Terminal Student pointed me to an interesting story she heard this morning on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. It concerns the translation of the Bible into Zapotec by Rebecca Long, a linguist associated with SIL.
It's interesting to hear about the controversies that surround the translation. There's apparently a tight connection between the local government and the Catholic Church, tight enough that some local evangelicals ended up in jail for trying to opt out of the obligation to help maintain church facilities and pay for religious fiestas. Translating the Bible into the vernacular can still be controversial after all these centuries, apparently, and it's easy to see how a community with a single religion could be suspicious of an outsider with both linguistic and missionary goals.
Although I don't share SIL's religious beliefs, I think they do a lot of good work in language preservation and documentation, not to mention their lovely fonts. In my Master's thesis (in the hands of the third and final reader, thanks for asking), which includes data from 30 genetically diverse languages, the data for two comes from grammars published by SIL researchers: Albertha Kuiper and Joy Oram's "A Syntactic Sketch of Diuxi-Tilantongo Mixtec", and Nancy L. Morse and Michael B. Maxwell's Cubeo Grammar. On top of that, I made use of SIL's Ethnologue taxonomy of the world's languages. While it's true that SIL is not alone in doing this kind of work, given that there are so many dying languages there aren't enough available researchers to study them, it seems to me that even non-evangelicals ought to welcome their efforts. There's plenty of language-preservation work to go around.
[Now playing: "My Favorite Game" by the Cardigans]
hello, i hope i'm not bothering you, but its really important , and yet too personal to explain why...
might you be able to tell me how to say "Blue Fire" in Zapotec, written and spoken translation.
i'd be forever grateful
b
Posted by: bryna | February 05, 2005 at 12:47 PM
Sorry, I'm completely ignorant of Zapotec. I'll bet you'd be able to figure out a simple noun phrase like "Blue Fire" if you could get your hands on a Zapotec grammar, but a brief search of the holdings at my university's library turned up no English-language grammars. There are a couple of Zapotec grammars and bilingual dictionaries in Spanish, though.
Posted by: The Tensor | February 05, 2005 at 05:50 PM