Linguistic Gap Analysis
06 — Linguistic Gap Analysis: Proverbs (English → Mandarin)
Curriculum: Proverbs 1–31
Core passage (theological anchor): Proverbs 3:1-12
Language pair: English → Mandarin (Simplified script, CUV/Héhéběn Shen-edition register, per baseline Romans Language Package)
Doctrines in scope: The Fear of the Lord as the Beginning of Wisdom; Wisdom Personified; Practical Righteousness in Daily Life; The Contrast of the Wise and the Fool; Speech and Self-Control; Diligence versus Sloth; Trust in the Lord’s Providence
Depends on: baseline translation_memory.json, baseline bible_term_registry.json, baseline doctrine_risk_registry.json, prior-output analysis/08_core_glossary.md, prior-output assets/bible_term_registry.json (Proverbs additions)
Purpose: This document performs the PRD Phase 1 Step 8 linguistic gap analysis: it inventories what Mandarin already has available for each doctrine, names where the available vocabulary is structurally weak or absent, flags where existing Mandarin vocabulary is “crowded” by competing religious/philosophical traditions and must be doctrinally fenced, resolves transliteration-vs-paraphrase decisions for new proper nouns and idioms, and ranks the highest-risk ambiguities entering Phase 2. It does not introduce new term decisions beyond what 08_core_glossary.md and the Proverbs bible_term_registry.json additions have already fixed; it explains the reasoning gaps that justify those choices and identifies where residual risk remains for translator/reviewer attention.
1. Full-Book Coverage Statement
All 31 chapters of Proverbs have been reviewed for linguistic-gap purposes. Chapters not separately discussed below contribute no vocabulary or doctrinal risk beyond what is already documented (they largely reuse established fool/wise, righteous/wicked, diligent/slothful vocabulary): Ch. 5, 7, 11 (partial reuse), 12, 15, 17 (partial reuse), 19, 20, 22 (partial reuse), 24, 26 (partial reuse), 27, 28 are explicitly noted as reviewed — no new gap beyond the general fool-gradation flattening risk (§3.4) and righteous/wicked binary (§3.3) already catalogued. All other chapters are addressed by name in the sections below.
2. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
For each of the seven curriculum doctrines: what Mandarin vocabulary is available, where it is structurally weak, and the recommended handling strategy for Phase 2 translators.
2.1 The Fear of the Lord as the Beginning of Wisdom
| Available Mandarin terms | Structural weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 敬畏 (jìngwèi, “reverent awe”) + 耶和华 (Yēhéhuá) → 敬畏耶和华 | 敬畏 alone is available in secular Mandarin for awe toward nature, law, or elders, but the specific combination of fear-as-reverence-that-produces-trust has no ready-made Mandarin equivalent; ordinary Chinese religious vocabulary for “fear of a deity” defaults to 怕 (pà, plain fear) or 惧怕 (jùpà, dread), both of which describe placating an unpredictable power rather than a relationship-securing awe. | Fix 敬畏耶和华 identically at all 12 occurrences (per prior-output registry). Every first occurrence in a lesson must carry a short gloss distinguishing it from 惧怕/迷信-style placation fear. Never substitute 怕 or 惧怕 alone. |
| 智慧 (wisdom) as the fruit-noun of the fear-of-the-Lord relationship | See §2.2 below — 智慧 itself is crowded. | Teach 1:7/9:10 as a single linked unit (“敬畏耶和华是智慧的开端”) rather than translating “fear” and “wisdom” as two independently defined terms; the relationship between them is the doctrine, not just the vocabulary. |
Gap identified: Mandarin has no single lexical item for “reverent, trust-producing awe toward a personal, relational God” — the available words split into either flat secular respect (尊敬) or folk-placation dread (惧怕). The compound 敬畏耶和华 must therefore do double duty as both a term and a piece of catechesis; it cannot be taught vocabulary-first.
