06 — Linguistic Gap Analysis: Acts 1–28 (English–Manipuri)

Companion documents: 07_semantic_analysis.md (verse-level detail), 08_core_glossary.md (term inventory), assets/bible_term_registry.json (enforcement registry), Romans baseline translation_memory.json.

Governing rule: This analysis extends, and never contradicts, the Romans baseline Language Package. Section A terms from 08_core_glossary.md are treated here as fixed inputs. This document’s task is diagnostic: to locate (1) where Manipuri simply lacks vocabulary Acts needs, (2) where existing Manipuri religious vocabulary is already “crowded” by Sanamahi and/or Gaudiya Vaishnava meaning and must be fenced off rather than borrowed, (3) which new terms should be transliterated versus rendered by descriptive paraphrase, and (4) which specific ambiguities in this book carry the greatest risk of doctrinal distortion if mishandled in Phase 2.

Manipuri’s religious-vocabulary situation, as established in the baseline, is a live dual system: Sanamahism (Sanamahi, Pakhangba, the Umang Lai forest deities, Lai Haraoba, the maibi/maiba ritual-specialist offices) and Gaudiya Vaishnavism (Krishna-Radha bhakti devotion, Ras Lila, avatar theology, prayaschitta ritual atonement). Acts intensifies this challenge relative to Romans because Acts is a narrative of contested spiritual power — miracles, spirit-possession, oracular speech, exorcism, ritual purity, and conversion from prior religious practice all appear as concrete story events, not abstract doctrinal statements. This raises the stakes on several semantic fields (spirit-language, power-language, “the Way”/path-language) that Romans touches only lightly.

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Part 1 — Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

For each of the nine curriculum doctrines: the Manipuri terms currently available (reused from baseline or newly proposed in 08_core_glossary.md), the specific weaknesses/gaps in that vocabulary, and the recommended handling strategy for Phase 2.

1. The Holy Spirit and Pentecost

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
থাওয়াই অসেংবা (Holy Spirit, reused Critical)	Bare থাওয়াই is a populated category in Sanamahi belief (ancestral Apokpa spirits, Umang Lai nature-spirits); omitting অসেংবা even once in a Pentecost-heavy chapter is a severe risk given the term’s ~15 occurrences in Acts 2 alone.	Never permit bare থাওয়াই in any Acts 2 segment; enforce full compound with zero exceptions; flag any occurrence of the bare form for automatic rejection at validation.
পেন্তেকোস্ত (Pentecost, new Medium)	No native lexical equivalent for a fixed-calendar salvation-historical feast; risk of passive assimilation into the general “festival day” category shared with Lai Haraoba and the Vaishnava festival calendar (Ras Lila, Janmashtami).	Transliterate and always pair with a one-clause explanatory gloss (“the Jewish Feast of Weeks, fifty days after Passover”) on first occurrence per lesson unit.
লোন (tongues, new Critical)	Manipuri has no single existing term that unambiguously means “real foreign human language received as a sign,” and Meiteilon’s own term for “trance utterance” is not lexically far from ordinary speech vocabulary.	Use লোন/অতোপ্পা লোন with mandatory translator note anchored to 2:6,8,11 (“each in his own language”) distinguishing this from unintelligible trance speech.
থাওয়াইগী খুদোল (spiritual gifts, reused Medium)	Risk of conflation with শক্তি, the term for a maibi’s ritual/oracular trance-power.	Never substitute শক্তি; keep the descriptive “gift of the Spirit” compound.
খুৎ থাম্বা (laying on of hands, new Medium)	Physically resembles a maiba’s ritual touch-healing gesture.	Frame consistently as a commissioning/blessing act tied to apostolic authority, not an independent healing technique.

