Linguistic Gap Analysis
Habakkuk — Linguistic Gap Analysis (Hmong Language Package)
0. Purpose and Method
This document executes PRD Phase 1 Step 8. It does not re-derive the term inventory — that inventory is fixed in analysis/08_core_glossary.md and assets/bible_term_registry.json — but instead analyzes that inventory for four things:
- Doctrine vocabulary matrix — for each of the four assigned Habakkuk doctrines, which Hmong terms carry the doctrinal weight, where they are weak, and what strategy compensates.
- Crowded semantic neighborhoods — places where a single Hmong lexical root (already fenced in the Romans baseline, or newly reused here) is being asked to carry two or more theologically distinct senses within Habakkuk itself, or across the Romans↔Habakkuk boundary, and therefore needs an explicit fencing rule.
- Missing vocabulary — concepts with no ready-made Hmong Christian equivalent at all, requiring either coined periphrasis or transliteration.
- Transliteration vs. paraphrase decisions — a consolidated ledger of which proper nouns/technical terms are transliterated vs. periphrastically translated, with rationale.
- Ranked risk list — a single prioritized list for theologian review sequencing.
Full-book coverage confirmation: Habakkuk 1, 2, and 3 have all been reviewed. Chapter 1 (complaint + Chaldean commissioning), Chapter 2 (woes + the core passage 2:1-4 + idol polemic), and Chapter 3 (theophany psalm + closing confession of trust) are all load-bearing for this curriculum’s four doctrines; no chapter is thin enough to log as “reviewed, no new terms” — every chapter contributes at least one Medium-or-above finding below.
1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
| Doctrine | Available Hmong Terms (locked or candidate) | Weaknesses | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Wrestling with God over Injustice | tus ncaj ncees (righteous, reused Critical); kev txiav txim ncaj (justice, N4/id 23); tus limhiam (wicked, N5/id 24); Txoj Kevcai (ntawm Vajtswv/Mauxes) (Law, reused Critical); kuv tej lus thov/tsis txaus siab uas kuv tau hais rau Yawmsaub (covenant-lawsuit complaint, N2/id 13); tus Dawb Huv (Holy One, N13/id 4) | (a) Hmong elder-deference culture (kev hwm laus) discourages sustained direct questioning of authority; an unglossed lament reads as disrespectful, while an over-softened one loses the covenant-lawsuit genre’s legitimate force. (b) kev txiav txim ncaj (justice) risks bleeding into the forensic-imputation frame already reserved for tus ncaj ncees/justification, collapsing a social-ethical claim (absence of civic justice, 1:4) into a soteriological one. (c) tus Dawb Huv shares the dawb huv root flagged for ritual-purity collision in the Romans baseline’s sanctification entry. | Teach lament-as-covenant-lawsuit explicitly as a legitimate biblical form of faith (not rebellion) at first occurrence (1:2). Keep kev txiav txim ncaj (civic/judicial justice) and tus ncaj ncees + raug suav tias ncaj ncees (forensic righteousness) lexically paired but functionally distinguished by a footnote at 1:4 and again at 2:4, so learners see continuity of root without doctrinal conflation. Fence tus Dawb Huv per §2 below. |
| 2. The Righteous Shall Live by Faith | tus ncaj ncees (reused Critical, direct OT anchor of Rom 1:17); kev ntseeg / ntseeg (reused Critical, carrying added Hebrew emunah steadfastness sense); yuav muaj txoj sia (shall live, N-new/id 32, deliberately not using the baseline’s ...nyob mus ib txhis eternal-life suffix); zaj yog toog uas Yawmsaub qhia (vision, N8/id 11); chaw zov tsom / zov tos saib (watchpost, N7/id 10); lub caij uas Vajtswv twb teem tseg lawm (appointed time, N9/id 14) | (a) kev ntseeg in ordinary Hmong Christian usage tends toward a one-time assent/trust event; Habakkuk’s emunah is thicker — steadfast, enduring covenant fidelity across delay and hardship — and the existing baseline note (fixed for Romans usage) does not by itself carry this durative sense into a reader’s mind. (b) yuav muaj txoj sia intentionally omits the eternal-life qualifier, creating a real risk that learners either (i) wrongly import full NT eternal life into 2:4’s immediate historical referent (survival of Babylonian judgment), or (ii) conversely treat Paul’s citation of this verse in Romans 1:17 as a mere proof-text mismatch once they notice the differing renderings. (c) zaj yog toog (vision) risks being heard as one revelatory channel among several