Benjamin Pehrson

Onnele is the local language name for Northern One [onr], an undocumented, endangered Papuan language in the West Wapei subgroup of the Torricelli family in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. The Torricelli family includes around fifty languages, yet accessible descriptions are lacking, especially for the West Wapei subgroup.
Using a corpus of natural texts reflecting various discourse types, I seek to narrow the typological Torricelli research gap with a data-driven grammar description of Onnele, particularly the Goiniri dialect. While I may occasionally highlight some remarkable contrasts between the related Onnele dialects of Wolwale and Romei-Barera, this thesis will focus on the Goiniri dialect.
This research will include description of the Onnele context (geographical, historical, cultural, and sociolinguistic setting), phonology (phonemes, syllable structure, morphophonemics, and prosody, including tone), morphosyntax (word classes, noun and verb phrases, adpositional phrases, clauses and sentences), and functional grammatical categories (number, possession, tense, aspect, mood, accompaniment, directionality, pluractionality). The thesis culminates with a description of text relationships beyond the sentence at the level of paragraph and discourse. Interesting Onnele features, with atypical Torricelli features marked [!] include:
• min. phoneme inventory – no voicing contrasts [!]
• lexical tone contrasts [!]
• min. residue of noun classes on ADJ & kinship [!]
• 12+ strategies for marking plurality
• clusivity distinction in pronouns [!]
• ‘and’-verbs (cf. Brown & Dryer 2008)
• remarkable complex pronouns
• non-configurational noun phrases (Donohue 2000)
• prepositions and postpositional locative nouns
• 5 possessive constructions?
• no grammatical tense
• 10+ verbal aspects
• regular verb serialization without clause chaining
• topicalization particle
• demonstratives also pointing to time and text
• surface structure marking at discourse peaks

A longstanding debate continues regarding coherent structure in the Koine Greek New Testament Letter of James. I argue that multiple linguistic perspectives confirm the central theme of trust in divine grace and mercy as foundational to Christian behavior. Applying Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive semantics theory to James, a faith-journey conceptual metaphor structures the life of faith according to the source-path-goal image schema with a born-of-grace conceptual metaphor reflecting the source. Using Longacre and Hwang’s discourse theory, I describe James in terms of discourse type, notional schemata, macrosegmentation, skewing, paragraph relations, verb/clause salience, and embedding. A prototype approach reveals James as a persuasive text with embedded hortatory and expository units. Movements of mitigation and intensification most clearly reveal the coherent structure within the text’s profile and peaks. The controlling theme is ultimately derived from the above investigations in terms of van Dijk’s theory of macrostructure.

This thesis represents a holistic approach to inner-biblical allusions. A method for analyzing allusions is developed and applied to the text of Jas. 3:1-12. I then consider how the proposed allusions should be communicated in modern translations of the Bible. Thus, apparent discrepancies in the text are resolved through recognition of James's allusions. After suggesting possible markers of allusion in the text, I identify James's probable referent texts, analyze these passages within their own context, trace the tradition history of allusive themes, consider how James intended his allusions to be understood, and apply a series of tests to evaluate the existence and interpretation of the proposed allusions. This thesis argues that James, by alluding to the flood and post-flood narratives of Genesis, supports the theological framework that he only implies in the passage, namely, that what is impossible for humanity is possible with God. Just as God was sovereign over His creation when He re-created the earth in the time of Noah, God has begun the eschatological new creation in human hearts through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That is why James can assert the futility of human attempts to become perfect in righteousness and, at the same time, expect his readers to discontinue their pattern of duplicitous talk. If the proposed Noachic allusions can be confirmed to a high degree of certainty, I propose that they be communicated in modern translations of the Bible either through explicit words in the translation or through supplementary Bible helps.

Since the early days of Cameron Townsend and Kenneth Pike, SIL has sought to integrate high level academic scholarship with the practical needs of people on the margins of society. This presentation explores various ways that we can integrate scholarship and service in the PNG context such that each domain can better inform the other. This will include various opportunities available here in PNG as well as recent experiences in applying to the Pike Center Small Grants Program and the Pike Center Scholar Development Program.

