LAKHOTA TRANSLATION OF BIBLE

Table of contents

Old Testament

The Gospel

Editor's note:

The Lakhota translation of Bible was published in 1924 as "BIBLE HISTORY in the Language of the TETON SIOUX INDIANS" by Eugene Buechel, S.J.

Eugene Buechel worked as a missionary among the Lakhotas (mainly Oglalas of Pine Ridge and Brules of Rosebud) for 49 years from 1902. In 1939 he published Grammar of Lakhota and during all his years among the Indians he collected Lakhota words and phrases. He had over 25 000 of them carefully catalogued in a filling case. They were published only after his death as Lakota-English dictionary, a work that still represents the largest and most complete collection of its kind.

The details of his work on translating the Bible into Lakhota are not known to me. It is more than likely though, that he had some native speakers to assist him with this work, just as S. R. Riggs had had during his translating Bible into Santee dialect some 50 years earlier. It is not even known to me, whether Buechel used Latin or English version of Bible as a source (Riggs used French one). Yet it is apparent that the translator(s) tried to get as close to the original as possible, which caused that the Lakhota version uses a language that is less idiomatic and sometimes there even appear constructions that are not in accordance with proper Lakhota grammar. This is perhaps true of early translations of Bible into other languages, too, and this feature may even make the text itself feel more sacral.

Despite these facts (or sometimes thanks to them), the Lakhota version of Bible provides a Lakhota text that is worth studying, from both linguistic and philosophical point. It can show us how Lakhota language dealt with culturally new concepts and also we can perhaps see how the language influenced or changed the meaning or the context.

My goal is to provide a full on-line version of Buechel's Bible in Lakhota, with literal and free translation and with notes pointing to interesting linguistic and contextual issues. I have already copied the whole book into my computer and I am currently preparing the literal and free translation. The orthography of the original Buechel's text was not phonemized (no marking of nasalization of vowels, aspiration of stops and no marks of stress). During the proces of copying the text I phonemized it. Also the changable final "a" or "ą" was not ablauted (changed into "e" or "į") in many cases. While it is quite characteristic of written texts, this inconsistence hardly ever occurs in spoken Lakhota. Therefore I have changed all the cases where a changable final "a" or "ą" is supposed to be ablauted (e.g. I changed Buechel's original akhíyagle na to akhíyagni na or eyá to eyé at the end of a sentence). Although in this on-line version I do not mark the changed cases in any way, I did keep a record of the changed words (about 350 of them) for case that anyone is interested in this issue.

So far I have prepared only few samples, single one form the Gospel, the rest form the Old Testament.

Editing and web design by (C) Jan F. Ullrich; mail to jfuNOSPAM@centrum.cz (remove NOSPAM)