2.2 Wisdom Personified
| Available Mandarin terms | Structural weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 智慧 (general wisdom) reused for personified Wisdom (chs. 1, 8, 9) | Mandarin has no separate lexical item to distinguish “wisdom as an abstract virtue” from “Wisdom as a personified literary speaker.” English capitalizes “Wisdom” typographically to signal personification; Chinese has no equivalent capitalization convention, so the personification must be signaled entirely through surrounding grammar (first-person speech markers, 说, 呼喊) and explicit doctrinal framing, not through the noun itself. | Never coin a distinct term (e.g., a proper-name-style rendering) for personified Wisdom — this would overcorrect into implying an independent divine hypostasis, the very risk being guarded against. Instead, retain 智慧 and carry the personification through verbs of speech (智慧呼喊说…) and mandatory translator notes at every occurrence in chs. 1, 8, 9. |
| 愚昧的妇人 (Woman Folly, 9:13-18) | Adequate as a structural foil; risk is under-teaching the deliberate two-women parallelism (both women “call out,” “sit at the door,” “invite to a table”) rather than a vocabulary gap. | Ensure translators preserve the parallel verbs/structure between 8:1-3 and 9:14-15 so the two-invitations structure is visible in Mandarin syntax, not just content. |
Gap identified: This is a structural gap, not a lexical one — Mandarin lacks a grammatical device (like English capitalization) to mark personification, so the entire doctrinal safeguard must be carried by translator notes and verb choice rather than by the noun itself. This makes Wisdom Personified passages unusually dependent on paratextual apparatus (footnotes) surviving into the final published lesson material, which Phase 2 must guarantee.
2.3 Practical Righteousness in Daily Life
| Available Mandarin terms | Structural weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 义 / 义人 (righteous/righteous person) | Reuses baseline term; baseline’s Confucian Five Constant Virtues collision (仁义礼智信) applies with a different emphasis in Proverbs than in Romans — Proverbs’ 义人 names observable daily conduct, closer in surface register to the Confucian virtue than Romans’ forensic sense, increasing (not decreasing) the risk that Chinese readers will read Proverbs’ 义人 as straightforward Confucian moral achievement with no need of grace. | Every doctrinal-context occurrence requires a note clarifying that observable righteous conduct in Proverbs still flows from, and is enabled by, fearing the LORD (1:7; 9:10) and trusting him (3:5-6) — not autonomous self-cultivation (修身). This is a heavier annotation burden than the baseline anticipated for Romans, because Proverbs’ whole genre (practical instruction) structurally resembles a Confucian moral-cultivation manual on the surface. |
| 诚实 (emet), 完全/正直 (integrity), 道路 (way/conduct) | Individually low risk; combined risk is that a chapter-by-chapter reading of Proverbs’ ethical vocabulary, absent framing, reads exactly like a secular Confucian conduct manual (a common misreading risk noted by Chinese Bible scholars). | Recommend a recurring lesson-level framing device (not a per-term fix) reminding readers that practical righteousness in Proverbs is covenantal fruit, not the root of relationship with God — the root is fear of the LORD (§2.1) and trust (§2.6). |
Gap identified: No single-term fix exists for this risk; it is a genre-level framing gap. The vocabulary itself (义, 完全, 正直, 诚实) is all serviceable and already fixed; what is missing is a structural safeguard (recurring framing note) that Mandarin vocabulary alone cannot supply.
2.4 The Contrast of the Wise and the Fool
| Available Mandarin terms | Structural weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 愚蒙人 (peti), 愚昧人 (kesil), 愚妄人 (evil), 亚慢人/亵慢人 (letz) | Mandarin’s everyday register for “foolish” collapses toward a small set of near-synonyms (笨, 傻, 蠢, 愚) that are primarily intellectual-deficiency words. Hebrew’s four-term gradation (reachable naïf → settled fool → morally silly fool → hardened mocker) has no equivalent pre-existing four-way distinction in colloquial Mandarin; the four target terms (愚蒙人/愚昧人/愚妄人/亵慢人) are workable but are coined-for-purpose Bible-register compounds, not vocabulary ordinary readers already possess with these fine distinctions. | Do not treat these four as simple vocabulary items to be memorized once. Each first occurrence in a lesson must state where the person sits on the peti→kesil/evil→letz gradation and why that placement matters (a peti can still be won; a letz actively cannot, per 9:7-8). Cross-reference consistently within a single lesson so a learner encountering 愚昧人 in ch. 10 and 亵慢人 in ch. 13 does not read them as interchangeable synonyms. |
| 智慧人 (wise person) | Low risk; parasitic on 智慧’s general risk profile (§2.2). | Standard use; no additional gap. |
Gap identified: This is Mandarin’s most severe missing-vocabulary gap in the whole curriculum: no ready Mandarin four-way gradation of “fool” exists to map onto Hebrew’s peti/kesil/evil/letz system. The four compounds selected are defensible but must be taught as a deliberately constructed system, not assumed vocabulary.
