nɨkʉʉbaha - "I was afraid"
nɨkʉbaha - "I will give them"
Those two words occur in back-to-back verses in Genesis 26, the chapter the Ikizu translators and I were reviewing yesterday. Seeing that the only difference between the two was vowel length, we double-checked to make sure both were correct, which they were. Usually when we're doing our final read through of a chapter to make sure every little detail is as it should be, we find quite a few mistakes. Upon seeing these two words so close together, we assumed one of the two must be wrong. When realized that they were right, we were rather encouraged after a long day of spell-checking!
A little interesting tidbit (okay, interesting for linguists, boring for the rest of the world) is that these words have totally different roots (-ʉbaha versus -ha) and prefixes (nɨ- is on both, then one has ka- and the other has kʉ- and ba-), but the arrangement of them happens to make them look quite alike.
nɨ + ka + ʉbaha = nɨkʉʉbaha
nɨ + kʉ + ba + ha = nɨkʉbaha
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