You’ve heard of town twinning, maybe even of toilet twinning, but have you ever heard of ‘ethnotwinning’? Did you know that every language in the world has a 3 letter ISO639 code? So, as long as you’ve got 3 initials, you can find your own ethnotwin. My initials are DJR and my ethnotwin is a language in Australia called Djambarrpuyngu. My wife Julie ends up as a Macrolanguage in Nigeria — a cluster of languages that used to be considered one language but which has been split up now.
Category Archives: News
A Host of Problems
In the course of trying to compare the style of natural storytelling in Koro Wachi language with what’s in the Bible, we looked at a seasonally appropriate passage:
“That time, angels that accepted strangers in heaven many appeared and they came with the angels.”
Luke 2:13, the Koro Wachi translation draft, as explained in English.
That’s how the Koro Wachi translator explained the current translation of Luke 2:13. I must admit I was somewhat puzzled as I asked about each word of the Koro translation in turn. It wasn’t what I was quite expecting. Suddenly the penny dropped! Of course! Who welcomes strangers but a generous “host”? And this is what the original Koro Wachi translator understood when he read Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared… in his NIV Bible. If these were heavenly hosts then they must be angels welcoming people to heaven. It all makes some kind of sense.
But of course it’s based on a tragic misunderstanding of the NIV English. Had the original translator looked at the Good News version ‘a great army of heaven’s angels’ then they may have done better, but how were they to know what to choose? Since ‘host’ (one welcoming guests) is a familiar concept and ‘heavenly host’ features in not only the NIV but in the KJV, ASV, ESV, RSV, NRSV, NASB (even the NLT!) why would a bilingual translator who considered himself to know English adequately suspect anything could be wrong?
The Lord is my Goat Hunter
One of my favourite short articles about Bible translation was written 56 years ago by Constance Naish and Gillian Story working among Tlingit people in Alaska. They reflect on how the interpreters for the first missionaries there 100 years ago (mis-)understood the Bible. It’s comic and tragic and repeated in some similar way every day in parts of Nigeria. As we work with people to study their language and the Bible we gradually get to unpick some of the confusions which in our case have often been baked into the reading of the Bible for a few generations, now.
The original article is hard to find, so I’ve re-typed it here.
“The Lord is my shepherd…” and I am His sheep—isn’t this the sense in which we understand this phrase as the result of long familiarity with the Twenty-thrd Psalm? But couldn’t it mean instead, “The Lord is the one who herds sheep for me?” It was in some such sense that a Tlingit interpreter for some of the early missionaries understood it. His interpretation of the opening verses of this Psalm was later translated back again from Tlingit into English like this:
The Lord is my goat hunter;
I don’t want Him.
He knocks me down on the mountain:
He drags me down to the beach…
Unpicking Biblish: witness
Abstract: ‘witness’ in the Bible tends to mean telling people about something rather than seeing it. This is not normal English.
The following definitions hopefully explain the senses given by the Greek word martys and martureo, and the word they’re often translated by in English.
μαρτυς noun 1. one who testifies in legal matters, 2. one who affirms or attests, 3. one who witnesses [tells something] at cost of life
μαρτυρέω verb 1. to confirm or attest someth. on the basis of personal knowledge or belief, bear witness, be a witness.
(BDAG)
a. to offer testimony
b. to confirm bear witness to, declare, confirm,
c. to support one’s testimony with total selfgiving, eccl. usage w. regard to martyrdom bear witness, testify, be a witness (unto death), be martyred,
2. to affirm in a supportive manner, testify favorably, speak well (of), approve
Continue reading Unpicking Biblish: witnesswitness noun 1. a person who sees an event, 2. evidence, proof
(OED 3 ed, via Apple)
verb 1. see (an event) happen, 2. have knowledge of a development from observation or experience.
Folk Linguistics: How many tenses does English have?
How do we know how many tenses English has? Well, we’ve been taught it. What were you taught?
I think normally the basic answer is past, present and future: “I came; I come; I will come.”
Then someone (probably someone who did some Latin) will chime in with perfect or pluperfect: “I have come; I had come.”
