The Lord's Prayer

At this stage, Andrea and I are pleased to sit in church and understand next to nothing. By that I mean, our lack of understanding shows how little the Amharic language has infiltrated the Gmz church setting. Although we are paying careful attention to the still meaningless sounds that pass through our ears, our brains immediately kick into a different, meaning-processing gear whenever the preacher switches to Amharic in the reading of Scripture or even uses just one Amharic loan word in a Gmz sentence. No doubt the exact OPPOSITE is true for many of the Gmz believers worshipping with us. For them, an Amharic word or Scripture reading throws a wrench of confusion into the effortless processing of their mother tongue. For this reason, such borrowed words and phrases are to be avoided in Scripture translation as much as possible.

This is, however, much easier said than done, as evidenced in the translation of the Lord’s Prayer. (Apparently, the guy who first planted the church here among the Gmz was from a particular denominational background where the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer was a MUST in every church service. Although I may have resisted importing such traditions onto what it means for the Gmz to “do church,” I do praise God that these early church planters valued the mother tongue enough to take the time to translate and teach it in Gmz. By doing this, they avoided many other, more dangerous, pitfalls.) So, all that to say, Andrea and I have heard the Lord’s Prayer in Gmz a number of times but it wasn’t until today that we asked our teacher, Habtamu, to help us decipher its meaning in detail. This language learning exercise turned out to be helpful in that it showed us two new grammatical forms: the relative clause “(our Father) who is in heaven,” and the jussive “(your will) let it be done.”

After working through the whole prayer, I went back with a red pen and circled three words: kedus (holy); mengist (kingdom); and kebir (glory). All three of these very important words were borrowed directly from Amharic. Do Gmz words for these important ideas exist? I certainly hope so, but that doesn’t mean that finding them will come easily. The discovery and selection of “key words” such as these is one of the hardest parts of Bible translation, yet a necessary one. If all the difficult theological concepts are communicated through words borrowed from other languages, words that, without explanation, are meaningless to the Gmz ear, then does God really speak Gmz? It appears not. All that to say, we need a band of people who will faithfully pray for the discovery and selection of just the right Gmz words to communicate these difficult “key term” concepts.