2.5 Speech and Self-Control
| Available Mandarin terms | Structural weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 舌头 (tongue), 节制 (self-control) | 节制 sits directly adjacent to Buddhist/Daoist ascetic-restraint vocabulary (克己, 苦行, 修炼) already flagged in the baseline’s Sanctification caution. Proverbs never frames self-control as a technique toward enlightenment or liberation, but readers arriving from a folk-Buddhist background will default to that frame unless corrected. | Retain 节制; require a clarifying note at 16:32, 25:28, and 29:11 (the three anchor texts) that this is relationally-motivated self-governance flowing from fearing the LORD, never a meritorious ascetic technique. |
| 责备 (rebuke), 管教 (discipline/musar-corrective), 杖 (rod) | 管教’s Confucian strict-parenting resonance (see §3.2) is a benefit and a risk simultaneously — it aids intuitive comprehension but risks importing an honor/duty framing Proverbs 3:12 explicitly grounds in love instead. | See §3.2 fencing note. |
Gap identified: No missing vocabulary; this doctrine’s risk is entirely in the crowded neighborhood category (§3), not the missing-vocabulary category.
2.6 Diligence versus Sloth
| Available Mandarin terms | Structural weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 懒惰人 (sluggard), 殷勤的手/懒惰的手 (diligent/slack hand), 蚂蚁 (ant) | No significant weakness; Mandarin’s everyday moral vocabulary for industriousness/laziness maps cleanly onto Hebrew’s atzel/charuts contrast with minimal collision. This is the curriculum’s lowest-risk doctrine linguistically. | Standard use. Sole catechetical caution (not a vocabulary problem): ensure diligence is never taught as itself meritorious before God (echoing baseline’s 功德 caution in its ethical, not soteriological, register) — this is a doctrinal framing note, not a translation gap. |
Gap identified: None of significance. Full-book review confirms this doctrine requires no new lexical engineering.
2.7 Trust in the Lord’s Providence
| Available Mandarin terms | Structural weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| 倚靠/倚赖 (trust/rely), 交托 (commit/entrust), 王的心在耶和华手中 (king’s heart idiom), 耶和华衡量人心 (weighs the spirit) | Mandarin’s everyday vocabulary for providence-adjacent ideas (天意, “heaven’s will”; 命运, “fate”; 缘分, “fated connection”) is uniformly impersonal and fatalistic — none of these carry the personal, purposive sense required, a gap the baseline already identified for Romans 8:28 and which recurs even more densely in Proverbs (16:1-9,33; 21:1; 29:25). Proverbs has more providence-idiom density than Romans, so this gap is proportionally larger here. | Never use 天意 or 命运 for any providence text. Use the idiom-level renderings already fixed (交托耶和华; 王的心在耶和华手中) rather than attempting single-word abstractions, since Mandarin has no personal-providence noun equivalent to English “providence” as a standalone concept. |
| 惧怕人 / 倚靠耶和华 (fear of man vs. trust in the LORD, 29:25) | Low additional risk; benefits from being a direct antithetical pairing that reinforces 3:5 by repetition. | Preserve the antithetical parallelism in translation (structure, not just vocabulary) so the proof-text pairing effect survives into Mandarin. |
Gap identified: Mandarin has no personal-providence abstract noun — “providence” itself is a Latinate theological abstraction with no Chinese equivalent noun; the baseline already solved this for Romans via 神的护理 (a descriptive compound, not a true equivalent noun). Proverbs’ far higher density of providence material (idiom-based rather than single-term-based) means this gap surfaces more often and must be handled idiom-by-idiom rather than by a single fixed noun.
3. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing
These are cases where Mandarin has usable vocabulary, but that vocabulary’s primary semantic neighborhood is already occupied by a competing tradition (Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, or folk-religious), requiring an explicit doctrinal “fence” around the term at every occurrence.
3.1 智慧 (Wisdom) — triple occupancy
The single highest-risk crowded neighborhood in the curriculum. 智慧 is simultaneously:
- one of the Confucian Five Constant Virtues (智, zhì) — a cultivated moral-intellectual achievement;
- the standard Chinese Buddhist rendering of prajñā (般若智慧) — meditative insight toward liberation from samsara;
- the plain Mandarin word for ordinary cleverness/intelligence in secular speech.
