Translating Mary's Magnificat (that is, her song of praise after learning she was so blessed to give birth to her Lord and Savior) actually went better than I thought. Sure, with it being located in the first chapter of Luke, it was the first time we encountered some pretty loaded Biblical concepts, but overall, we finished with the feeling that we had given justice to the original text. The review committee check over those verses went well, as did the consultant check last May. Everything was fine and dandy, that is, until another read through surfaced a very unfortunate possible reading which made Mary out to be a blatant polytheist! Come with me a bit into the Gmz language to show you exactly what went so terribly wrong!
Luke 1:46-47 read as follows "Maariyaam daka, 'Fahatsa alam dafarok'w s'ee-Misa ala-Etagirba. Gafic'a alam daaŋgahaiil kaMisa kacanaka, ka-etambidok'wa-ara' – which can be word-for-word translated as "Mary said, 'Soul of me it raises up name of God of the Lord. Spirit of me it rejoices to God a lot, to the one who saves me.' Looks ok with those glosses, but in the umpteenth read-through something occurred to me - "kacanaka" as it was written could either be an adverb meaning "a lot" modifying the verb "rejoice," or it could be an adjective meaning "many" modifying the noun "God." In other words, instead of, "My Spirit rejoices a lot in God," one could accurately read Mary to have said "my spirit rejoices in many gods." Ouch! Not exactly the message we want to communicate!
Now most of the time when there are ambiguous, dual readings like this, we must go back to the drawing board and find a different way of stating the correct meaning more clearly. That wasn't, however, the case here. Instead, I decided, once and for all, that we need to mark the Gmz language for tone.
You see, the Gmz language is tonal, in that saying the same word with high pitch and with low pitch can completely change its meaning. Faithful blog-readers may remember a very early linguistic blog which addressed the potentially embarrassing difference between the two meanings of t'isa (http://taw05.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-of-god.html). At that time, I hadn't yet discovered that these two meanings are actually differentiated by tone (yes, for those most interested, the "barking spiders" are accented by a HIGH tone – insert your own sound effects here).
So, the Gmz language has some important tone variation in it, but whenever I tried to write it down, it found it nearly impossible. Why? First of all, because the overwhelming majority of Gmz speakers don't realize that they are speaking in tones. Secondly, the tones have a complicated set of rules that can change in different grammatical contexts. And so, partially out of frustration, and partially out of needing to simplify the Gmz writing system and spelling rules, I tried my best for more than two years to write the Gmz language without with any marking of tone. Yet I couldn't let Mary rejoice in many gods.
In Gmz, there are two prepositions: High tone ká- meaning "to/for" and low tone ka- meaning "with/in/from." Most of the time, the context clearly limits whether an unmarked ka- should be high or low tone, but in Luke 1:47, daaŋgahaiil kaMisa kacanaka, is truly ambiguous. However, with the simple addition of an acute accent (or as one translator calls it, the vowel's 'hair') over the high tone preposition in káMisa and no accent on the low tone in kacanaka, the problem was solved. And Mary, the mother of our Lord has once again become a solid monotheist! Whew!
And so, striving for consistency and freedom from further ambiguity, last week, while I was in Addis Ababa for some meetings, I charged one of the translators to read through the entire draft of Luke's gospel placing "hair" on all the high tone ká- prepositions and leaving their low tone counterparts bald. No doubt, Mary's near-heresy wasn't the only theological disaster averted.
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