available (dreams, omens, shamanic trance), rather than the uniquely authoritative disclosure it is. | This is the core passage of the curriculum (Hab 2:1-4) and receives the highest density of teaching-note requirements in this Language Package: (i) introduce emunah’s durative sense explicitly wherever kev ntseeg occurs in Habakkuk, cross-referencing but not replacing the Romans baseline gloss; (ii) hold yuav muaj txoj sia and the baseline’s txoj sia nyob mus ib txhis together in an explicit two-stage teaching note (temporal preservation now, fulfilled/expanded into eternal life through Christ per Rom 1:17/Gal 3:11/Heb 10:38) rather than merging or silently choosing one; (iii) apply the chazon contrast-teaching (see §3, N8) at every occurrence of zaj yog toog. |
| 3. God’s Sovereignty in Using Nations for Judgment | Vajtswv/Yawmsaub tsa [haiv neeg] sawv los ua tus rau txim (raising up a nation, N6/id 36, Critical); Vajtswv hwjchim (reused High, mandatory qualifier); lwm Haiv Neeg (nations, reused Low-Medium with re-contextualization note); dab mlom (idol, reused High); khob kev npau taws (cup of wrath, N11/id 40); kev npau taws ntawm Vajtswv (reused High) | (a) The “raising up” formula is structurally identical to the exact collision the Romans baseline documents for election/predestination (hmoov, impersonal fate): if God’s sovereign, personal commissioning of Babylon is heard through fate-vocabulary, both His personal purposiveness and Babylon’s own moral culpability (judged in the woes, 2:6-20) collapse simultaneously — a double doctrinal loss unique to this term. (b) nws hwm nws tus kheej lub hwjchim yam li tus dab (Chaldean self-idolized power, 1:11) is a vivid negative case study that could be mistaught as merely describing pagan religion abstractly rather than modeling exactly the collision the mandatory Vajtswv hwjchim qualifier exists to prevent in the reader’s own vocabulary use. | Treat N6 (id 36) as the single highest-priority new term in this Language Package (see Ranked List §5, item 1) — mandatory theologian review before any curriculum content ships. Require the volitional, purposive verb phrase in full at every occurrence, never a bare noun paraphrase, exactly mirroring the baseline’s rule for kev xaiv. Use 1:11 pedagogically as the “worked example” of why hwjchim must never appear bare — flip the vivid negative case into a teaching asset rather than a risk to be merely contained. |
| 4. Trust and Rejoicing amid Hardship | kev cawm dim / cawm (reused High); txoj kev khuv leej (mercy, reused Medium); kev cia siab (hope, reused Low); kev ua siab ntev (endurance, reused Low); kev xyiv fab / kev zoo siab rau hauv Yawmsaub (rejoice/exult, N16/id 52, High); tej uas raug tsim los (creation, reused Low) | (a) kev xyiv fab/kev zoo siab in ordinary Hmong usage is readily triggered by good harvest, health, or prosperity — precisely the agricultural/material blessings 3:17 lists and explicitly denies as the ground of the prophet’s joy. Without careful anchoring, 3:18’s climactic joy risks being heard as either (i) premature celebration presuming the hardship will soon lift, or (ii) a koob hmoov-adjacent good-fortune feeling, both of which invert the verse’s entire rhetorical point (joy despite total agricultural failure). (b) txoj kev khuv leej (mercy) sits in the same verse as kev npau taws (wrath) at 3:2 — the pairing is doctrinally essential (wrath held together with mercy) but linguistically fragile if either term drifts toward its collision-risk sibling (koob hmoov for mercy/grace confusion; capricious spirit-anger for wrath). | Mandatory teaching note at 3:17-19 explicitly contrasting kev xyiv fab rau hauv Yawmsaub against both (i) circumstantial happiness and (ii) koob hmoov-style harvest-fortune, using the text’s own list of failed crops/flocks as the pedagogical anchor — this verse is the strongest available anti-koob-hmoov illustration in the entire curriculum and should be flagged as such for lesson-writers. Keep mercy/wrath pairing at 3:2 taught as a single co-occurring unit, never split into separate lessons. |
2. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing
Habakkuk does not merely add new vocabulary; it re-deploys several Romans-baseline-fenced roots into new grammatical slots (titles, place-names, anthropological terms) where the existing fence may not automatically apply. Each neighborhood below requires an explicit, restated fencing rule for Phase 2 generation.