2. The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
নুংঙাইবগী পাউ (gospel, reused High)	Stable from baseline; low incremental risk.	Reuse exactly.
অতোপ্পা ফুরুপ (gentiles, reused Medium)	ফুরুপ (clan/community) carries real weight in Meitei social organization; “other peoples” phrasing can be over-read through an ethnic/clan lens rather than a covenant-history lens.	Always anchor to the Jew–Gentile covenant-historical frame in teaching notes, not left to resonate purely with local clan categories.
শেংদবা / শেংবা (unclean/ceremonially clean, new High / reused)	Two lexically similar terms carrying a fragile but doctrinally load-bearing distinction (ceremonial law category vs. moral-relational holiness, অসেংবা).	Keep all three terms (শেংদবা, শেংবা, অসেংবা) rigorously distinct in every occurrence; mandatory note at 10:14-15,28; 11:8-9 that God himself abolishes the ceremonial boundary — this is not a general statement about ritual purity being unimportant.
তেংবাং মপুবু কিবা মীওই (God-fearer, new Medium)	No existing Manipuri social category maps to “Gentile sympathizer with Jewish monotheism prior to full conversion.”	Retain as a bridging descriptive compound; teach as a narrative bridge-status (Cornelius, Lydia), not a doctrinal category needed elsewhere.
খংদবা তেংবাং মপু (unknown god, new Critical); খংদবা মতমশিং (times of ignorance, new High); হিংবা তেংবাং মপু (living God vs idols, new High)	The single highest-density cluster of syncretism risk in Acts: three related terms in adjacent narrative units (14:15; 17:23,30) that, mishandled together, could be read as a soft, single coordinated argument that all prior Meitei religious practice “already knew” the true God under another name.	Treat as one doctrinal unit in the curriculum with one shared, explicit framing note: Paul’s rhetoric corrects and replaces prior ignorance, it does not affirm it; never let this unit be taught detached from 17:30’s turn to repentance.
তেংবাং মপুনা মমাই য়েংনা ৱারৌবা তৌদে (no partiality, new High)	Risk of the teaching material being read as commentary on present-day Manipur inter-community relations rather than the text’s own Jew/Gentile referent.	Frame strictly as the theological ground of Gentile inclusion in the apostolic mission; do not extend the illustration to contemporary ethnic-relations commentary.

3. Repentance and Baptism

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
পুকৌ হোংদোকপা (repentance, new Critical)	No existing single Manipuri Christian term; the nearest cultural analogues are ritual, not inward-orientation, categories (Vaishnava prāyaścitta atonement rites; Lai Haraoba purification).	Retain the descriptive compound (“turning/reorienting the heart-mind”); mandatory contrast note distinguishing inward reorientation from a ritual act that discharges an offense; must explicitly carry 11:18’s point that repentance is itself God’s gift, applied identically to Gentiles and Jews.
বাপ্তিস্মা / বাপ্তিস্মা লৌবা (baptism, new Critical)	Manipuri has no indigenous single-word equivalent; the two nearest cultural analogues (Vaishnava snana ritual bathing; Sanamahi purification washing before Lai Haraoba/temple entry) are both repeatable ritual-purity acts, whereas Christian baptism is a public, once-for-all identification with Christ.	Retain transliteration বাপ্তিস্মা (a “clean,” non-collision loanword, deliberately not translated by any existing washing/purification term); mandatory distinguishing note wherever it occurs; Acts 19:3-5 requires an explicit sub-note distinguishing John’s repentance-baptism from baptism into the name of the Lord Jesus with the Spirit — two named, historically real, but doctrinally different rites using the one loanword.
পাপ (sin, reused High)	Stable; low incremental risk beyond the baseline’s existing ritual-offense caution.	Reuse exactly; keep distinct from ritual offenses addressed by Lai Haraoba purification or Vaishnava prayaschitta.
অসেংবা ওইহনবা (sanctification, reused High)	As in Romans; low incremental risk.	Reuse exactly.

4. The Church as Community

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
কলিসিয়া (church, reused Medium)	Stable transliteration; risk only if translators are tempted toward a native descriptive term that would collide with মন্দির or উমাং লাই থাবা.	Reuse exactly; never substitute a descriptive Manipuri compound.
পোৎ পুম্নমক লোয়ননা লৈবা (all things common, new Medium); ইমুং পুম্নমক (household, new Medium)	Both concepts risk being absorbed into existing yumnak (clan/lineage) obligation categories, which are kinship-structural rather than voluntary and Spirit-produced.	Explicit note in both cases: this is voluntary, Spirit-initiated sharing/faith-response, not automatic lineage-based obligation or status transfer.
থৌরোই (deacon, new Medium); অহল / চেক্শিনবা / য়াওল (elder/overseer/shepherd, new Medium); ৱারেপ্পা লৌখিবা (council decree, new Medium)	No existing Manipuri Christian governance vocabulary is attested; risk is low doctrinal collision but real terminological instability across future lesson units if not fixed now.	Fix all four terms now as the durable local-church governance vocabulary for this and all future curricula; flag for native-speaker (not theologian) review per baseline risk convention.
লোইনবা (fellowship, reused Low)	Stable; low risk.	Reuse exactly.

