“The situation has calmed considerably.”

This was the US State Department announcement about Cameroon last Wednesday (12 March). We have been cautiously back at school and our normal daily activities for almost two weeks now. We are grateful for all the prayers for our safety and for the peace and stability of this our beloved adopted country.

Here’s an exciting progress report related to the ongoing tussle we’ve had with Esimbi tone over the years: Two gifted linguists from Wycliffe Bible Translators have been mulling over our Esimbi tone problems and yesterday we received their findings and suggestions. Our semester break starts on March 21, and Arnie hopes to gather a group of our Esimbi translation and literacy folks the following week in Bamenda to discuss this report and decide where to go from here. Please pray for wisdom and direction for that meeting.

Also over spring break we’ll gather as World Team Cameroon South missionaries for our annual field conference. This year it will be held at the beach—a first for us—and we are really looking forward to some good fellowship and fun (and some business mixed in!) with our colleague/friends. We work with a great group of folks here, all committed to our World Team mission statement: Glorifying God by working together to establish reproducing churches focusing on unreached peoples of the world.

Noah just got back from a friend’s sleepover/birthday party where one of the gifts was a live tarantula, caught at school yesterday by one of the other invitees—oh, the joys of having your 13th birthday in the tropics! Zac is trying to get his homework out of the way this afternoon to have time to go back to school tonight to sell snacks with his fellow 10th graders, during the intermission of the annual Rain Forest International School (RFIS) drama production. Arnie has been busy grading assignments received from his 11th and 12th grade Bible students, as progress reports come out next week. Karen continues to simmer her “alphabet soup” of tests for RFIS—SAT, ACT, AP, IGCSE, and TOEFLs—and just hopes from day to day that the pot doesn’t boil over!

Thanks for your prayers for us and our dual ministry responsibilities here with Esimbi Bible translation and RFIS. We appreciate the partnership we have with you in God’s Kingdom work here in Cameroon.

The African Colemans—Arnie, Karen, Zac and Noah


Below is a copy of the latest report on the progress of the Esimbi language project:

Esimbi Tone Research Report
Stephen Anderson, SIL Cameroun, March 14, 2008

1. Introduction
For some time now, Robert Hedinger had informed me that the Esimbi language team needed to do additional research to come up with a good way to mark tone in that language. When Robert heard that Arnie and Karen Coleman were going to be living in Yaounde this year, he asked me if this might be a time for me to help them make some progress. Fortunately, I am also mentoring Phil Davison for a couple of years, so we actually had the manpower to try to do something. Finally, we all received the phonology and orthography write-up from Brad Koenig, so we had a known basis from which to start.

2. Goals
After Phil and I read Brad’s write-up, the two of us met with the Colemans and Charles ABRE (an Esimbi speaker attending the University of Yaounde). We promised the Colemans that we would try to do some additional tone research and see if we might come up with a better suggestion for writing tone than was proposed in Brad’s write-up.

3. Methodology
From the beginning, due to previous experiences with other languages, we wanted to find a way to measure the level of functional load that each tonal contrast carries in Esimbi. In order to do this, we needed as near as possible an exhaustive list of Esimbi tonal minimal pairs. Phil ended up working quite a bit on the language team’s database to slowly develop a list of minimal tone pairs/triplets.

4. Problems
The phonetic tone data on the database needed quite a bit of work and verification before we felt we had a good idea of tonal minimal pairs. Phil accomplished this by working with Arnie, Charles and Elias NUM (another Esimbi speaker) during some three afternoon language sessions.

5. Results
5.1 Minimal tone pairs/triplets/etc.
Phil developed a list of 350 Esimbi words that he was confident were part of minimal tone pairs/triplets/etc. This is quite high since we had only 2,000 words in the database, so the 350 words represented 17% of all recorded Esimbi words.
5.2 Functional load of various tone contrasts
After establishing a list in which we had confidence, Phil analyzed the importance of each of the minimal tone pairs. The result was that by far the highest functional load was carried by two tone contrasts: H vs. L and M vs. L. The third highest contrast was between H and M, with rising and falling tones not important in this area.
5.3 Tonal contrast between class 9/10 singulars and plurals
As already reported in Brad’s write-up, nouns of gender 9/10 differed from each other only by their tone patterns. Since that write-up was proposing to only write high tone on specific minimal pairs, they also proposed that the 9/10 nouns be handled the same way. When Phil looked at these patterns in detail, there was indeed a general “raising” influence so that the tones of the pluralized forms were always higher than their parallel singular forms.