2.1 dawb huv root — now carrying THREE distinct referents
| Sense | Rendering | Baseline/New | Fencing Rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Process: Spirit-wrought moral transformation | kev raug ua kom dawb huv (sanctification) | Reused Critical from Romans | Unchanged — process sense only. |
| Divine title: God’s transcendent moral purity | tus Dawb Huv (Holy One, 1:12) | New (id 4) | Must be taught as a title, not a repeatable ritual state; never construed as “the one who has been purified” (passive/process reading), but “the One who is inherently, eternally set apart.” |
| Spatial: God’s heavenly dwelling | lub Tuam Tsev Dawb Huv ntawm Yawmsaub (holy temple, 2:20) | New (id 5) | Must be taught as architectural/spatial, explicitly distinguished from any folk shrine (dab teem) concept; the compound with ntawm Yawmsaub is mandatory, never abbreviated to a bare lub tuam tsev dawb huv. |
Risk if unfenced: All three could be heard as variations on “ritual cleanliness,” collapsing God’s title, His dwelling, and the believer’s process of transformation into one folk-purity concept. Recommendation: a single consolidated footnote introduced at first occurrence (1:12) listing all three senses side by side, cross-referencing the Romans baseline sanctification entry, rather than three separate uncoordinated footnotes.
2.2 hwjchim — now with FOUR co-occurring frames in one short book
| Frame | Rendering | Status | Fencing Rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| God’s power (theophanic, 3:4, 3:19) | Vajtswv hwjchim | Reused High | Mandatory qualifier, never bare. |
| Pagan self-idolized military power (1:11) | nws hwm nws tus kheej lub hwjchim yam li tus dab | New (id 38) | Deliberately unqualified with “Vajtswv” because this IS the negative case; must carry its own explanatory frame (“this is what happens when hwjchim is NOT qualified”) rather than silently reading as a parallel positive usage. |
| Closing compound epithet (3:19) | Yawmsaub, kuv tus Tswv, yog kuv lub hwjchim | New (id 7) | All three divine-name elements (Yawmsaub / tus Tswv / hwjchim) must appear together; dropping any one collapses Habakkuk’s deliberate three-name intensification. |
| Civil/military power of nations generally (implicit in 1:6-11’s Chaldean might) | (no separate lexical entry; described via Vajtswv/Yawmsaub tsa...sawv los ua tus rau txim, N6) | New | Kept distinct from Vajtswv hwjchim — Babylon’s military capability is a delegated instrument, not itself called hwjchim in a way that could be misread as sharing God’s quality of power. |
Risk if unfenced: A learner encountering four hwjchim-adjacent clauses within three chapters, two of them structurally similar (God’s power vs. Babylon’s self-idolized power), may flatten the crucial theological distinction between possessing delegated power and deifying one’s own power. Recommendation: explicit side-by-side contrast table in the 1:11 lesson (already modeled in §1 doctrine 3 strategy above).
2.3 ncaj ncees family — now spanning FOUR distinct grammatical/semantic roles
| Role | Rendering | Status | Fencing Rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forensic righteous status (2:4, core passage) | tus ncaj ncees | Reused Critical | Must always be read in continuity with Rom 1:17’s citation of this exact verse. |
| Civic/judicial justice (1:4) | kev txiav txim ncaj | New (id 23) | Kept as a distinct compound noun, not collapsed into the bare adjective ncaj ncees. |
| General moral uprightness of character (2:4b, “not upright”) | tsis ncaj | New (id 30) | Must NOT be confused with the forensic term despite the shared root; describes character generally, not covenant standing. |
| Antithesis partner (wicked) | tus limhiam | New (id 24) | Antonym-pairing only; no independent collision risk, but its consistent use reinforces the righteous/wicked contrast structurally. |
Risk if unfenced: Because all four share the ncaj root, careless translation could produce four sentences in three chapters that all “sound like” they are making the same forensic-righteousness claim as 2:4, artificially inflating the doctrinal weight of ordinary civic-justice or character statements, or conversely deflating 2:4 into “just another ncaj-root statement.” Recommendation: the core-passage lesson for 2:1-4 should include an explicit root-family map (this table) so learners see the distinction is deliberate curriculum design, not translation inconsistency.