5. Apostolic Authority and Miracles

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
মমল অমসুং খুদমশিং (signs and wonders, new High)	This is the doctrine with the single densest overlap with existing Meitei ritual-power vocabulary; miracle narratives (healings, exorcisms, a death judgment at 5:1-11 and 12:23, the viper at 28:3-6) read, on the surface, like accounts of a powerful ritual specialist — exactly the maiba/maibi’s recognized social role.	Consistent descriptive compound avoiding শক্তি; every miracle narrative unit requires a note that biblical signs authenticate God’s sent messenger and his message, they are not a personally-wielded occult or ritual-specialist ability.
লৌহৌবগী থবক (sorcery, new High); ফাত্তবা থাওয়াই (divination spirit, new Critical)	These are the terms the curriculum must use to name what Scripture itself condemns (Simon Magus, Elymas, the Ephesian scrolls, the Philippian slave girl) — but the phenomena described (oracular utterance through a human medium, ritual power for prestige) are structurally close to socially respected practice, not a fringe activity, in the Sanamahi tradition.	These are NOT vocabulary gaps to be filled gently; they require the single most careful pastoral framing in the whole curriculum. Teach Scripture’s own verdict (unambiguous condemnation, exorcism in Jesus’ name) without editorializing beyond the text, and without implying blanket condemnation of Sanamahi religious practice as a whole community identity — the text condemns specific practices, not persons.
তেংবাং মপুগী পাংথোক-থেংনবা (power of God, reused High)	Stable from baseline; risk is contextual re-collision with শক্তি if translators default to it under pressure of miracle-narrative register.	Reuse exactly in every apostolic-miracle passage; never substitute.
খুৎ থাম্বা (laying on of hands, new Medium); তেংবাং মপুগী ৱারোল পুম্নমক (whole counsel of God, new Medium)	Low collision risk.	Fix as proposed.

6. Persecution and Bold Witness

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
সাক্ষী (witness, new High)	Risk is not lexical collision but genre collision: a maibi’s trance disclosure is also, in local perception, a form of authoritative “testimony” about unseen realities delivered through a human mouth.	Mandatory note at every occurrence: apostolic witness is sober, first-hand, historical eyewitness testimony to a bodily, datable event (the resurrection), not spirit-mediated oracular disclosure.
ঠাঠোন্না ঙাংবা (boldness, new Medium)	Low collision risk; mainly a consistency-of-rendering concern given ~9 occurrences across the book.	Fix rendering now; apply uniformly.
থাজবগী ইনবা (obedience of faith / “obey God rather than men,” extended High)	Risk of collapsing into সেবা, ritual devotional service performed to build bhakti standing.	Frame explicitly as principled, Spirit-produced allegiance to God under threat, distinct from ritual service accruing devotional merit.
মখোয়গী মফমদা হায়জবা (intercession, reused Medium); মনগী মিত্তুবা (conscience, new Medium); লাকপা লান্থোকপা (coming judgment, new High)	Low-to-moderate collision risk individually; cumulative risk if the trial narratives (chs. 22–26) are taught without connecting conscience/judgment vocabulary back to the justification doctrine already fixed in the baseline.	Cross-reference explicitly to Romans’ fixed “righteousness”/“judgment” vocabulary so Paul’s defense speeches read as continuous with, not separate from, the justification doctrine.

