Now that we have finished drafting and checking Luke in the Zanaki language, we're working hard on getting it ready for publication. One of the biggest jobs is checking spelling. Now, I (Misha) try to pay fairly close attention to spelling when I'm working with the translators and we make a lot of corrections during every check. So when I started spell-checking, I thought, "Oh, this won't take too long; I'm sure there are some mistakes, but I think we did pretty well checking most if Luke already."
WRONG!
Sure, we already caught a lot of errors, but there are still an awful lot of others! For example, check out these two words:
ang'ariri - "he shone"
ang'ariiri - "he deserved"
Believe it or not, both are correct. Now I just have to make sure every other instance of "shine" and "deserve" are correct, too, or readers might be a little bit confused!
okutura - incorrect spelling of "to put"
okutuura - correct spelling of "to put"
The incorrect spelling above is easy enough to fix throughout Luke, but realizing it is spelled inconsistently in the first place took some work. It was used so often with the short vowel that it looked correct, since the translators had been very consistent with it. It was the few instances of the incorrect one that tipped me off (and I first I thought it must be the incorrect one, since it only appeared a few times!).
I'm just glad I got glasses this past year!
Hey Misha, interesting one about okutura and okutuura. In the Kabwa language, both are correct. Okutura means 'to be able', okutuura means 'to put'. We caught a couple of funny typos for these two.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, did you catch the spelling mistake in the first paragraph of this blog? ;-)