plurality of similar but not identical items

3) Duality/plurality of similar but not identical locations

4) Nonnormativity arising from the comparison of two similar but non-identical forms

While the types of iconicity listed above have been hinted at by other researchers (e.g. Thun 1963, Fischer 2011, Armoskaite & Kutlu 2015, Cabrera 2017), this talk presents the first unified crosslinguistic study of the iconicity of MRD which highlights the similarity of ablaut reduplication and rhyming reduplication, and establishes an iconically-based common ground between such diversely labelled phenomena as “expressives” (Diffloth 1979), “ideophones” (Mikone 2001), “echo formations” (Abbi 2018) and “m-reduplication” (Armoskaite & Kutlu 2015).

The study also shows that similar but not identical forms occur in many languages on the paradigmatic level in personal and demonstrative pronouns, giving further evidence that MRD has iconic potential to represent two or more locations, e.g. Swedish här ‘here’ vs. där ‘there’, Finnish minä ‘1SG’ vs. sinä ‘2SG’, Finnish (dialectal) myö ‘1PL’ vs. työ ‘2PL’ vs. hyö ‘3PL’.

Speaker: Juha Yliniemi holds a PhD degree in General Linguistics from the University of Helsinki (2019). The title of his dissertation was A descriptive grammar of Denjongke (Sikkimese Bhutia). He is a Linguistics Specialist in the Southern Himalayas and a consultant at the Workshop in Grammatical Description at CanIL. His current research interests include iconicity of modified reduplication in the Himalayas and across language families, discourse particles, and language description and documentation in general.

Seminar description: 

An estimated 1000 oral language groups have waited for thousands of years to receive the Scriptures. Many will never obtain the written Word of God.  But they can still hear the saving truth of the Gospel. ‍Oral Bible Translation (OBT) sidesteps the hurdle of having to develop an orthography and do extensive linguistics studies to do actual Bible translation in an oral community. The oral community receiving the translation side steps the need to be able to read and write as their Bible is made available in an audio format. Individuals living in unreached people groups who may never read can still hear God's Word and come to Christ. 

Now, a team of mother-tongue translators can be trained to work among their own people to clearly and accurately render God's Word in a format they can understand and use. OBT goes through all of the same rigorous checks of a written translation — team checking, community checks, back translation, and consultant checking. OBT utilizes an icon- and color-based software called Render which was developed in partnership with translation organizations. And as soon as a recording is approved — whether a few verses or a whole book — it becomes available to the community. The wait is finally over!  

This seminar will include the following:

• An introduction and overview of OBT

• A demo of the Render software

• An explanation of drafting and consultant checking in an OBT project

• Opportunities (including internships) for students to consider in OBT

The concluding time will be dedicated to answering your questions about OBT. 

Presenters: 

Alex Mathew is from India, and initiated Bible translation work in several parts of India. His family was also involved in a translation project in a rural area of the eastern part of India. They published a New Testament in 2016. They saw church growth take off when the Audio Bible was created years after the translation was completed.

He was CEO of Wycliffe India from 2011 until early 2018. At that point he joined FCBH (Faith Comes By Hearing), a mission with the mandate to record and provide the Word of God in every language that needs it. He began as Director of Strategic Initiatives, dramatically growing the S. Asia and SE Asia teams, and empowering many national leaders to step into greater leadership roles. After three and a half years he became Director of Oral Bible Translation in March of 2022 (this month!).

Alex’s wife, Swapna Alexander is Lead OBT translation consultant with FCBH and they are blessed with two children, Atulya (20 years old) and Mathew (16 years old).

Louis Rose is an OBT trainer with FCBH.

This talk is part of the following conference:

MOT (Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto) Phonology / Phonetics Workshop
Friday - Saturday,  March 25-26

Abstract:
Emeneau (1939) reported that Badaga (a Dravidian language of India) had a remarkable three- way contrast between ‘normal’ (non-retroflex), ‘half-retroflexed’ and ‘fully retroflexed’ vowels. Thereafter, Badaga became a celebrated example of retroflex vowels, earning recognition in works such as Chomsky and Halle (1968) and Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996), and playing an important role in discussions of phonological typology and feature theory (e.g., Hockett 1958; Bhat 1974; Lindau 1978). Research conducted many decades after Emeneau (1939) found no trace of the retroflex vowels, suggesting that they had been lost in the interim period (Pilot-Raichoor 1988, 1991; Hockings and Pilot-Raichoor 1992). As a result, Emeneau’s account has never been adequately verified despite its typological and theoretical significance.

This paper re-examines evidence from surviving data, which confirms that Badaga had distinctive retroflex (or rhotacized) vowels with a characteristic low third formant. However, the evidence does not provide convincing support for contrasting degrees of retroflexion. The weight of evidence suggests that Badaga likely had a two-way contrast between regular and retroflex vowels, with some allophonic variation in how the later series was realized. This conclusion is supported by evidence from three areas. First, acoustic analysis of field recordings made by Peter Ladefoged and associates in the 1990ʼs confirms the production of retroflex (or rhotacized) vowels by some speakers but does not provide evidence of a clear or consistent distinction between ‘half-retroflexed’ and ‘fully retroflexed’ vowels (contra Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996). Second, historical-comparative evidence reveals that there is no motivation for two degrees of retroflexion, as both alleged degrees have the same historical antecedents. Finally, cross-linguistic typology indicates that no other language maintains contrast between two degrees of retroflexion in consonants, let alone in vowels. Some implications for phonological typology and feature theory are briefly discussed.

