August, 1941
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given a missionary a contact with this young Mixteco Indian, Nalo, and had made Nalo willing to work as an “in formant*' of his native language. Day after day was spent in long and often tedious labor on strange intricacies o f an unwritten tonal language, and after wards in seeking to put the Word of God into that language. Little by little the truth had penetrated his heart until his fear of witchcraft and Roman idol atry had given place to a living faith in a risen Lord. Five years ago, when missionary en trance to Mexico seemed to be becom ing, more. and more difficult, the Lord opened a door which Satan had not thought to make secure. Language students were permitted by the govern ment to enter the country, study the primitive languages existing there, and translate the Scriptures. Each year a' new group has come urrtjl now thirty- seven men and women are engaged in the work. No task could be more im- •portant, for salvation is by the Word of God which liveth and abideth for ever, and there is no abundant life for a people who do- not have God’s Word in a tongue that they can understand Puzzles in Tones aryl Grammar One of the first young men to enter the open door found himself confronted by a strange situation. He was gain ing quite a vocabulary, but the people were not understanding him, though he pronounced the words exactly a3 they founded to him. One day he stum bled upon the reason. The language he was seeking to learn, the Mixteco, spok
en by some 200,000 people in the south ern part of México, was tonal! A .word spoken with one sequence of pitch meant an entirely, different thing from the same word spoken in reverse order. “ Kuni-na tata,” said the informant (speaking the syllables on .the tones: re do-mi, re mi). “That means, T shall see the Lord.’ But if you say, ‘kuni-na tata,” he continued (speaking the syl lables on the tones: re mi-mi, re'do), “it means, T want some seed corn.’ That is the reason we cannot write our lan guage. It looks just the same on paper.” Any alphabets the Indians knew were inadequate to express wHat they spoke, so the first step in translating the New Testament into Mixteco was to prepare a special Mixteco alphabet which would ■express the tone and the other peculiari ties of the language. Not until this was done could these people be taught’ to read and write the Word of God which was to be translated for them. Mixteco is not the only tonal lan guage in Mexico. At least a dozen oth ers have so far been discovered to pos sess this phenomenon, some with three levels, some with four, and a great var iety of possible glides from one tone to another. Translating hymns into a tonal language presents particular problems. An attempt was made in four-tone Mazateco to translate a Spanish hymn, “ Come to the Lord, Ó Sinner,” but the tone made the singers plead instead, “Gome to the Lord, O fat person,” the difference between the words “sinner” and “fat person” being only a matter of tone in that particular language. Many other brain
Camp Wycliffe Prepares Translators Year by year for six summers, the attend ance of prospective missionaries has increased at the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Camp Wycliffe, Sulphur Springs, Ark. This summer the enrollment has reached fifty-five, includ ing a number of returned missionaries from Africa, South America, Central America, and 'Mexico, Mrs. Lathrop, writer of the article on these pages, has been working with her husband. Maxwell D. Lathrop, In investigating the language of the Tarascan Indians of the state of Michoacan in southern Mexico. W. Cameron Townsend, Director of the Institute of Linguistics, formerly served, with Mrs. Townsend, in Guatemala, C. A., where they reduced the Cakchihuel Indian language to writing and published a translation of the New Testament. Eugene A. Nida, formerly Professor of New Testament Greek at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, is serving as Director of Camp Wycliffe, where the linguistic students hold their sessions. Correspondence concerning the work may be addressed to Professor Nida at Camp Wycliffe, Sulphur Springs, Ark., during the summer months. After September 10, it should be sent to Mr. W. C. Townsend at Box 2975, Mexico City, D. F., Mexico. tives, accusatives, and locatives in Latin. But Indian tongues could give them far more of a workout fdr their minds, for in some of them you may take off the case endings from two or three words and pile them up on the word at the end of the sentence, so that you will have a possessive and an accusative on the same word, and add a locative to the combination for good measure. Errors Intentional and Accidental The young translators in Mexico must leam to speak the languages idiomat ically, for the Word of God must be correctly rendered, in such a way that the people will feel that it belongs to them, and not that it is some foreign thing. The possible mistakes are legion, especially in languages where one letter or two in very long words may com pletely change the meaning. There is the famous example quoted by Dr; North in The Book of a Thousand Tongues, of the translator - who found he had rendered, “Nation shall rise against na tion,” by “a pair of snowshoes shall rise up against a pair of snowshoes," the difference being just one letter in a seventeen-letter word. In one Indian tribe in Mexico, the difference between “life” and “perdition” consists in permit ting the breath to escape through the lips before a “p” in the middle o f the word! Among some of the mistakes found in time to correct them were the fol lowing humorous ones. The informant who helped in the translation of the [Continued an Page 315]'
puzzles f a c e this band of language students. There are sounds in primitive I n d i a n languages which A m e r i c a n ears com p 1e t e 1y miss. There are p’s and t’s a n d k’s which are spoken with a little less or a little more breath passing through the lips. T h e r e a r e sounds which are “glottalized” ; t h a t is, the throat is sud denly opened, pro ducing a s o u n d which is somewhat guttural. There are nasalized vowels, r’s that sound like l’s, s’s that turn back u p o n themselves, vowels that stretch out to double length. There are ques tions of grammar to be solved. Boys and girls in high school struggle over geni-
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