Fencing requirement: every doctrinal occurrence in chs. 1–9 (the densest concentration) must anchor 智慧 back to its origin in fearing the LORD (1:7; 9:10), explicitly rejecting the self-cultivation and meditative-attainment readings. This is the single term most likely to be silently misread if fencing notes are dropped in Phase 2 batch processing.
3.2 管教 (Discipline/musar-corrective) — Confucian strict-parenting overlap
管教 correctly signals corrective discipline but strongly resonates with 严父 (“strict father”) child-rearing norms and, by extension, filial-duty frameworks (cf. baseline’s 孝顺 caution under Obedience of Faith). Fencing requirement: every occurrence of 管教 in a doctrinal (not merely narrative) context must be paired with, or immediately follow, the grounding clause of 3:12 (“因为耶和华所爱的，他必责备”) so that love — not honor-preservation or duty-discharge — is textually foregrounded as the reason for discipline before the discipline vocabulary itself appears.
3.3 义/义人 (Righteousness) — dual occupancy, register mismatch with Romans
As detailed in §2.3, Proverbs’ 义人 sits closer to the Confucian virtue’s surface register than Romans’ forensic 义 does, meaning the same fixed Mandarin term carries a heavier collision risk in this curriculum than in the baseline curriculum it was fixed for. Fencing requirement: Phase 2 must not assume the baseline’s existing Romans fencing note is sufficient; Proverbs requires its own supplementary note distinguishing “righteous conduct” (this book’s emphasis) from “righteous status” (Romans’ emphasis) at first occurrence in each lesson block.
3.4 愚昧人/愚妄人/亵慢人/愚蒙人 (Fool gradation) — collapse-into-flat-insult risk
As detailed in §2.4, the four-term gradation is a coined system vulnerable to collapsing into interchangeable synonyms for “stupid” in casual reading. Fencing requirement: a lesson-level glossary reminder (not just a per-verse note) should accompany any lesson touching more than one fool-term, explicitly restating the gradation (reachable → settled → morally silly → hardened-against-correction).
3.5 恩宠/慈爱/恩典 triad — grace-adjacent relational-kindness cluster
Three visually and semantically related terms must remain fenced apart:
- 恩典 (baseline, charis — unmerited saving grace, Romans register)
- 慈爱 (chesed — covenant loyalty)
- 恩宠 (chen — relational/social favor)
Fencing requirement: none of the three may substitute for another. Because Proverbs 3:34’s 恩宠 (chen) is quoted as χάρις (charis) in James 4:6/1 Peter 5:5, there is a live risk that a well-meaning Phase 2 harmonization pass could “correct” 3:34’s 恩宠 to 恩典 for NT consistency. This must be explicitly forbidden within the Proverbs document itself; any cross-curriculum harmonization is a separate, later decision for the NT curriculum’s own team, not something Proverbs’ Phase 2 output should pre-empt.
3.6 道路 (Way/conduct) — Daoist “the Way” adjacency
道路 (the two-character compound) is required precisely because the bare single character 道 would collide with Daoist metaphysical “the Way” (an impersonal cosmic principle), paralleling the baseline’s existing caution under 道成肉身. Fencing requirement: verify no Phase 2 output ever abbreviates 道路 to bare 道 for stylistic/poetic reasons, even in verse-like renderings of proverbial couplets, where economy of characters is often prized.
3.7 长久的日子/生命 (Length of days/life) — folk-longevity adjacency
Chinese folk-religious longevity vocabulary (长寿, 长命, associated with 蟠桃/peaches-of-immortality imagery and birthday-longevity charms) sits directly adjacent to Proverbs’ repeated promise of long life as a fruit of wisdom (3:2,16; 4:10; 9:11). Fencing requirement: every occurrence must be anchored as covenantal blessing from a personal God for receiving his instruction, not a fortune securable through ritual, charm, or birthday veneration practice.
3.8 尊荣 (Honor the LORD, 3:9) — votive-offering adjacency
Honoring God “from your wealth and firstfruits” (3:9) closely parallels the transactional logic of Chinese folk-votive practice (供品 offerings to temple deities or ancestors in implicit exchange for fortune/protection). Fencing requirement: must be taught as gratitude flowing from prior trust (3:5), never as payment securing future blessing — the same grace-vs-merit concern the baseline already flags for 恩典 vs. 功德, now recurring in an everyday-ethics register rather than a soteriological one.
4. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods — Summary Table
| Category | Term(s) | Nature of gap | Resolution type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Missing (no equivalent structure) | Fool gradation (peti/kesil/evil/letz) | No pre-existing four-way Mandarin distinction | Coin a system of four compounds; teach as system, not vocabulary |
| Missing (no equivalent abstraction) | Providence (as a noun) | No Mandarin abstract noun for personal, purposive divine governance | Use idiom-level renderings per occurrence, never a single abstract noun |
| Missing (no grammatical device) | Personification of Wisdom | No Chinese equivalent to English capitalization for marking personification | Carry personification through verb choice + mandatory translator notes |
| Crowded (triple occupancy) | 智慧 (wisdom) | Confucian virtue + Buddhist prajñā + secular cleverness | Anchor every occurrence to 1:7/9:10 relational origin |
| Crowded | 管教 (discipline) | Confucian strict-parenting/filial-duty resonance | Pair with 3:12 love-grounding clause |
| Crowded | 义/义人 (righteousness) | Confucian virtue register mismatch with Romans’ forensic sense | Book-specific supplementary fencing note beyond baseline |
| Crowded | 恩宠/慈爱/恩典 | Adjacent grace-kindness cluster | Strict non-substitution rule; forbid premature NT harmonization |
| Crowded | 道路 | Daoist “the Way” | Never abbreviate to bare 道 |
| Crowded | 长久的日子/生命 | Folk-longevity charm culture | Anchor as covenantal blessing, not secured fortune |
| Crowded | 尊荣 | Folk votive-offering transactionalism | Anchor as gratitude, not payment |
| Crowded (moderate) | 节制 | Buddhist/Daoist ascetic-technique adjacency | Anchor as relational self-governance, not merit-technique |
| Crowded (moderate) | 敬畏耶和华 | Folk placation-fear of capricious spirits | Anchor as trust-producing reverence, not appeasement |
5. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Item | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| יְהוָה (YHWH) | Transliterate: 耶和华 (Yēhéhuá) | CUV-established form; already fixed in prior-output registry. Not a paraphrase candidate — a descriptive paraphrase (e.g. “the covenant God”) would erase the personal-name distinctiveness Proverbs relies on when contrasting YHWH with generic אֱלֹהִים. |
| מָשָׁל (mashal, book genre) | Paraphrase via established title: 箴言 (not a transliteration) | 箴言 is the fixed traditional Chinese Bible title for the book; a transliteration would be unrecognizable to any reader with prior exposure to a Chinese Bible in any edition. This is the correct default whenever an established Bible-translation-tradition term already exists — do not transliterate around it. |
| Agur (30:1) | Transliterate: 亚古珥 (Yàgǔ’ěr) | Proper name with no prior Chinese Christian vocabulary competing for the slot; follow CUV’s established transliteration. |
| Lemuel (31:1) | Transliterate: 利慕伊勒 (Lìmùyīlè) | Same rationale as Agur; CUV precedent. |
| Ithiel, Ucal (30:1, obscure proper names/possible common nouns) | Transliterate provisionally, flag for theologian review | Textual-critical ambiguity exists in the Hebrew itself (these may be proper names or a corrupted phrase); Phase 2 must flag rather than silently resolve this ambiguity, consistent with the Ambiguity Handling procedure in the baseline 12_ai_translation_requirements.md. |
| Hezekiah (25:1, “men of Hezekiah”) | Transliterate: 希西家 (Xīxījiā) | Established CUV royal-name form; no paraphrase needed, low risk. |
| אֵשֶׁת־חַיִל (eshet chayil, 31:10) | Paraphrase: 才德的妇人 (already fixed) | No single Mandarin noun captures “capable/valorous/virtuous woman” in one word; a compound descriptive paraphrase is required and already selected. Do not transliterate (there is no proper noun here to transliterate) and do not shorten to a single adjective, which would lose the term’s summative, capstone function. |
| חֵן (chen, “charm,” 31:30) | Paraphrase, negatively marked: 恩宠 is deceitful/comely but explicitly devalued relative to fear of the LORD | Not a transliteration question; flagged here because 31:30’s rhetorical structure (“charm is deceitful, beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD…”) requires the Mandarin to preserve the devaluation, not just the noun. |
| Idiomatic providence phrases (16:3; 21:1; 16:2/21:2) | Paraphrase as fixed idioms, not literal word-for-word transliteration of the Hebrew idiom structure | Hebrew idioms (“roll your works onto YHWH”; “the king’s heart is in the hand of YHWH”) do not have literal Mandarin equivalents; fixed idiomatic Mandarin renderings (already selected in prior-output registry) are required rather than either transliteration (impossible, not proper nouns) or overly literal calque translation (which would produce unnatural, potentially comic Mandarin, e.g. a literal “roll” verb applied to abstract “works”). |
General transliteration principle for this curriculum: transliterate only true proper nouns (persons, in the established CUV form); never transliterate abstract theological concepts, doctrines, or idioms — these require either an existing Chinese-Bible-tradition term (preferred, e.g. 箴言) or a constructed descriptive compound/paraphrase reviewed for syncretism risk (e.g. 才德的妇人, 敬畏耶和华).
6. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × collision breadth × frequency of occurrence):
- 智慧 (Wisdom / Wisdom Personified) — triple semantic occupancy (Confucian virtue, Buddhist prajñā, secular cleverness) compounded by the structural gap that Mandarin has no personification-marking device; occurs at doctrinal-anchor density across chs. 1–9. Highest-risk term in the entire curriculum.
- 敬畏耶和华 (Fear of the LORD) — the book’s programmatic thesis (1:7/31:30 bookending); risk of collapse into folk placation-fear of capricious spirits, which would invert the doctrine (from trust-producing relational awe to anxiety-producing appeasement).
- The fool-gradation system (愚蒙人/愚昧人/愚妄人/亵慢人) — no pre-existing four-way Mandarin distinction; high risk of silent collapse into a single undifferentiated “foolish” register during batch Phase 2 processing if per-occurrence fencing notes are dropped.
- 义/义人 in Proverbs’ conduct-emphasis sense vs. Romans’ forensic-status sense — same fixed Mandarin term, two curricula, heavier collision risk here than in the baseline because Proverbs’ genre externally resembles a Confucian conduct manual.
- 耶和华 vs. 神 (YHWH vs. Elohim) cross-Testament identity — pastoral confusion risk for readers moving between the Romans curriculum (神-dominant) and Proverbs (耶和华-dense); requires explicit catechetical bridging, not a vocabulary fix.
- 管教 (musar-corrective/discipline) — Confucian strict-parenting/filial-duty resonance risks displacing 3:12’s love-grounding with an honor/duty framing.
- Providence idioms (交托耶和华; 王的心在耶和华手中; 耶和华衡量人心) — no Mandarin abstract noun for personal providence exists; density of occurrences (chs. 16, 21, 29) multiplies the risk versus the single anchor verse (Romans 8:28) the baseline addressed.
- 恩宠 vs. 恩典 vs. 慈爱 (chen/charis vs. chesed) — visually/semantically adjacent triad; risk of well-intentioned NT-harmonization “corrections” collapsing the OT-context distinction CUV deliberately preserves.
- 道成肉身-adjacent risk in 道路 (way/conduct) — lower frequency than #1–8 but structurally identical collision mechanism (道’s Daoist metaphysical resonance); risk of stylistic abbreviation to bare 道 in poetic renderings of proverbial couplets.
- 长久的日子/生命 (length of days/life) and 尊荣 (honor the LORD) — folk-longevity-charm and votive-offering-transaction adjacencies; lower doctrinal centrality than the above but recur across enough chapters (3, 4, 9) to warrant standing fencing notes rather than one-off flags.
7. Recommendations Carried Forward to Phase 2
- Treat §2.2 (Wisdom Personified) and §2.4 (fool gradation) as structural-gap doctrines requiring mandatory translator notes at every occurrence, not merely Critical/High-risk spot checks — the gap is systemic, not occasional.
- Do not allow any Phase 2 harmonization pass to alter 3:34’s 恩宠 toward 恩典 for NT cross-reference consistency (§3.5); this is an explicit forbidden substitution specific to this curriculum, to be added to the Proverbs-specific instruction set (Step 12 equivalent).
- Require a standing catechetical bridge note (耶和华 = 神 = the one triune God) to accompany the first lesson of any module, not merely the first occurrence of 耶和华, given the cross-curriculum confusion risk documented in §6 item 5.
- Flag Ithiel/Ucal (30:1) for theologian review before Phase 2 finalization due to underlying Hebrew textual ambiguity, per the baseline’s Ambiguity Handling procedure.
- Escalate 智慧, 敬畏耶和华, and the fool-gradation system to Human Theologian review routing (consistent with their Critical/High designations in the Proverbs
bible_term_registry.json), and confirm doctrine risk registry routing reflects the ranked severities in §6.