In English we are used to the idea that nouns are either singular (‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘man’, ‘tree’, etc.) or plural (‘cats’, ‘dogs’, ‘men’, ‘trees’, etc.) Our language has taught us to refer to things in our environment as either one or many. But in the Enga language, nouns are neither singular nor plural; they are conceptual. What do I mean by that? Well, let me explain it by quoting Psalm 8:4, which says, “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” In this case, even though the word ‘man’ is technically singular, it does not refer to only one man. Rather it refers to the concept of man, or humanity. Similarly, although ‘son of man’ is singular, again it does not refer to just one person, but to humanity as a whole (although, in this case, it also hints at Jesus, who referred to himself as the ‘Son of Man’). The way ‘man’ and ‘son of man’ are used in Psalm 8:4 is a good description of Enga nouns in general. They are neither singular nor plural, but conceptual.
If that’s the case, how do we ever tell the difference between singular and plural in Enga? The answer is that the word ‘the’ in Enga can be singular or plural. Now in English the word ‘the’ does not tell us whether a noun is singular or plural; it is the form of the noun itself that tells us if it is singular or plural. For example, we know that ‘the cat’ is singular and ‘the cats’ is plural. But in Enga, it is the article that tells us if the noun is singular or plural. It would be like saying ‘the cat’ or ‘thes cat’ (if we were to invent the word ‘thes’ as the plural of ‘the’). It is only by the article that we know whether or not a noun is singular or plural. Without an article (or a determiner like ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’, ‘those’), the noun is purely conceptual.
But Enga has an additional feature that English does not formally have, and that is what is called ‘dual’. You see Enga does not separate only into singular or plural; Enga has an additional category for exactly two nouns, which is called ‘dual’. So in Enga we can say ‘the cat’ ‘the-two cat’ and ‘thes cat’. Now the hardest things to learn in a foreign language are the distinctions in that language that your own language doesn’t make. In English we do not distinguish between dual and plural, and so it is quite difficult for me to remember to use dual forms instead of plural forms (just like it is difficult for Engans to remember the difference between ‘he’ and ‘she’ because in Enga the same word is used for both). Interestingly the dual form is also used to indicate a small amount of something, particularly something that cannot be counted. For example, in Matthew 13:33 the Enga translation reads, “The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who took a couple of yeast and mixed it into three flour bags, and the yeast spread throughout all the flour and it grew big.” It is not that the woman took two grains of yeast only, but that she took a small amount of yeast.
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| Is heaven singular, dual, or plural? |
In translation, sometimes is helpful to have conceptual nouns rather than singular or plural nouns. Take the word ‘heaven’ for example. What many people do not know is that the term ‘the kingdom of heaven’ is literally ‘the kingdom of the heavens’. (And to make matters even more complicated, in Hebrew ‘heaven’ is a dual noun: ‘two heavens’.) Now it can be odd for us to think of ‘heaven’ (or ‘sky’) as being more than one, but that is certainly the biblical concept. For example, in 2 Corinthians 12:2, Paul talks about being “caught up to the third heaven.” So the English translation ‘the kingdom of heaven’ is a slight mistranslation that should more properly be ‘the kingdom of the heavens’. But in Enga, we don’t have to worry about whether to write ‘heaven’ or ‘two heavens’ or ‘heavens’ because we can just leave off the definite article so that the word ‘heaven’ is conceptual rather than singular or dual or plural, which may actually be a better representation anyway since ‘the kingdom of the heavens’ refers not so much to a physical kingdom in a physical location, but to the concept of the reign of God.
Well, hopefully this short explanation has given you just ‘a couple of’ knowledge (to speak in an Engan manner) into how languages work and some of the things we need to take into consideration in the translation process.