7. Conversion of Paul

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
তেংবাং মপুগী খনবা (election, reused High); খনবগী শান্দোক (chosen instrument, new High)	Risk of resonance with the historic Meitei kingship’s own royal-divine selection claim (Pakhangba lineage) and with impersonal-fate (ৱাইফম) readings, both already flagged in the baseline.	Reuse baseline’s existing fencing language; extend explicitly to Paul’s commissioning (9:15) as a specific, historically bounded apostolic call, not a repeatable royal-selection pattern.
লম্বী (“the Way,” new High)	The single most conceptually crowded new term in the Acts curriculum: Indic soteriology generally, and Manipuri Vaishnava bhakti-mārga specifically, organizes itself around “the path” as a live, named devotional category (a path among paths).	Mandatory translator note at every occurrence (9:2; 18:26; 19:9,23; 22:4; 24:14,22): this names one specific historical movement centered on the risen, exclusive Lord Jesus, not one mārga among several equally valid paths to the same goal.
মিত কায়দবা লৌথোকখি (scales fall from eyes, new Low-Medium); শয়তানগী মপাংথোক (Satan’s authority, new Critical)	The Satan term risks assimilation to the more morally ambivalent spirit-categories of Sanamahi cosmology, where certain spirits are propitiated rather than uniformly opposed.	Explicit doctrinal note (26:18): biblical Satan is comprehensively, categorically evil and opposed to God; conversion is rescue from active hostile dominion, not renegotiation of ritual standing with an appeasable spirit.
ফুরুপশিংগী মমী (light for Gentiles, new High)	Shared risk profile with the Gospel to Jews and Gentiles doctrine above.	Cross-reference; teach 13:47 and 26:23 together as Paul’s own retrospective summary of his conversion-commission.

8. Justification apart from the Law

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
অচুম্বা ওইহনবা (justification, reused Critical); অচুম্বা চৎনবিরাক (righteousness, reused Critical); পীথোকপা অচুম্বা চৎনবিরাক (imputed righteousness, reused Critical)	Stable from baseline; Acts 13:39 is the book’s locus classicus and must render identically to Romans for cross-curriculum consistency.	Reuse exactly; treat 13:39 as a required cross-check verse against the Romans package before this lesson is finalized.
য়াথাং (law, reused Medium); মথৌ তাদনা পীবা তেংবাং (grace, reused Critical)	Grace remains the highest-recurrence collision risk in this doctrine: Acts 15:11’s “saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus” is the Jerusalem Council’s climactic resolution and is exactly the kind of statement a bhakti-framework reader could reflexively re-hear as কৃপা answering accumulated devotional service.	Reuse baseline term and forbidden-substitution rule exactly; treat 15:11 with the same mandatory contrast-with-works framing the baseline requires for Romans 4:4-5 and 11:5-6.
চোকথোকপগী চত্থোক (circumcision, new Medium-High); য়াথাংগী পোৎ (yoke of the law, new Medium)	No prior Manipuri Christian precedent for either term; doctrinal weight is carried mainly by the surrounding fixed grace/law/justification vocabulary rather than these terms themselves.	Confirm with theologian before final deployment; keep subordinate in teaching emphasis to the grace/justification core terms.
ৱাশাক্না লৌবগী থৌরাং (Nazirite vow, new Low-Medium)	Minor risk; illustrates permitted (non-required) covenantal custom.	Teach as supporting, not central, evidence for the “law-keeping permitted but not required” principle.

9. The Great Commission Fulfilled

Available terms	Weakness/Gap	Recommended Strategy
পাউ সন্দোকপগী থৌদাং (mission, reused Medium)	Baseline already flags historical mission-work sensitivity (American Baptist mission history among Naga/Kuki-Zo hill communities, colonial-era administration memory, present inter-community sensitivities); Acts intensifies this by narrating an active, expanding, cross-cultural sending movement in detail across 13 chapters.	Frame consistently as the church’s own Spirit-initiated calling (Antioch’s commissioning, 13:2-4), never as an externally imposed or ethnically-coded project.
তেংবাং মপুগী লৈপাক (kingdom of God, reused Medium)	Risk of resonance with the historic Meitei kingship’s own Pakhangba-descent royal-divine-lineage political framing, which the baseline already flags.	Reuse baseline’s exact fencing language across every kingdom-of-God occurrence (1:3,6; 8:12; 14:22; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23,31).
ফুরুপশিংগী মমী (light for Gentiles, new High); কোনবা য়াওদনা (without hindrance, new Medium-High doctrinal weight)	“Without hindrance” is lexically simple but is the deliberately chosen final word of the entire book; underweighting it in teaching would blunt Acts’ own closing theological claim.	Highlight explicitly as the book’s closing thematic seal: no opposition, from either live religious tradition or from imperial legal process, ultimately halts the gospel’s advance.

