What’s in a Clause?

By David Ringer

"This language is not meant to be translated!" Iska Routamaa would exclaim in exasperation.

Iska and his family began living among the Kamula people of Papua New Guinea's Western Province in 1991. They had come in response to the Kamula's request for Bible translators. Between them, Iska and his wife, Judy, had studied English, Finnish, French, and German. But despite their background in languages, they faced tremendous challenges as they started work among the Kamula people.

Only a handful of Kamula speak any English at all, so the Routamaas began learning Kamula like little children. "We wandered around the village. We pointed. They said something," laughed Judy. Slowly, the couple learned how to ask simple questions. "What is that?", "What are you doing?"

The Routamaas estimate that the Kamula language has a vocabulary of about 2000 words, which is less than one percent of the size of the enormous English vocabulary. Many of those 2000 words are words for food and animals the Kamula know --words that are of little use in translating the Scriptures.

As the couple discovered, Kamula has very few words to express abstract concepts. For example, there are words for good and bad, but there is no word for beautiful. Translating verses like Philippians 4:8 proved quite difficult when all the concepts Paul lists are summed up in the Kamula word good. Kamula does not have a word for hope, and the Routamaas struggled to find even an equivalent concept in the language. Eventually, they settled on an expression that means waiting patiently.

Iska and Judy worked closely with Kamula co-translators, Nokopapi Molo and Hawo Kuru. They helped the men to understand the verses as Hawo and Nokopapi struggled to translate them into Kamula.

The most difficult challenge the translators faced was the lack of relative clauses in Kamula. In English and many other Indo-European languages, relative clauses are a powerful way to provide context and information. An English speaker can say, "The man who is lying down," but a Kamula speaker must say, "The lying-down man." Such a substitution is easy enough in a simple sentence but proves extremely difficult in Scripture passages that depend heavily on relative clauses, like Romans 1:1-6.

But despite these differences, the Routamaas insist that Kamula actually has a more complex grammar than English does. The most-used verb in the Kamula New Testament is the verb "to say." It has 360 different forms in the Kamula New Testament, but only a handful of forms are possible in English.

Another difference between the languages is the order of elements in a sentence. In English the usual order is subject, verb, and object: God made the world. But in Kamula, the usual sentence order is subject, object, and verb: God the world made.

These dramatic differences in language combined to make translation a very difficult process for the Routamaas and their co-translators.

"The tools and means are totally different," say the Routamaas. They had to chop the verses apart into their smallest bits before Nokopapi and Hawo could translate them into Kamula. Information had to be re-ordered, and implicit information had to be made explicit.

Despite these challenges, the team completed the New Testament in less than 10 years, and the Kamula people dedicated their Scriptures on March 19, 2005.

The Kamula do not often show emotion, and gifts are usually received in silence -- Kamula does not have a word for thank you. But the people wept and sang as they received their Scriptures, and some of the elders expressed their appreciation to the Routamaas and their joy in having the New Testaments. The rarity of such expressions convinced the Routamaas of the occasion's significance.

Iska and Judy say they are a little sad that the work is done, but they are excited to see what God will do among the Kamula people now that they can read His Word in their mother tongue.

"I can't think of anything else I'd rather have done with my life," says Judy. "We've felt that what we're doing is worthwhile and that the New Testaments will be used."

"It's like their history is beginning," says Iska.

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