2.4 ntsuj plig — new anthropological extension into Hebrew nephesh
The Romans baseline fixed ntsuj plig for Greek pneuma (anthropological) with an absolute rule: never receives the Vaj prefix, reserved exclusively for the Holy Spirit. Habakkuk 2:4 (nephesh) proposes reusing this same rendering for a broader Hebrew concept that additionally carries appetite/desire overtones absent from the NT Greek term.
Fencing rule: (a) the absolute no-Vaj-prefix rule carries over unchanged; (b) a supplementary teaching note is required distinguishing this occurrence from both (i) the Hmong animistic multi-soul concept (avoiding collision) and (ii) the narrower NT pneuma sense already taught under Romans (avoiding under-teaching the appetite/desire nuance Habakkuk’s nephesh actually carries). This is flagged Critical-adjacent (High) precisely because it sits at the intersection of two prior fences (Romans’ anthropological pneuma fence and Hmong folk-soul cosmology) rather than introducing a wholly new risk.
2.5 kev cawm dim — re-anchored to a different agent-timeframe
Reused verbatim from the baseline, but Habakkuk’s occurrences (3:13, 3:18) anchor salvation to Yawmsaub/God acting within Israel’s own history (rescue of “your people,” “your anointed”), not, as in Romans, explicitly to Yexus Khetos. The baseline’s mandatory-anchoring rule (“always anchor explicitly to Yexus Khetos as sole agent/means”) cannot be mechanically imported without producing an anachronism in the OT text itself.
Fencing rule: within Habakkuk’s own historical clauses, anchor to Yawmsaub/God as agent (matching the baseline’s OT-appropriate convention already modeled for all_israel_will_be_saved); add a canonical forward-pointing teaching note (not a lexical substitution) connecting this rescue typologically to salvation through Yexus Khetos, exactly as the glossary already models for mashiach (N15) and chayah/“shall live” (id 32). Do not silently insert Christ’s name into the OT clause itself.
2.6 lwm Haiv Neeg — re-contextualized referent
Reused from the baseline’s Jew-Gentile soteriological contrast, but here denotes generic political/military nations (Babylon, and by extension any imperial power) with no Jew-Gentile mission framing at all.
Fencing rule: every occurrence in Habakkuk curriculum content must carry a one-line disambiguating gloss (“here: the surrounding political/military powers, not the Jew-Gentile distinction of Romans”) on first use per lesson module, per the Reading Level re-glossing convention already established in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md §6.
3. Missing Vocabulary (No Ready-Made Hmong Equivalent)
These concepts have no existing fixed Hmong Christian rendering at all (unlike the crowded-neighborhood terms above, which have a rendering but risk misapplication). Each requires either coined periphrasis (already proposed as a candidate in the glossary) or transliteration, decided in §4.