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Part 2 — Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods

A. Genuinely Missing Vocabulary (no attested Manipuri Christian precedent)

These concepts have no existing settled Manipuri Christian rendering and required new coinage in 08_core_glossary.md. They are not “crowded” by competing religious meaning so much as simply absent from the currently published Manipuri Bible-translation tradition, requiring careful construction from scratch:

• Repentance (পুকৌ হোংদোকপা) — nearest available concepts are all ritual (prayaschitta, purification), not lexical synonyms.
• Baptism as a single ordinance-word (বাপ্তিস্মা) — no native descriptive compound was judged safe; transliteration was chosen precisely because paraphrase would default into ritual-bathing vocabulary (see Part 3).
• “The Way” as a self-designation for the Christian movement (লম্বী) — Manipuri has an ordinary word for “path” but no precedent for using it as a proper-noun movement-title.
• Christian (ক্রিস্তান) — a new proper name entirely, coined by transliteration.
• Local-church governance titles (elder/overseer/shepherd/deacon) — no settled Manipuri Christian ecclesiastical vocabulary exists prior to this curriculum.
• Household-based corporate reception of the gospel (ইমুং পুম্নমক) — Manipuri has family/kinship vocabulary but not this specific corporate-conversion sense.
• Several compact Christological titles new to this curriculum (Founder/Pioneer of Life, Son of Man, Servant, Holy and Righteous One) — none of these titles occur in the Romans baseline and each had to be built as a fresh descriptive compound.

Strategy for missing vocabulary generally: favor transparent descriptive compounds built from already-fixed baseline morphemes (e.g., অসেংবা + অচুম্বা compounding into “Holy and Righteous One”) over borrowing a ready-made word from either live religious tradition, even when a ready-made word exists and would be easier to use.

B. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (existing words already carrying heavy prior meaning)

These are Manipuri words or word-fields that already have strong, specific meaning within Sanamahism and/or Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Acts, more than Romans, forces direct engagement with these fields because it narrates spirit activity, ritual power, and religious conversion as concrete events. Each must be actively fenced — kept out of Christian theological vocabulary or restricted to a narrowly defined sense — rather than casually adopted.

Crowded word/field	Live tradition association	Fencing rule
থাওয়াই (bare “spirit”)	Sanamahi: ancestral Apokpa spirits, Umang Lai nature-deities	Never use bare; Holy Spirit is always থাওয়াই অসেংবা in full.
শক্তি (“power,” esp. trance/oracular)	Sanamahi: maibi’s Lai Haraoba trance-power; regional Vaishnava-Shakta overlap: goddess-power	Never use for God’s power, spiritual gifts, or apostolic miracles; reserved exclusively as the term used (in a negative, condemnatory sense only) when naming what sorcery/divination-spirits claim to wield.
মৈবা / মৈবী (ritual specialist / oracular priestess)	Sanamahi religious office	Never use for prophet, apostle, or witness.
উমাং লাই থাবা (sacred grove) / মন্দির (temple)	Sanamahi sacred site / Vaishnava temple	Never use for church (কলিসিয়া is transliterated precisely to avoid this).
ঠাকুর (devotional title)	Vaishnava: Krishna-specific	Never use for Lord/God (baseline rule; reaffirmed for Acts’ many Lordship-confession passages).
ভক্তি / সেবা (devotion / devotional service)	Vaishnava bhakti-mārga	Never used for faith or obedience-of-faith; risk is acute in Acts 15:11 (grace) and 5:29 (obey God rather than men).
কৃপা (Krishna’s responsive favor)	Vaishnava bhakti	Never used for grace; risk acute at 15:11.
ধর্ম (religious/cosmic duty)	Vaishnavization-era loan	Never used for law or righteousness.
অবতার (avatar)	Vaishnava avatar theology, Ras Lila	Never used for incarnation, Son of God, or (new to Acts) “chosen instrument”/Christological titles generally.
মোক্ষ / পুনর্জন্ম (liberation / rebirth)	Vaishnava soteriology	Never used for salvation or resurrection, including the newly extended general-resurrection references (23:6,8; 24:15,21).
শেংবা (ritual/ceremonial cleanliness)	Shared ritual-purity vocabulary across both traditions and Mosaic-law food categories	Reserved strictly for ceremonial-law contexts (10:14-15,28; 11:8-9; 21:24,26); never substituted for অসেংবা’s moral-relational holiness.
লম্বী/মার্গ (“path”)	Vaishnava bhakti-mārga	Restricted to the fixed proper-noun sense “the Way” (the Christian movement); must not be used generically as “a path to God” in any teaching material, to avoid implying equivalence with other named paths.
ৱাইফম (impersonal fate)	Regional folk-fatalism, not tied to one tradition exclusively	Never used for calling, election, or providence.