Bio: Paul Arsenault has worked as a linguist with SIL International and its partner agencies since 1997. He has lived and traveled extensively in South Asia doing language research, teaching linguistics and providing consultant support to non-governmental organizations involved in literacy, translation and other language development projects. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto, and his areas of specialization are phonology, phonetics, morphology and South Asian languages.

If you cannot make it to your respective session, you can come to the session that works for you!

Come and learn in a hands-on tutorial how to use LaTeX – a document preparation system.

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.

If you missed the first week's sessions, see the LaTeX tutorials page at https://tutorials.canil.ca/latex, and read through up to and including LaTeX Training: Short Intro to LaTeX, and LaTeX Training I.

Contact Jonathan Lim (jonathan.lim@canil.ca) for help or further information.

Come celebrate Rod Casali’s promotion to full Professor on Friday, March 11, 1:30-2:45 pm in the Common Room in the CanIL Harvest Centre building. (This promotion happened in 2019, but the celebration was postponed until now due to the pandemic.) 

Rod will be giving an inaugural lecture, preceded by a short program. Dessert and drinks will be provided.

Seminar description: Whether you're a student writing a paper or a faculty member researching for a publication or a class, do you sometimes have questions such as the following:

1.       When searching online for research materials, what logins do I need to do (since I see various login prompts and other messages on the TWU library website), and when, and why? TWU account? EBSCO? DOAJ? JSTOR? others?

2.       What do I do when I search and find digital materials, but then there's no actual link anywhere to display and read them?

3.       How do I search for online journals or articles or topics within articles?

4.       How do I fine-tune my searches to get just the results I want?

5.       How do I get references from the library site into my bibliography manager?

Come to find out the answers to these questions and more. There will be lots of time for Q&A, so bring any question you have related to using the TWU library resources and services.

Presenter: Qinqin Zhang has been working at the TWU Library as a research and teaching librarian for the past six years, coming from a background in computer science and instructional technology. Qinqin is interested in exploring new technologies to support teaching and learning, and she’s also passionate about connecting with people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Abstract: Based on criteria proposed by Dixon & Aikhenvald (2002) for identifying grammatical and phonological words in a language, this colloquium talk presents the notion of ‘word’ in Makary Kotoko (Chadic, Cameroon). The criteria of (i) pause phenomena, (ii) isolatability, (iii) meaning, and (iv) tone assignment are determinative, not for the identification of word per se, but for identifying word classes – in particular, the major word classes of the language: noun, verb, adjective, adverb and ideophone. Misalignment between grammatical and phonological words occurs with functional elements of the language and are addressed in a discussion of the clitics of the language. Clitic behavior creates issues for determining orthographic words for this language which has had no known written tradition until fairly recently.

Bio: Sean is involved in a language development project for the Kotoko languages, spoken in the north of Cameroon just south of Lake Chad. He is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at CanIL, and serves as the MA in Linguistics program director for TWU.

Abstract: Language shift occurs whenever speakers of a language choose, for whatever reason, to use a different language for regular communication across the various domains of life. Language shift can lead to language endangerment and eventually language loss if this process of shifting from one language to another is not counterbalanced by language maintenance and development. This presentation will examine the factors which can influence language shift, predictions of massive loss of languages this century, and a variety of language assessment tools that are used to gauge the vitality of existing languages. One conclusion from this study is that assessment tools used in many parts of the world may not be adequate to evaluate what is happening within the small minority languages of Oceania, and specifically those found in the country of Papua New Guinea.

Bio: Norm obtained an MDiv in Theology & Missiology, and helped in church pastoral roles from 1979 – 1994. In 1994, with his wife, Jill, he joined Pioneer Bible Translators. In 1995-96, together with some pastors in western Canada, Norm & Jill helped to establish the non-profit organization of Pioneer Bible Translators of Canada. In 1997, the Weatherhead family (with two elementary age boys) moved to Papua New Guinea and started Bible translation work among the Nend speakers of the Middle Ramu region of PNG; the Nend book of Mark was later published. Due to a diagnosis of leukemia, the family returned to Canada for the years of 2002-04. Norm became National Director for PBT of Canada, and taught mission courses at two Bible colleges. With doctors’ clearance, the family returned to the field, this time to Tanzania where Norm was the Acting Director for one year and Jill ran the Finance Office. In 2007, Norm became a translation consultant, and from 2007-12 helped to do consultant checking on biblical books for ten different PNG language groups. Norm was diagnosed in 2008 with a rare muscle disease (Mitochondrial Myopathy), and moved to Calgary, but still traveled to do translation checking. From 2013-19, he was “remote” Director of Language Affairs, seeing three New Testament and one Old Testament translation projects completed. From 2019-20, he earned a DMin from Knox Theological Seminary (Fort Lauderdale, FL), and became a translation advisor to the Akukem language project in the Lower Ramu region of PNG, and began to teach occasional linguistic courses for CanIL.