6. Immediate implications of the results
6.1 Importance of low tones in the functional load
We were very pleased to see that just one of the five tones figured so much in the functional load of Esimbi tone contrasts. It was quickly apparent to us that, if one would mark just this one tone, over 90% of the ambiguity between tonal pairs/triplets/etc. would be taken care of. We recently analyzed another language with results like this, while yet other languages divide the functional load up more evenly.
6.2 Importance of low tones in distinguishing 9/10 gender nouns
We were then very pleasantly surprised to find that if one marked these same L tones in 9/10 gender nouns, over 90% of the ambiguity there was also taken care of.

7. Suggested implications for the orthography of Esimbi
7.1 Write vowel length with double vowels wherever it is found
As we suggested to the Colemans at our initial meeting, even though vowel length does not carry a high functional load, it should be written wherever it is found, whether in underlying lexical forms or (if found) in derived forms where the vowel length is important. (This is a great help to writers.)
7.2 Write low tones with a diacritic wherever they are found
Due to the fortuitous results of our research, we suggest that Esimibi orthography uses a diacritic (a grave accent) over the vowel in each low tone syllable. It is important that we are recommending that such accents are only written according to the pronunciation of the word in isolation (or, its “dictionary tone”). We refer to this as writing the underlying lexical tone. We are thus suggesting that Esimbi uses such a diacritic to mark PITCH, and not just to disambiguate certain minimal tone pairs. This does mean that you will need to teach this mark as a pitch in the various primers.
7.3 Writing diacritics for two cases of grammatical tone
As already clear in Brad’s write-up, both “habitual” and “progressive” constructions are tonally ambiguous with other constructions in the language. When we looked at it closer, being aware that habitual and progressive aspects are subcategories of the more general imperfective aspect, we found that it would be possible to use a single diacritic to mark these two cases of grammatical tone (since there is a vowel change between the habitual and progressive constructions that could, if pressed, be used to determine that difference). Let’s suggest for the moment that Esimbi uses the dieresis diacritic to mark both of these cases of imperfective aspect, thus disambiguating them from their potentially confusing counterparts (doing this because choosing the dieresis, which no Cameroon language uses to mark tone, reinforces the fact that we are thereby marking a grammatical construction and not PITCH). Our suggestion would be that this mark is always placed on the verb prefix (whether that prefix is the pronoun marker or the infinitive marker). If the pronoun marker has a low tone, the dieresis would replace the normal grave accent in the case of habitual and progressive constructions (hopefully, there is not a tonal minimal pair among these pronoun markers, something we couldn’t tell from the write-up). It was mentioned in the write-up that such a verb prefix is always present except in imperative forms, so it would be ideal for marking such “grammatical tones”.

However, because the concept of “imperfective” is hard for people to understand, we would instead suggest that two separate diacritics be used to mark either “habitual” or “progressive” meaning on the prefix before the verb, finding these two categories much more concrete and therefore, we trust, easier to teach. The exact diacritics chosen are not important to us, but we might suggest the dieresis and the nasalization diacritics if pressed. It us our understanding that literacy teachers find these “grammatical diacritics” much easier to teach than teaching a diacritic that indicates pitch, probably because it goes straight to meaning and, once the meaning is known, all speakers know how to pronounce it.