General fencing principle for Phase 2: whenever a crowded-neighborhood word is the only natural-sounding option a fluent Manipuri speaker would reach for, the curriculum must supply an explicit mandatory translator note rather than silently accept the natural-sounding but doctrinally compromised choice. Naturalness is subordinate to doctrinal fidelity per the priority order already established in the baseline’s 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.

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Part 3 — Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

Term	Decision	Rationale
Baptism (βάπτισμα)	Transliterate (বাপ্তিস্মা)	Every available native paraphrase option evokes an existing repeatable ritual-bathing practice (snana, Lai Haraoba purification washing); a “clean” loanword avoids false-equivalence better than any descriptive compound would.
Pentecost (Πεντηκοστή)	Transliterate (পেন্তেকোস্ত)	A fixed proper-name feast day; no native descriptive phrase can carry its specific salvation-historical referent without becoming a generic “festival” label vulnerable to assimilation into the Vaishnava/Lai Haraoba festival calendar.
Christian (Χριστιανός)	Transliterate (ক্রিস্তান)	A brand-new proper-name group designation coined within the narrative itself (11:26); transliteration mirrors the source text’s own strategy of minting a new name rather than reusing an existing category label.
Sanhedrin (συνέδριον)	Transliterate (সানহেড্রিন)	A specific historical Jewish institution with no functional Manipuri equivalent; low doctrinal risk, so transliteration (rather than a potentially misleading “council” paraphrase) preserves historical specificity.
Repentance (μετάνοια)	Paraphrase (পুকৌ হোংদোকপা, “heart/mind-turning”)	Unlike baptism, repentance is a universal human-response concept expressible in ordinary Manipuri without borrowing; paraphrase here successfully avoids ritual-atonement vocabulary while remaining natural.
Tongues (γλῶσσαι)	Paraphrase (লোন / অতোপ্পা লোন, “language(s)“)	The text’s own internal gloss (2:6,8,11, “each in his own language”) makes a literal-language paraphrase both accurate and necessary; transliterating a Greek grammatical term would obscure the very point the narrative makes.
The Way (ἡ ὁδός)	Paraphrase (লম্বী, “the Path/Way”)	A meaningful, self-consciously chosen movement-name in the source text; paraphrase is required to preserve its rhetorical force, but the paraphrase must be fenced (see Part 2) against the bhakti-mārga collision it creates.
Signs and Wonders, Sorcery, Divination Spirit	Paraphrase (descriptive compounds)	These require value-laden, explicitly biblical framing (authenticating vs. condemned) that no single transliterated loanword could carry; paraphrase allows the necessary judgment to be built into the term itself.
Servant (παῖς), Son of Man, Founder/Pioneer of Life, Holy and Righteous One	Paraphrase (descriptive Christological compounds)	Consistent with the baseline’s own established practice (e.g., Son of God, Incarnation) of building new Christological titles from transparent Manipuri morphemes rather than borrowing titles from either live tradition’s own divine-figure vocabulary.
Circumcision, Yoke of the Law, Council Decree, Elder/Overseer/Shepherd, Deacon	Paraphrase (descriptive compounds)	Institutional/practice vocabulary with no proper-name status in the source text; paraphrase keeps these terms transparent to a low-Old-Testament-literacy reading audience per the baseline’s reading-level target.
Unknown God (Ἀγνώστῳ Θεῷ)	Paraphrase, not transliteration (খংদবা তেংবাং মপু)	Deliberately built on the already-fixed তেংবাং মপু rather than transliterating a Greek inscription-phrase, so the term reads unmistakably as “the true God, currently unknown to you” rather than as a foreign curiosity or a neutral placeholder that could be filled by any local deity name.

General rule applied: transliterate proper names, fixed institutions, and calendar-bound events with no functional native equivalent; paraphrase theological concepts, titles, and value-laden narrative categories where the source text’s own meaning depends on transparency, contrast, or moral judgment that a bare loanword cannot carry.

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Part 4 — Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities in Acts

Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × specificity of the collision with a named live tradition practice) and required review routing.

1. Divination spirit / oracular trance possession (Acts 16:16-18; cf. 5:16; 8:7; 19:12) — Critical. The single highest-salience risk in the entire curriculum: an oracular spirit speaking through a human medium is not an abstract parallel but a description that closely matches the maibi’s recognized, currently practiced trance role within Lai Haraoba. Requires theologian-authored pastoral framing before any translator touches the passage.

