_How the Bible Creates Languages_
The Bible societies by no means rest contented with their present horizons of conquest. Both the London and New York societies are very much engaged upon translations and revisions, and missionaries throughout the world are busy with similar tasks. In scores of instances the Bible is the only literature of a language. Often a language is first reduced to literary form in order to produce a Bible. Often, also, the Bible actually creates a language, in the proper sense of that term. The ideas, the topics of thought, the point of view, are not in the local speech. Take, as an example, the translation just made for the Sheetswa tribe in East Africa. They had no word for Supreme Being, or home, father, heaven, house, and other ideas equally fundamental. “Our Father which art in heaven” was absolutely unintelligible to them. Yet, little by little, the missionaries persevered till they have now compiled a dictionary of eighteen thousand words, a grammar, and a translation of the New Testament that can be used by three million people. Other recent translations have been into Mare (one of the French Loyalty Islands), Uganda, Persian, Labrador-Eskimo, Kongo Baldo, Murray Island (Torres Straits), Wedan (New Guinea), Fang, Madarese (South Malaysia), Nogogu (New Hebrides), etc. That much work still remains to be done, however, appears from the statement that in the borders of the Indian empire alone one hundred and eight languages, in use by seventy-four million souls, have as yet no version of the Scriptures. Translations and revisions are now going forward in over one hundred languages.—The Century.