| Concept | Hebrew | Gap Type | Candidate Approach | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Covenant-lawsuit complaint genre (tokhachti) | תּוֹכַחְתִּי | No native genre-equivalent; Hmong oral tradition has laments but not a formal legal-complaint-to-a-deity genre | Descriptive periphrasis: kuv tej lus thov/tsis txaus siab uas kuv tau hais rau Yawmsaub | Candidate, Medium-High risk (id 13) |
| Prophetic “woe” oracle marker (hoy) | הוֹי | No fixed formulaic equivalent in Hmong religious register | Fixed literary marker: Txom Nyem rau..., used identically at all 5 occurrences | Candidate, Medium risk (id 17) — must be verified as translatable identically across all five occurrences without becoming awkward Hmong prose |
| Watchman’s disciplined prophetic post (mishmar/tsaphah) | מִשְׁמָר / צָפָה | Concept of “waiting expectantly for an authoritative word” has no single-word Hmong equivalent | Periphrasis: chaw zov tsom / zov tos saib | Candidate, Medium risk (id 10) |
| Appointed/fixed divine time (moed) vs. impersonal fate | מוֹעֵד | Conceptual gap: Hmong has strong fate/hmoov vocabulary but no equivalent for “a time personally fixed by a sovereign, personal God” | Periphrasis explicitly naming God as agent: lub caij uas Vajtswv twb teem tseg lawm | Candidate, Medium risk (id 14) |
| God’s decisive historical “raising up” of an instrument-nation (meqim) | מֵקִים | Conceptual gap identical in kind to the baseline’s election-vocabulary gap, but never previously modeled for a national/political (not individual-soteriological) referent | Volitional verb-phrase, structurally parallel to kev xaiv: Vajtswv/Yawmsaub tsa [haiv neeg] sawv los ua tus rau txim | Candidate, Critical risk (id 36) — see Ranked List |
| Liturgical genre heading Shigionoth | שִׁגְיֹנוֹת | Pure comprehension gap; obscure even in Hebrew scholarship | Transliteration + gloss | See §4 |
| Prophetic-vision authority vs. shamanic divination (chazon) | חָזוֹן | Not a vocabulary gap (Hmong has words for “vision/dream”) but an authority-status gap — no existing Hmong term carries “uniquely authoritative divine disclosure” without also implying shamanic channel-equivalence | Periphrasis with explicit divine-source anchor: zaj yog toog uas Yawmsaub qhia | Candidate, High risk (id 11) |
General finding: Habakkuk’s missing-vocabulary gaps cluster around two axes: (1) genre gaps (lawsuit-lament, woe-oracle, liturgical heading) where Hmong has no formal register-equivalent and periphrasis is the only option; (2) authority/agency gaps (appointed time, raising-up-a-nation, vision) where the gap is not the vocabulary itself but ensuring the vocabulary is heard as personal, sovereign, and authoritative rather than impersonal/fatalistic or divinatory. Axis (2) gaps are uniformly higher risk than axis (1) gaps and should receive priority in theologian review.
4. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Term | Hebrew | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| YHWH (covenant name) | יהוה | Established-tradition transliteration/rendering: Yawmsaub | Not a fresh transliteration decision — reuses the existing Hmong Bible-tradition term, distinct from generic Vajtswv and tus Tswv. Explicitly NOT the sectarian NWT-style “Yehauvas” pattern the Romans baseline already forbids for the parallel Rom 10:9-13 collision; this is a positive reuse of a sound existing convention, not a new coinage. |
| Chaldeans | כַּשְׂדִּים | Transliteration: cov Kadees | Simple ethnonym; no theological content to paraphrase; consistent with the baseline’s transliteration pattern for cov Yudas/cov Kilis. |
| Teman (place name in theophany) | תֵּימָן | Transliteration as proper noun within descriptive clause | Vajtswv/Yawmsaub tuaj hauv lub tebchaws Temas los... — geography is a comprehension gap, not a doctrinal one; transliterate and gloss rather than paraphrase into a generic “the south” that would lose the specific historical anchor. |
| Shigionoth (liturgical heading) | שִׁגְיֹנוֹת | Transliteration + gloss: Sikiyoos, glossed “ib hom nkauj thov Vajtswv” | Genuinely obscure even to Hebrew scholars; paraphrase would overclaim precision the source term does not have. Transliteration honestly signals “this is a technical term whose exact meaning is uncertain” while the gloss supplies the functional sense (a prayer-song genre marker). |
