K ING 'S BUSINESS M ISS ION ARY FEATURE:
"Why Hasn’t God Learned Language?”
by Betty Stevens
“ TT ust now, this year, we finally £J> have the message of Jesus,” wrote Antlers, the Piro Indian of Peru who helped missionary - linguist Esther Matteson with the translation of the New Testament into the Piro lan- guage. “ Since then I am sad because of those who live around me, those who speak other languages, those who need to hear about Jesus. They cry in their souls!” But God to whom the most impene trable jungle is no barrier to hearing that universal cry, in whatever lan guage it is uttered, was preparing an answer. How that anguished appeal from earth’s forgotten tribes is being met is the dramatic chronicle of the Wyc- liffe Bible Translators and the Sum mer Institute of Linguistics, who are celebrating 25 years of translation work. The story is vividly told in the book “ Two Thousand Tongues to Go,” by Ethel Emily Wallis (Biola gradu ate), and Mary Angela Bennett (Har per and Brothers, $3 .9 5 ). W h a t onlooker, beholding two earnest, dedicated young students and their two teachers, seated on over turned nail kegs in a renovated chic ken house on a little farm in the Arkansas Ozarks during those hot summer days of 1934, could have imagined the present Summer In- stitutes of Linguistics? The powerful hand of God is the only answer. To day with five schools on three con tinents— at the Universities of Okla homa, North Dakota, and Washington in the United States, the W y cliffe Language Course at Chigwell near London, England, and the W ycliffe Language School in Melbourne, Aus tralia— each summer some five hun-
1
Dr. Kenneth Pike giving linguistic demonstration with aid of Christian Comanche informants. Summer Institute at Norman, Oklahoma. Aguaruna Indian receiving diploma of bilingual school from Mrs. Cameron Townsend, Peru. Now he can be a teacher of his own people.
i
44
TH E KING'S BUSINESS
Made with FlippingBook HTML5