Continue reading Folk Linguistics: How many tenses does English have?Accordance Bible Software Updates may use up GBs of unnecessary space
Sometimes storage space just seems to disappear. I just got to the bottom of some unnecessary wasted space on my Mac which I hadn’t encountered before. Accordance Bible software (very useful) uses the Sparkle service for updates. I discovered over 15GB of old versions of the Accordance app and updaters sitting quietly in an invisible folder on my system. Many seemed to be duplicates.
So, if you have Accordance and you’re wondering what is using up so much space you might want to check:
- Inside your user folder
- Library
- Application Support
- Accordance
- .Sparkle (this is the invisible folder – open it by using Go to Folder and typing .Sparkle)
- Accordance
- Application Support
- Library
Or at the Terminal type
open "~/Library/Application Support/Accordance/.Sparkle"
The Bible in Hausa: Over 100 years of efforts
I recently came across a very interesting review of the history of the Hausa Bible up to the 1979/1980 edition, by history professor Musa Gaiya in 1993.
The Hausa Bible of 1980 is a notable publishing event in the history of Bible translation. The author tells the story of the leading personalities responsible for this translation and recounts the many challenges faced. The author also points out that this landmark achievement should not obscure the fact that the sub-groups under Hausa hegemony have mother tongues that should not be neglected. “No language can substitute for the mother tongue… [In] the case of the 1980 edition of the Hausa Bible, care was supposedly taken to express the message in a way that non-Hausa speakers can readily understand, since for the non-Hausa in Northern Nigeria the Hausa language is his second or even third, if not fourth language. Real Hausa, whether Sokoto, Bauchi or Kano, for most of them is often out of reach.”
Continue reading The Bible in Hausa: Over 100 years of efforts
Languages of Wilder Confusion: Wonderful
“The motorbike fell, and my computer was crushed and it was wonderful,” said a Nigerian friend.
Now there’s nothing unusual in that statement for a Nigerian, but I think most British folk would be surprised. For Brits and Americans, Wonderful is just another way of saying ‘very good’. But in Nigerian English it means something surprising or shocking. And quite likely something wonderful is not going to be very good!
Now, I know this distinction in my head, but can I actually discipline myself to use the word Nigerianly?! That’s another thing. I’m sure I’ve baffled many by describing something merely good as particularly shocking.
Languages of Wilder Confusion: Peculiar
Every week I drive past Peculiar International College and a shop titled Peculiar Cuts/Drycleaning. There’s a school bus (above) emblazoned with Peculiar Child. Why do I find this odd?
In Nigeria Peculiar means something/someone special, or precious to someone else. That’s what it used to mean in British English too, as you can see in the King James Version of the Bible where Christians are described as being a peculiar people. But languages don’t stand still, and so today peculiar has changed its meaning, from being a delightful epithet of worth to marking something strange or unusual.
Thus my friend Princeton had been perplexed to read in a novel about a ‘peculiar sight: a cat reading a notice board’. That just doesn’t make sense with the Nigerian (old) English meaning of the word, but does with the modern use.
Naboth: A Faithful Farmer in God’s Vineyard
Just under 2 weeks ago we were shocked by the news of a colleague’s sudden death.
Naboth Musa was only 23 years old, but had been a tremendous answer to prayer for the venerable Duya Bible Translation project. Most recently I had helped get him and his colleagues set up to record several books of the New Testament in Duya language ahead of a month of community testing, and he took to it surprisingly quickly.
Please, #pray for the family, friends, and colleagues of Naboth Musa, a member of the Duya translation team in #Nigeria, who died a few days ago. (In the attached photo he is wearing the checked shirt). He had only recently recorded Matthew, Galatians & Colossians on audio, pic.twitter.com/8qTP1gDKw9
— Wycliffe UK Prayer (@wycliffeuk_pray) February 28, 2018
In the photo above you can see Naboth with his Duya team-mates and their consultant and advisor Mark Gaddis.
Continue reading Naboth: A Faithful Farmer in God’s Vineyard