Kiribati Languages: Difference between revisions

The Gilbertese language is written in the Latin script, which was introduced in the 1860s when Hiram Bingham Jr, a Protestant missionary, first translated the Bible into Gilbertese. Previously, the language was unwritten. Long vowels and consonants are since Independence (1979) represented by doubling the character, and a few digraphs are used for the velar nasals (/ŋ ŋː/) and velarized bilabials (i.e. /pˠ mˠ/). Bingham Jr and the first Roman Catholic missionaries (1888) did not indicate in their script the vowel length by doubling the character. The discrepancies between Protestant and Roman Catholic spelling have been an issue since 1895. Neither clearly distinguished the pronunciation of the vowel /a/ after velarized bilabials, like /pˠ/ (bw) and /mˠ/ (mw), that result in discrepancies between old scripts and modern scripts. For example, the word maneaba should be written ''mwaneaba'' or even ''mwaaneaba'' and the atoll of Makin, ''Mwaakin''. The Kiribati Protestant Church also recently used a different script for these two velarized bilabials, “b’a” and “m’a” forms are found in Protestant publications. <ref>Wikipedia contributors, "Gilbertese language," in ''Wikipedia: the Free Encyclopedia'', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbertese_language#Written_Gilbertese, accessed 2 February 2021.</ref>