The Torricelli language of Onnele (ISO 639: onr) includes a remarkable set of strategies to indicate number, and to express other related semantic notions of extendedness and pluractionality that go well beyond the paradigmatic categorization of number. Nominal plurals are rare outside of kinship terms, and the number of any particular referent is generally inferred from context. For object referents, the normative strategy is little interested in precision of count, which stands in stark contrast to the geographically closest Torricelli language of Olo, which includes over fifty subclasses of nouns based on number markings (Staley 15). The Onnele counting system only includes ‘one’ (wokera) and ‘two’ (plainre), and then combines these (e.g. plainrikera ‘three’). Nevertheless, Onnele exhibits over fifteen different strategies to indicate some kind of number.
Number is shown in a wide variety of ways among Onnele nouns, adjectives, possessive pronouns, question words, verbs, conjunctions, and pronouns. A compound noun includes each of the singular parts to form the resulting plural complex (e.g. ino ‘younger.brother’ + rani ‘older.brother’ = inrani ‘brothers’). This strategy allows for greater disambiguation than a mere singular/plural distinction, for another construction adds a plural suffix to some kinship terms (e.g. rani ‘older.brother’ + -mpi ‘PL’ = ranimpi ‘older.brothers’). Many kinship terms use different roots for singular and plural (e.g. awa / mokapi ‘mother’s.younger.sister(s)’). A few nouns can show plurality through partial or full reduplication, yet this often shows plurality in the sense of a large degree, or in a distributive sense. The same is true of adjectival suffixes. Possessive pronouns can sometimes indicate the number of the possessed noun, but this is still mostly determined from context. Question words can indicate number (e.g. fina ‘who.SG’, fopi ‘who.PL’). Most verbs are regularly marked with a portmanteau subject agreement morpheme across a paradigm that distinguishes singular and non-singular. Some verbs can also be marked for object number agreement, and these suffixes exhibit the greatest divergence of number-marking concord among the closely related Onnele dialects. The Onnele pronoun system exhibits a complex system of number – almost an open class in its use of the ‘and’-verb to form compound pronouns – in order to track numbered referents among dual forms as well as any other combination of numbered referents (e.g. wuyape ‘3SG.and.2PL’). A verbal prefix yem- conveys some kind of pluractional meaning of reciprocity or coordinated action among its actors, depending on the lexical and contextual constraints. Finally, separate verb lexemes are sometimes used to indicate whether the action is done to one object or to a plurality of them.
The semantic category of number is much more complex than simply identifying the singularity or plurality of nouns. Rather, number may include various semantically related notions to plurality across many word classes, and this complexity deserves more attention, as indicated by such recent typological volumes as Storch and Dimmendaal 2014 and Mattiola 2019. For the Onnele data, I need to look further into those nouns that do exhibit nominal plural distinctions and classify them accordingly. Also, some number markings were previously labelled as ‘plural’ when some other kind of extendedness or pluractionality may really be at play (e.g. adjective suffixes). The distinction between ompla ‘thing’ and ommo ‘things’ may really be something other than singular/plural since local speakers frequently use them interchangeably for singular and plural referents. Since this noun can also be used in various senses to indicate ‘food’ and ‘work’, perhaps the distinction is more along the lines of countable vs. uncountable.

The Aitape West Translation Program (AWTP), which includes 10 languages in 3 language families in Papua New Guinea (PNG), now publishes all printed copies of their translations as diglots, with the vernacular translation in parallel with a readable back translation (BT) in the LWC, Tok Pisin. Local church leaders, including some who are also translators, believe this strategy is the most effective way to engage their multilingual communities and congregations with Scripture. Tok Pisin alone is not enough because many local people do not understand it well, and it lacks the same precision of meaning and depth of emotion their local languages convey. Vernacular alone is not enough because many people do not understand the local language well: some have married into their village from other language communities, some are local people who have returned after living in a faraway town so long they lack fluency in their own native language, and some church members live in a nearby village where a different language is spoken. Because their translations differ exegetically and stylistically from the standard Tok Pisin translation, they decided they could not use it in their diglots. Additional work is required to prepare a BT that is of the same high quality as the translation itself. AWTP has partially mitigated this by producing one BT that is shared by up to four translations in the same language family. This is possible because the teams are already producing together translations that are as similar as they can be and only as different as they must be. For checking, consultants are given an interlinear in Paratext for each translation in addition to the readable (somewhat free) BT for a language family's translations.

After 16 years of experimenting (read: critical assessment and adjustment) in a creative strategy cluster project, it seems that there are more gray areas today concerning best practices and what strategies are encouraged or even acceptable within the Bible translation movement, especially as it pertains to  expectations of various partners concerning sustainability, effectiveness, and the roles of local colleagues and expatriate missionaries. The waters are most significantly muddied in the Pacific Area where average language community populations are considerably smaller than the rest of the world. Appropriate ‘Common Framework’ principles have been applied in vastly different ways by  the various resource, technical, and impact partners such that our assumptions, goals and methods are far from common, often without the partners even realizing it. This has a substantial effect on our ability to relate well to one another, and leaves outstanding questions of who has responsibility for which tasks. Underlying these awkward relationships are some major discrepancies in how we each view the end goal of our joint mission, for example, in the way we develop sustainable programs that involve ‘blakskin’ and ‘waitskin’ practitioners from very different cultural backgrounds. This presentation represents my own evaluation and honest critique of the approaches that the 11-language Aitape West Translation Project has followed, with implications for making recommendations in the PNG context for the way we view our ends, relationships, strategic planning, capacity building, resourcing and reporting, language boundaries, multi-lingualism, discipleship, training MTTs, and the role of linguistics, literacy and other holistic language development tasks within the Bible translation movement.

As one of the furthest northwestern language varieties of the Torricelli family, the Romei Onnele dialect of Northern One displays a rich pronoun system that provides a remarkable example of language change. The complex Romei Onnele pronoun system is built upon a set of seven basic free pronouns and a set of three emphatic free pronouns. This includes a first person plural clusivity distinction, a feature that appears elsewhere among the extensive subgrouping of the West Wapei dialect chain, yet otherwise is rare within this linguistically diverse region of northcentral New Guinea. A complete lack of gender distinction is also quite unique within the Torricelli family. Free subject pronouns are syntactically optional since verbs are regularly marked for person and number with bound subject pronoun prefixes, and free object pronouns are sometimes also optional for a limited number of verbs that include an object pronoun suffix. An alternative set of three emphatic pronouns are used only in combination with the basic pronouns. Asymmetry in the paradigm of basic and emphatic free pronouns provides a clue for understanding diachronic developments of the Onnele pronoun system. These include the emergence of the clusivity distinction and disyllabic forms among the basic free pronouns as well as neutralization among the emphatic forms. An extensive number of dual and compound pronouns are formed by combining one or more of the free pronouns with a verbal form meaning ‘and’ or ‘with’ along with its bound subject and object affixes. Ordering appears somewhat significant. Thus, the complex system of free pronouns in Romei Onnele is quite productive, including over 130 forms. Perhaps the compound forms are better understood as verb serialization for which some of the more common forms are in the process of becoming grammaticized.

Paratext 7 will include many new and welcome tools that enable
translation teams to interact more easily with their data and to do that safely between multiple team members in various locations. Ben Pehrson will demonstrate (1) creating and tracking the status of translation notes by multiple team members, (2) preserving an easily-accessible history of changes made to the translation, (3) comparing versions of a draft to see what has recently been changed, (4) comparing translations in related languages, and (5) sending and receiving changes between team members via the internet, network drive, or small email packets. UBS hopes to release a stable Paratext 7 beta version in mid-June. John Nystrom and Ben Pehrson have been helping UBS test and develop the alpha version since November.

This is my personal testimony of how excited I have become from seeing the benefits of working together in the Aitape West cluster project over the last year. I will briefly share what I have seen as the gains for us in multiple aspects of the project, both in terms of expats working together as well as translators from multiple languages working  together. We have experienced these gains in our planning, logistical problems, practical knowledge for living and working in the bush, complementary skills in language work, translation process, translation checking, social/spiritual/emotional health, cultural issues, and in making tough decisions. It's fun to work together. Every situation is different, but we would be happy if our story could facilitate for others to experience the kind of blessings that we have enjoyed.

In April/May 2008, John Nystrom and Ben Pehrson simultaneously did the final checking of Luke for four related languages involved in the Aitape West Translation Project. Ben and John will discuss the checking steps that preceded 'Final Checking’, how they conducted the checking sessions together, and what steps the team is following to complete Luke in 11 languages.

Scholarship on the Letter of James was dominated in the 20th century by the perspective that the letter lacks any coherence that unifies its parts. In recent decades, a near consensus has emerged such that the letter is upheld as highly structured and coherent. However, the proposals are many and varied. This presentation demonstrates how Robert Longacre’s peak and profile analysis contributes to the current debate concerning the existence of a coherent macrostructure in James. Discourse peak has been described as a zone of turbulence in which discourse features exhibit shifts from the normal patterns for the discourse type. Discourse features considered include rhetorical underlining, concentration of participants, heightened vividness (including the nominal/verbal ratio, verb tense/mood, person and number, and dialogue devices), change of pace (including length of units, frequency of conjunctions and preposed adverbial clauses), vantage point, role reversal and orientation, change in particles (including interjections and negatives), and change in tone (including grammatical complexity and vocatives). The analysis of discourse peak is properly understood in relation to the profile analysis or horizontal prominence throughout the entire text. In James the peaks correspond to the points of highest tension in a text that exhibits an overall rising and falling pattern of persuasive strain. In translation, receptor languages may not exhibit all the same patterns of individual discourse features as found in the Greek text of James, but the implications for a coherent macrostructure should be preserved.

