bhiikumaniirye
bhiikumanirye
If I were a native speaker of Zanaki, the two words above might be easy to distinguish. Context within a sentence likely helps, too, so one doesn't have to rely only on whether there is a short "i" or long "ii" in a word to know it's meaning.
I'm not a Zanaki person, and when I came across these two words in back-to-back verses in Acts, I thought that perhaps one of them was simply misspelled. It looked like a typo had happened, but I could come up with a linguistic explanation of why there might be a difference (I'll spare you that one). The context seemed the same to me, though, so I wasn't sure why one would be different than the other, even though I could theoretically figure out how an extra "i" had ended up in one word.
I gave the translators the benefit of the doubt and wrote a polite note in Acts asking if these really were two different words. The answer came back saying yes, in fact, they were! I'm glad I asked in a friendly way and didn't assume they had made a mistake!
If you're curious, the difference is that the top word, the one with the long "ii", means that people gathered indoors somewhere. The bottom word means they gathered outside in an open place. Languages are fascinating and complicated!
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