Mark and Richard are working in Tanzania with a group of languages. After they reported to local pastors on the progress of writing down two of the languages in preparation for Bible translation, the conversation soon turned to numbers:
‘How many Pimbwe [people] are there?’ asked one of the more senior leaders.
Richard answered that there are only about 20,000 Pimbwe according to our estimates, but that we still believe there is value in translating the Bible because of the impact that local language Scriptures can have in the life of the community, even if the language is only spoken in a few villages.
We looked up, expecting the pastor to be sceptical, or to advise that our resources could be better used elsewhere. But no… instead he encouraged us.
‘I want to encourage you that this is a work from God,’ he said. ‘When Jesus healed the man with the evil spirits, he ended up sending them into a large herd of pigs who then charged off the hill and drowned. This herd of pigs was the project of the whole village, and they depended on the business the pigs generated. But Jesus cared more about the life of one person than he did about the business project of the entire village.’
He continued, ‘He probably should have been arrested right there, for destroying their business! But the point was that Jesus valued the life of this one man more than the wealth of the entire village. So I want to tell you not to become discouraged because there are few speakers, but rather be joyful that God cares even for a small group like the Pimbwe, and that this is a work of God!’
This report of encourgement comes from Mark Woodward’s blog.
Translating God’s word is a way of showing Jesus’s love to even the smallest communities. Nearly 2,000 language groups are still without a single verse of Scripture or a project started to translate it. Give God’s Story.
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We were excited to be able to host six speakers of the Bende language, as they took the very first step towards writing their language and later starting to translate the Bible into Bende. During the week that they spent with us they managed to collect nearly 2,000 words in their language, which will later be analysed linguistically to come up with a writing system that is intuitive and easy for Bende speakers to read and write.
It was this task of creating suitable alphabets that brought Stephen and seven other speakers of the Bende and Pimbwe languages together for a three-week workshop that finished last Friday. Led by three of our colleagues who came alongside and guided them through the linguistic analysis, the participants painstakingly studied the sounds that make up the language they speak every day, in order to discover how they function together to make words.
be written in ways that reflect the perceptions of the speakers, and hence are intuitive to read and write. Together they were then able to come up with tentative orthographies, or writing systems, that will now be tested and refined over the coming months.
At the very first planning meeting for the dedication event people quickly began pledging goats and cash with enthusiasm. The deep passion for their language was so visible on that day, you couldn’t miss it. It was apparent that, if any people group is going to embrace mother-tongue Scripture, Kabwa is likely going to be one of them.
One response is say that languages, and to a lesser extent plants and animals, only have value in the degree to which they are useful to us, and so there is little reason to mourn their loss. In fact, in the case of languages, the reduction in diversity can actually make the task of communication easier, so the loss of languages may even be welcomed.
“In Mirwa, we were fortunate to have a large group of people, mostly non-Christians, who wanted to listen to the stories about Abraham.
Take Pastor Waynse, a Simbiti translator from Tanzania. On his way to distribute the Nativity story to Simbiti speakers, he found another opportunity to share God’s Story: