Saturday, October 26, 2024

Daily Bread 5

Continued from part 4.

Translators into the languages of Sub-Saharan Africa made similar decisions to those of the Americas. But with many more translations, made over a longer period of activity: nearly ten times as many as North America, according to UBS stats. So more opportunities for varying choices.

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The Bergholtz (and several others) Yoruba is from the Crowther Bible. Differences for this verse from the Yoruba Contemporary Bible of this century are mostly orthographic or euphony. Likewise Crowther's own original translation.

Fun wa li onjẹ ojọ wa loni.
Fun wa li onjẹ õjọ wa loni.
Ẹ fún wa ní oúnjẹ òòjọ́ wa lónìí.
Fu ʼwa li ongjeh ojoh ʼwa li oni.
give us SEC food day our today

The Gilbert and Rivington African Swahili matches the Bergholtz Swahili or Kiswaheli up to one letter (extra u prefix) and the latter, in turn, matches the 1869 Matthew (D&M 8737), translated by Steere.

utupe leo chakula tunachoihtajia
that-you-give-us today food that-we-need

chakula 'food' is from a root for 'eat'. The Swahili Wikipedia for Baba yetu has two rival modern versions, Protestant and Catholic, that instead use riziki 'provision' and mkate 'bread', respectively. riziki is from Arabic رزق rizq, from Persian روزی ruzi, related to روز ruz 'day' (second half of Nowruz); and ultimately a distant cognate of English light. mtake is from a verb for 'cut' and so the same idea as in Ojibwe.

The Apostolides (and some others) Hausa again only differs from a couple of modern Matthews in spelling and word order.

Ka bamu yao abintšimu dakulum.
you give-us today food-our daily
Ka ba mu abincinmu na yau.
Ka ba mu abincin yau da kullum.

However, Schön's translation from 1843 had this.

Bah mu yau nau massar mu da kulum.
give us today bread our day every

Elsewhere in that Vocabulary it does give massa / massar as 'bread'. But I believe it is, more precisely or etymologically, masa, the Hausa rice cake (for which YouTube recipes are easy to find), rather than European (or Mediterranean) bread.

All three possibilities happened in Shona, starting with what appears in Gilbert & Rivington, but only in the 500, as Chino (Matabeleland). It matches the 1898 Book of Common Prayer and nearly matches the 1937 and an Anglican liturgy.

Tipe nasi sadza redu remisi yese.
Tipe nasi sadza redu re misi yese.
Tipe nhasi sadza redu remisi yese.
give-us today sadza our day every

Moreover, it matches the version given by Bishop Knight-Bruce in Memories of Mashonaland, which leads me to suspect it is the work of Bernard Mizeki. Sadza, Shona maize porridge (similar to ugali, mentioned in the Maize post, and originally made with millet), is enough of an English word for the OED.

An alternate Communion Service from 1957 has chingwa 'bread' instead. And other Bible translations have zvokudya and kudya 'food'. The dictionary says zvokudya is 'fodder', but I imagine that's a dialect difference. By picking the date carefully, it's possible to find a translation, or at least snippet, from when this was spelled with Doke's alphabet, ɀokudya, using a hook instead of a v digraph for the labialized alveolar.

Without getting too far away from the focus of this blog, it is worth acknowledging the question, whether any of this makes any different to congregants. The Lord's Prayer in the Ghanaian Context by Michael F. Wandusim is a reworking of the author's D.Theol. thesis, a Reception History of the Prayer in that context, informed by Mother-tongue Biblical Hermeneutics and the work of fellow Ghanian theologian John D. K. Ekem. The author has also written a summary of what that approach is about and, while still a student in Germany, a short presentation on their research, referencing the 'daily bread' verse in particular.

