A New Committee to Give Leadership to the Njyem

Yesterday, Dec. 23, Mary and I returned from the Njyem city of Ngoyla, Cameroon, where we spent 10 days. We introduced the Njyem language committee to the new orthography for their language that we designed and encourage them to try. It is available to anyone with interest in such things at my public drop box, as is described here. On the 18th the language committee board was elected. The President is Aimé Mbɨ. He and the others of his board have a 2-year mandate. Their positions do not entitle them to any salaries. The name of the language committee is CODELAN: Comité de développement de la langue njyem. The authorities of Ngoyla were not physically present during the meeting, but they were invited and gave us a public place to meet in. The committee will meet again in January to approve an action plan. We are going to write a training manual as fast as possible to assist them in meeting their goals.

AIDS Awareness Needed for the Njyem

In February I worked with Collette Nkom on an AIDS brochure that is now available for use in helping the Njyem community resist this terrible danger. You can print the document from Adobe Acrobat on any printer.

The Gospel of Mark in Njyem

In February 2010 we sent a preliminary version of Mark to the Njyem villages. We are now done with a light revision of the whole Gospel, incorporating some new proposals for the writing system. We will be going out to Ngoyla on Dec. 10. You can see the document here, in Open Office Writer format, which works well in Word, as well. We are also taking a summary of the writing system to test out: pg1, pg2 and pg3. If we can convince ourselves that people are learning to write and to read with a minimum of effort, we will do the pedagogical manual that corresponds to this orthographic standard.

Now Available to You!: The Njyem orthography

The Njyem orthography ("writing system") is described in French on 12 half sheets ("A5"). Included in it are some sample texts. This is our attempt to make this available to the Njyem community and to its French-speaking friends. The front and back sides of page1, page2, and page3 make up the entire Open Office document. We returned from Ngoyla Dec. 23 and know now that some speakers of Njyem can become literate and writers using the new system. If anyone in Brazzaville, Souanke or Ouesso can make use of it, please send me news of your experience and the reactions people have to it.

Collaborative Research

We in SIL are all about cooperation, and nothing means more to me than cooperating on the frontiers of science. In that vein, I am posting the zipped-up FLEx project on Swo ("[sox]" in the Ethnologue) that I have been working on for about 2 months. This project will be going dormant if others don't pitch in and make it their shared concern. FLEx is the package of programs that is properly referred to as "Fieldworks Language Explorer". It is free, which by no means indicates that we set a low store of value on it. "Why are you letting this promising project go dormant", you ask. The answer is that we must move back to the Njyem project, which has the potential of taking off.