| Mashiach (Anointed One) | מָשִׁיחַ | Paraphrase with parenthetical transliteration: tus uas Vajtswv tsa los ua Vajntxwv (Mexiyas) | Unlike Yawmsaub or Kadees, this term requires dual-register handling: the immediate OT referent (a Davidic king/nation) must not be silently erased by jumping straight to the NT title, but the term “Mexiyas” is retained parenthetically to enable the typological bridge to Yexus Khetos (whose second name, per the Romans baseline, IS the Greek translation of this very word). Pure transliteration alone would lose the immediate historical referent; pure paraphrase alone would lose the typological link. |
| Massa (burden/oracle heading) | מַשָּׂא | Paraphrase: tsab lus hnyav uas Yawmsaub qhia | No proper noun to preserve; paraphrase carries the “weighty, authoritative” sense better than a loanword would, and matches the register of surrounding narration. |
| Hoy (woe) | הוֹי | Fixed formulaic paraphrase: Txom Nyem rau… | Not transliterated because it is a grammatical/rhetorical marker, not a proper noun or untranslatable technical concept; must nonetheless be treated with transliteration-like rigidity (identical string at all five occurrences) per the Consistency Requirement in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md §5. |
| Nephesh (soul/self) | נֶפֶשׁ | Reuse of existing baseline rendering, no new transliteration: ntsuj plig | Deliberately NOT transliterated as a Hebrew loanword, since the Romans baseline already supplies a working (fenced) native term for the anthropological category; introducing a second, Hebrew-specific loanword here would fracture the anthropology vocabulary across Testaments within a single curriculum family. |
General principle applied: Transliterate proper nouns (names of peoples, places, obscure genre-headings with no recoverable semantic content) and known cross-lingual titles with existing Hmong Bible-tradition equivalents (Yawmsaub). Paraphrase common nouns and theological concepts, even when awkward, in order to preserve teachability and avoid opaque loanwords — consistent with the Romans baseline’s explicit rejection of transliterated loanwords for hilastērion and baptisma.
5. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × collision specificity × consistency-failure likelihood across a three-chapter book). All items ranked Critical or High require mandatory human theologian review before any Phase 2 content ships; items ranked Medium require native-speaker review at minimum.
| Rank | Term / Passage | Risk Tier | Why It Outranks Neighboring Items |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | God’s sovereign “raising up” of Babylon as judgment-instrument (1:5-6, 1:11) — N6/id 36 | Critical | Only term in the book with a direct structural analogue to a pre-existing Romans-baseline Critical collision (election/predestination vs. hmoov), compounded by a doctrinal double-jeopardy: getting it wrong erases BOTH God’s personal sovereignty AND Babylon’s own moral culpability (needed for the woes in 2:6-20 to make sense at all). No other term in this book threatens two separate doctrines simultaneously. |
| 2 | kev ntseeg / emunah at the core passage (2:4) | Critical | This is the single verse the entire curriculum is built around and the direct OT source of Romans 1:17. Any thinning of the durative/steadfast sense back into a one-time-assent reading undermines not only this curriculum’s core doctrine but retroactively weakens the Romans Language Package’s own anchor citation. |
| 3 | tus ncaj ncees + yuav muaj txoj sia at 2:4 (righteous/shall-live pairing) | Critical | Same core-passage concentration as #2, with the added complexity of the deliberate temporal/eternal two-stage teaching requirement (§1, Doctrine 2) — the single place in this Language Package where a term is intentionally rendered differently from its NT-context baseline counterpart, creating maximum risk of being perceived as a translation inconsistency rather than a deliberate canonical-progression teaching device. |
| 4 | zaj yog toog uas Yawmsaub qhia (vision/chazon, 2:2-3) | High | Unlike most High-risk terms, this one collides with an active, ongoing competing authority-claim in Hmong religious life (shamanic divination, ua neeb, saib yaig), not merely a semantically-adjacent folk concept — meaning a poorly taught occurrence could be actively reinforced by hearers’ lived religious experience outside the church, not just misunderstood in the abstract. |
| 5 | Yawmsaub / Vajtswv / tus Tswv three-way distinction (throughout; compounded at 3:19, id 7) | High | The only term whose risk increases with frequency rather than decreasing through repetition-familiarity: because all three names co-occur repeatedly and sometimes stack in a single clause (id 7), inconsistent handling compounds across every chapter rather than being contained to one passage. |