How do Greek verbs agree with coordinated subjects? Does the verb agree with the plurality of the combined subjects, or does the verb sometimes attract to the singular number of the closest subject? Advanced Greek grammars are somewhat inconsistent in their presentations of such constructions, while introductory and intermediate Greek grammars are contradictory and quite misleading. This presentation will illustrate that the default agreement pattern in Greek is that the verb will normally agree with the plural sense of the coordinated subject. Singular verbs with coordinated subjects are usually explained by various semantic considerations rather than formal attraction. Therefore, such semantic influences on the syntax of the sentence often have implications for the meaning of the original text. A further consideration for translation is that the receptor language may exhibit different agreement patterns for such constructions with coordinated subjects.

This is a basic tentative grammar description of Onnele Romei-Barera, a Northern One dialect of the West Wapei Group in the Torricelli mountains of Papua New Guinea. Onnele Romei-Barera is classified with the ISO-639 language code for Northern One (onr). Onnele is the name that local speakers call their own language. Onnele Romei-Barera has the dialect code 21168 Northern One - Romei-Barera. The villages of Romei and Barera actually represent two closely related dialects of Onnele. The villages are adjacent to one
another, and their language varieties are so closely related that for most practical purposes they can be considered one dialect.
The villages of Romei and Barera are located several miles southwest of the Sissano Lagoon in the Aitape West Inland Region of the Aitape West LLG Area, Aitape Lumi District, in Sandaun Province.
This description is based almost entirely upon the spoken and written texts of James Panso and Rodney Ufa. This includes ten recorded texts which total over 14 minutes of running speech. It also includes three additional stories that were written without being spoken and recorded. Those 13 texts include 447 unique words, a total of 1525 words and 113 sentences. Lists of written elicited words, phrases, and sentences
were also utilized. When those are included, the texts include 533 unique words. Reference was minimally also made to texts that had previously been translated into the Onnele Romei-Barera language.
Benjamin Pehrson facilitated the data collection and helped type the data into this description. This description is the product of a month of working together with James Panso and Rodney Ufa to analyze their Onnele RomBar language in a Discover Your Language workshop held from 23 October through 20 November 2013. This workshop was held at the Pacific Institute of Languages, Arts and Translation, located at the SIL PNG Training Centre in Ukarumpa, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.
This descrip􀆟on is intended for two primary purposesː
• First, it is meant to aid James Panso and Otto Perau in their translation work, as well as Rodney Ufa and his partners in their literacy efforts. They work as a part of a larger team in the Aitape West Translation Project, a cluster project sponsored by SIL-PNG working in 11 languages of the Aitape West LLG area.
• Second, this description is intended to serve as a resource for linguists and other scholars who may have an interest in learning about the Onnele Romei-Barera language, or the One, West Wapei and Torricelli language families.

This paper proposes that the ancient Jewish calendar system of observing 49-year Jubilee cycles was interrupted sometime between Ezekiel’s vision at the start of the 17th Jubilee year in 574 BC and when the restored nation started counting them again in 463 BC (two years off from the previous calendar). This pattern aligns with some Christian interpretations of Daniel’s 70-weeks vision that attempt to locate the middle of the 70th week in 31 AD, the supposed year of Christ’s crucifixion. Yet, those dates are still seven years off from the Jubilee cycles that were being counted by the post-exilic Jews, since their 70th Sabbatical year started in 27 AD making the midpoint of that final week 24 AD. However, a close reading of Daniel’s vision of 70 Sabbatical years accords with a date that begins counting new Jubilee cycles in 453 B.C. This date follows a correction to the date of Artaxerxes’ 20th year as has been sufficiently demonstrated in historical research even though it remains hidden in what is commonly stated in most secondary consensus literature. Many factors have contributed to various ways of pinpointing dates for post-exilic Jubilee cycles; however, it is proposed here that the discrepancy between these two calendar systems actually derives from the heavenly message communicated at the very end of Daniel: “Go your way, Daniel, for these words are concealed and sealed up until the end time.” Thus, the eventual outcome of this divine concealing was a re-instituted Jubilee cycle among the post-exilic community that left its mark throughout the historical record, yet this observance of Sabbatical years in Second Temple Judaism remained at odds with the timing of the ten Jubilee cycles decreed from heaven and revealed to Daniel. Therefore, it was in this way that the new Jubilee cycle was “concealed” throughout the history of those 490 years, but the decreed timeline communicated by Gabriel was still relevant to the actual events that were foretold in the vision.