8. Problems with the previous “tone-marking” system
Without going into a lot of detail (which I could, if pressed), the previous system of marking only minimal tone pairs that someone has decided might possibly be ambiguous in text has a lot of drawbacks. While it may reduce the number of tone marks on a typical page, its ability to disambiguate potential problems is often overrated. It also provides a difficult challenge to the newly literate as he tries to decide whether or not to put a diacritic on a certain word. He would need to ask himself whether that word is part of a minimal tone pair, ask himself whether some other person/committee had decided (subjectively) whether that word might be potentially ambiguous, etc. Bottom line: while such a “minimal pair” type marking system might be a good alternative for a language where tone carries a really low functional load, we do not feel it should be used for a language with Esimbi’s functional load for tone. The high functional load for tone in Esimbi means that tone carries a lot of meaning, and getting by with marking just one pitch (for the moment) is already tempting fate.

9. Next steps
9.1 Decide to try marking just low PITCH on all lexical tones
This is the emotional step, changing from what you had been thinking to something else. In general, time helps, so take your time making a decision. On the positive side, we think there are many advantages to this decision, most important being to have a well reasoned decision made so that people can get on with literacy, translation and other activities. It needs to be noted that this decision, like all orthography decisions, should be seen to be tentative. Once the orthography is in use, its advantages and disadvantages become clear. In the case of Esimbi, we need to also note that marking one pitch alone may not, in the long run be adequate to disambiguate enough the tonal ambiguities.
9.2 Update the \lx field in the Esimbi database
Once you have a firm, yet tentative, decision made, you should go through the Esimbi database and add the grave accents (or whatever) to all the words that deserve it. If the Esimbi team needs help getting started with this, Phil could show them how to create a filter in Toolbox and be able to focus on the relevant words.
9.3 Make an exhaustive list of all remaining “Esimbi Tone Pairs”
Even after switching to our proposed marking system, there will remain ambiguity between various words in Esimbi. (Hopefully, not more than 30 or so words will still be ambiguous, despite marking grave accents on all low tone syllables.) These words should be carefully collected and analyzed as to their potential for causing problems. If serious problems do indeed occur with these additional words, two main options are available: one, marking as well either high or mid tones throughout, or two, finding some creative way (double consonants, double vowels, some other diacritic) to disambiguate these pairs. We are not at all against using this last strategy for disambiguating small numbers of words in a language, but not for so many problem words as we found in Esimbi without diacritics.
9.4 Fill in an explicit orthography statement for Esimbi
At the same time that he has been working on this research, Phil also updated the SIL Cameroon Orthography Template, both English and French versions. It is now much improved and gives a formatted and highly structured system for presenting your orthography decisions in an explicit manner. Once again, Phil could help the Esimbi team to get started on this process, leaving an explicit record of the current decisions. Part of filling out the tone section of this statement will be explicitly stating the adopted solution for the remaining minimal tone pairs (from section 9.3 above).
9.5 Make an English-Esimbi transition primer
Once the Esimbi team has decided on a fixed writing system to try out, get help from a literacy consultant to make a transition primer, to help those who already are literate in English to quickly transfer their literacy skills to Esimbi. The consultant should help you design very different ways of teaching the low pitch diacritic on the one hand, and the one or two grammatical diacritics on the other hand.
9.6 Publish an Esimbi-English bilingual lexicon
Once you have a fairly stable writing system and a database that is in good shape, you can publish a bilingual lexicon to help jump start literacy efforts. Even if the writing system is fairly logical and simple (at least compared to English and French), many people find help by being able to look up words and be sure that their writing is spelled correctly. What you want to aim for is Esimbi people writing their own language, not just reading it.

By the way, SIL currently has connections with the Kay Williamson Educational Fund (KWEF) and they are going to pay for the publication of many of our dictionaries/lexicons in the next few years. We are also facilitating the publication of such books by many of our partners, as well as by our own SIL teams. The publisher does have certain criteria, and two that you should know early, if you want someone else to pay for your lexicon, is that you should have IPA phonetics included for each main entry (which I believe you already have, though you may want to fine tune it) and you need the plural forms for all nouns, not just for irregular nouns.

Since Dan and Lisa Friesen happened to show up in Yaounde just as we finished our research, we briefly told them what we had found and said we would soon issue this written report.

If Phil or I can be of further help by giving you advice or by showing you how to begin any of these additional tasks, don’t hesitate to ask us.