| 6 | kev xyiv fab rau hauv Yawmsaub (rejoice/exult amid total loss, 3:17-19) | High | The doctrinal climax term of the fourth doctrine, sitting exactly adjacent to the strongest koob hmoov-collision opportunity in the whole curriculum (agricultural-fortune joy vs. God-grounded joy) — a collision the baseline documents as PERMANENTLY FORBIDDEN in the grace domain, now recurring in a new domain (joy) without the baseline’s existing forbidden-substitution language automatically covering it. |
| 7 | tokhachti covenant-lawsuit complaint (1:2-4, framing 2:1) | Medium-High | Cultural-pragmatic risk (elder-deference norms) rather than a lexical-collision risk; severity is real but more manageable via a single well-placed teaching note than the lexical risks above. |
| 8 | dab mlom idol polemic reinforced by self-idolized hwjchim (1:11, 1:16, 2:18-19) | High (inherited) | Not a new collision — fully inherited from the Romans baseline — but Habakkuk’s threefold reinforcement (net-worship, self-deified power, wood/stone teacher-of-lies) raises the consistency burden across three separate passages rather than introducing new risk content. |
| 9 | dawb huv three-referent neighborhood (title/temple/process; §2.1) | Medium-High | Real risk of collapse across three grammatical roles, but each individual occurrence is independently lower-stakes than items 1-6; the risk is cumulative/systemic rather than acute at any single verse. |
| 10 | kev cawm dim OT-agent anchoring at 3:13/3:18 (§2.5) | Medium | The baseline’s anchoring rule is directionally sound but requires a non-mechanical adaptation (Yawmsaub-as-agent, not Yexus Khetos-as-agent) — a nuance more likely to be missed by an automated system defaulting to the baseline’s literal instruction than by a human reviewer, hence flagged for explicit note but ranked below the acute collision risks above. |
| 11 | dever/resheph pestilence-as-judgment-agents (3:5) | Medium-High | Genuine collision with Hmong illness-causation folk belief (spirits/curses), but confined to a single verse with a clear, teachable fix (explicit “commanded agent, not autonomous spirit” framing), unlike the systemic risks above. |
| 12 | mishpat/kev txiav txim ncaj vs. forensic ncaj ncees (§2.3) | Medium | Root-family conflation risk, manageable with the root-map teaching device proposed in §2.3; lower stakes than the core-passage items because 1:4’s civic-justice claim is not itself a soteriological load-bearing verse. |
| 13 | ntsuj plig extended to nephesh (2:4b) | Medium (structurally High per baseline anthropology fence, but single-occurrence exposure) | Inherits a well-documented existing fence (no Vaj prefix) and needs only a supplementary note, not a new fencing architecture. |
| 14 | hoy formulaic consistency across five occurrences (2:6,9,12,15,19) | Medium | Pure consistency-execution risk (will the fixed phrase actually read naturally five times in Hmong prose), not a doctrinal-collision risk. |
| 15 | lwm Haiv Neeg re-contextualization (political nations vs. Romans’ soteriological Gentiles) | Low-Medium | Comprehension-gap risk only; well-precedented disambiguation strategy already modeled in the baseline for similar reused terms. |
6. Summary Recommendations for Phase 2
- Escalate items ranked 1-6 above for mandatory theologian review before any lesson content referencing them is drafted, consistent with
12_ai_translation_requirements.md§9’s escalation table for newly surfaced Critical/High terms with no existing TM analogue. - Adopt the four crowded-neighborhood fencing tables in §2 as mandatory footnote/teaching-note templates for Phase 2 lesson generation — these are not optional stylistic notes but structural requirements to prevent doctrinal collapse across repeated occurrences of the same root.
- Confirm the transliteration ledger in §4 as final before Phase 2 generation begins; no ad hoc transliteration decisions should be made lesson-by-lesson once this ledger is approved.
- Treat Habakkuk 2:1-4 (the core passage) as requiring the single densest concentration of teaching notes in the curriculum — items 2 and 3 in the ranked list both center here, and the doctrine matrix in §1 confirms Doctrine 2 (Righteous Shall Live by Faith) carries more distinct linguistic risk points than any other assigned doctrine.
- No finding in this document proposes an alternate rendering for any existing Romans-baseline Critical or High term. All fencing rules in §2 extend, rather than revise, the baseline’s existing renderings and qualifier-phrase requirements, per the governing-document hierarchy established in
12_ai_translation_requirements.md§0 and §10.