This study responds to the status quaestionis concerning the New Testament Letter of James with a marked departure from current scholarship that remains largely skeptical of definitive hypotheses regarding authorship, historical situation, or any coherently articulated message. However, the conjunction of recent historical and astronomical evidence with the prophetic record concerning ancient Jewish messianic expectation suggests that James the Righteous sent this letter within a few months of the Festival of Dedication in A.D. 36 to the Jewish believers in Jesus who had been scattered after the stoning of Stephen. Widespread correspondence of the letter’s themes with historical particulars—of the early Christian history of Acts, of Daniel’s vision of the seventy weeks, and of the celebration of Jewish religious festivals—commend this date as plausible. Given the familiarity of the Jewish Christian audience with their enlightened messianic understanding of Jesus after the resurrection and Pentecost, James had little need to explain foundational teachings regarding their newfound faith in Jesus as the long-awaited Christ. Rather, his primary purpose was to clarify the Holy Spirit’s role in producing the fruit of righteousness in the believer’s experience of eschatological new birth, and to convey the importance of perseverance towards perfection through single-minded love for God and neighbor before the coming judgment of the Lord. In this context, James likely understood himself to be leading the faithful of Israel in humble repentance—not to restore the nation from exile—but to bring in everlasting righteousness before the seventy weeks ordained for the people in Daniel’s vision was complete. Thus the letter, which identifies its author as Ἰάκωβος, was disseminated in typological fulfillment of God’s interactions with Israel’s patriarch ‫יעקב‬. As such, it follows the climax of that history in the passion of Christ and commences an eschatological dénouement to the story of the younger brother who stole the birthright of Esau and subsequently fathered the twelve tribes of Israel. A kind of glorified mirroring of that ancient plot is now in view as Yeshua’s younger brother Yaʿaqov leads his people to righteousness by reflecting the glory of Christ as a movement in the divine narrative that will very soon extend the blessings of the new covenant in יושׁע to the descendants of עשׂו.  ‬‬

As one of the furthest northwestern language varieties of the Torricelli family, the Romei Onnele dialect of Northern One displays a rich pronoun system that provides a remarkable example of language change. The complex Romei Onnele pronoun system is built upon a set of seven basic free pronouns and a set of three emphatic free pronouns. It includes a first person plural clusivity distinction, a feature that appears elsewhere among the extensive subgrouping of the West Wapei dialect chain, yet otherwise is rare within this linguistically diverse region of northcentral New Guinea. A complete lack of gender distinction is also quite unique within the Torricelli family. Free subject pronouns are syntactically optional since verbs are regularly marked for person and number with bound subject pronoun prefixes, and free object pronouns are sometimes also optional for a limited number of verbs that include an object pronoun suffix. An alternative set of three emphatic pronouns are used only in combination with the basic pronouns. Asymmetry in the paradigm of basic and emphatic free pronouns provides a clue for understanding diachronic developments of the Onnele pronoun system. These include the emergence of the clusivity distinction and disyllabic forms among the basic free pronouns as well as neutralization among the emphatic forms. An extensive number of dual and compound pronouns are formed by combining one or more of the free pronouns with a verbal form meaning ‘and’ or ‘with’ along with its bound subject and object affixes. Ordering appears somewhat significant. Thus, the complex system of free pronouns in Romei Onnele is quite productive, including over 130 forms. Perhaps the compound forms are better understood as verb serialization for which some of the more common forms are in the process of becoming grammaticized.

One, two, some, each, many, all. I consider the syntax-semantics interface in Greek clauses having quantifier arguments and claim that partitive subjects are disallowed with 1st or 2nd person verbs. Quantifiers are unmarked for person, so scholarship generalises that pronominal quantifier subjects collocate with verbs of any person. This, however, does not hold for partitive constructions. Koine literature widely confirms that partitive pronominal subjects require 3rd person verbs even when the antecedent derives from wider 1st or 2nd person referents within the discourse. Therefore, partitivity is precluded by 1st or 2nd person verbs. In early Christianity, this has the greatest import for understanding τινες ‘some’ in 1Cor 6.11 and πολλοὶ ‘many’ in Jas 3.1. In each case the 2nd person verb constrains interpretation, and the argument must apply to all members of the audience, not only some. Furthermore, the emergence of unrestricted application to the whole Christian community reveals a significantly stronger argument regarding the impossibility of believers—if they interact with one another according to the cultural rules and societal laws of the Roman empire—to reflect the image of God, inherit his kingdom, bear his Spirit, teach the brothers, or share the righteous responsibility of judging the world.