2. Tongues as literal known language vs. ecstatic/trance utterance (Acts 2:4-11) — Critical. This is the curriculum’s core passage’s own central linguistic event; any drift toward “unintelligible spiritual utterance” phrasing collapses the passage’s own argument (each hearer understood in their own language) and simultaneously invites confusion with maibi trance-speech.

3. “Unknown God” rhetorical bridge (Acts 17:23) and its surrounding unit (17:22-31) — Critical. The single greatest risk of the curriculum being (mis)read as syncretistic affirmation rather than corrective proclamation; requires explicit, repeated doctrinal framing tied directly to 17:30’s call to repentance.

4. Baptism vs. ritual purification bathing (Acts throughout; esp. 2:38,41; 8:36,38; 19:3-5) — Critical. Two live traditions (Vaishnava snana, Sanamahi purification washing) supply an easy, wrong, repeatable-ritual reading of a once-for-all identification rite; further complicated internally by the John’s-baptism-vs.-Christian-baptism distinction at 19:3-5.

5. Repentance vs. ritual atonement (Acts 2:38; 3:19; 11:18; 17:30; 20:21; 26:20) — Critical. High-frequency term across the entire book; risk of quiet assimilation to prayaschitta-style ritual discharge of guilt rather than inward reorientation toward the living God.

6. “The Way” vs. bhakti-mārga (Acts 9:2; 18:26; 19:9,23; 22:4; 24:14,22) — High. A self-designation used as a proper name across six chapters; without a fencing note on every occurrence, it reads as one path among the recognized paths of Manipuri devotional life.

7. Signs and wonders / apostolic miracle narratives vs. maiba/maibi ritual power display (Acts 2:22,43; 4:30; 5:12; 6:8; 8:13; 14:3; 15:12; and the broader miracle-narrative chapters 3, 9, 12, 14, 19, 20, 28) — High. Repeated, narratively vivid, and structurally similar to a recognized local religious-specialist role; requires sustained, not one-off, contrastive framing.

8. Servant (παῖς) Christological title vs. Vaishnava dāsya-bhāva devotee-servant posture (Acts 3:13,26; 4:27,30) — Critical. Risk of directional inversion: the text names Christ as God’s unique sent Servant, the reverse relationship from a bhakta’s servant-posture toward Krishna; easy to invert accidentally in translation.

9. Satan’s authority vs. Sanamahi’s morally ambivalent, appeasable spirit categories (Acts 26:18) — Critical. Risk of importing a negotiable, propitiation-based spirit relationship into a passage that describes decisive, one-directional rescue from a uniformly hostile power.

10. Sorcery/magic condemnation vs. blanket judgment on Sanamahi ritual-specialist identity (Acts 8:9-11; 13:6-11; 19:13-19) — High. Pastoral risk distinct from doctrinal risk: the text condemns specific practices (Simon, Elymas, the Ephesian scrolls), and the curriculum must not extend that condemnation into a demeaning judgment on Sanamahi religious identity as a whole, consistent with the baseline’s colonial-sensitivity caution regarding mission framing.

11. Kingdom of God vs. Pakhangba royal-divine kingship lineage (Acts 1:3,6; 8:12; 14:22; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23,31) — Medium-High. Lower narrative vividness than items 1-10 but recurs across the entire book as a structural frame; cumulative risk if left unaddressed at each occurrence.

12. Grace vs. bhakti-responsive কৃপা, intensified at the Jerusalem Council’s climactic statement (Acts 15:11) — Critical (carried over from baseline, elevated in Acts by its placement as the Council’s resolving verse). Requires the same explicit works-contrast framing the baseline mandates for Romans 4:4-5 and 11:5-6.

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Phase 2 Handoff Note

This gap analysis, together with 08_core_glossary.md, constitutes the complete linguistic-risk input for Phase 2 segment translation of Acts. All Critical-ranked ambiguities in Part 4 must be routed to human theologian review before any associated segment is marked approved, per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md. All newly coined terms discussed in Parts 1–3 remain provisional pending the theologian/native-speaker review cycle specified in the 08_core_glossary.md Phase 2 Handoff Note, and must not be treated as final until written into an incremented version of translation_memory.json.