Since the book was a disseration, it must also confirm the candidate's understanding of existing Lord's Prayer exegesis and that takes up some of the front. The author then lays the groundword for the history, both of the Prayer in the context of Ghana and of the interpretation of that history by reviewing Ekem's analysis of Jacobus Capitein's Translation into Mfantse, specifically in the Ekem's paper, “Jacobus Capitein's Translation of ‘Lord's Prayer’ into Mfantse: An Example of Creative Mother Tongue Hermeneutics,” but also in his book Early Scriptures of the Gold Coast: The Historical, Linguistic, and Theological Settings of the Gã, Twi, Mfantse, and Ewe Bibles. Capitein's 1745 published version is here. Ekem's works also reconstruct it in modern orthography. His book also relates the history of Andrew W. Parker's translation of the New Testament (D&M 1902-6; scan of the Gospels). That version is included in Gilbert and Rivington as Fanti and added here.

Innadubánne mánjen dabaê.
Hɛn edziban ma hɛn dabaa ɛ
Onze ſpys geef ons altyd.
Give us our food always.
Ma hen, hen dadā edziban nde.

Wandusim notes that Capitein's translation avoids epiousion problems by omitting it. And that rather than a single dish of 'bread', 'food' implies something more comprehensive. Wandusim's book then interprets more carefully the Prayer in Matthew 6 in a 2012 Twi Bible. Ekem's book reproduces the title page of and transcribes the Lord's Prayer from J. G. Christaller's 1871 Bible (D&M 1898). This version is in Gilbert and Rivington as Otshi (but missing one of the underlines for ԑ). The differences in the prayer seem to be primarily in orthography, particularly for this verse.

Ma yԑn yԑn daa aduane nnԑ,
mã ye̲ṅ ye̲ṅ dā aduaṅ ʼne;
give us our everyday food today,
  1. daa for epiousion: 'continually, constantly, always, every day, daily, often, ever, eternally'. Combining two of the possible exegetical senses, “bread for today and bread necessary for our existence.” (The others are “bread for the following day, …, bread for the future, and bread necessary for our everyday existence.”)
  2. aduane 'food' instead of paanoo 'bread' indicating not a specific meal but all that nourishes. Also motivated by the “dire economic realities of most Ghanaians,” though note that the same word was used in the nineteenth century translation.

Wandusim then interprets a 2016 Kusaal Bible. The 1996 version is given in footnotes.

tisimi ti zina diib nwԑnԑ fʋn tisidi ti daar wʋsa si’em la,
ka tisi ti zina diib wenne fun n tisid ti daar wusa si’em la,
[and] give us today(’s) food like how you give us all day/every day,
  • diib “food in the generic sense”
  • “the whole petition … suggests an understanding that God always gives food to the people”
  • “a here-and-now focus”

It is perhaps worth noting that while Ekem's book is primarily religious in its focus, and made even more so by some additional materials bound in by the print-on-demand house, it does give detailed histories of the development of the orthography for these languages, featuring missionary linguists such as Diedrich Hermann Westermann, who was discussed over at LanguageHat after the Maize post. Those underlines for open vowels come from the Lepsius Standard Alphabet, already encountered on other continents above.

In 1855, when an English edition of Lepsius's Standard Alphabet was published, Johannes Zimmermann and the Basel Mission were in the midst of work on a Gã Bible. The transliteration followed the system developed for the Church Mission Society, under the leadership of Henry Venn, by James Frederick Schön, introduced above for his Hausa translation, and Samuel Lee, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, and published in 1848 as Rules for Reducing Unwritten Languages to Alphabetical Writing in Roman Characters : With Reference Especially to the Languages Spoken in Africa (often cited in pre-digitization days from the transcription in this paper). Now in early 1854, a series of meetings were held at the London residence of Baron Bunsen, in the Prussian Legation in Carlton Terrace, to work out a better, more universal replacement. Here Lepsius and Max Müller presented competing proposals to scientists like Herschel and Owen (to explain voice physiology), colonial adminstrators like Trevelyan, and missionaries like Venn and Trestrail, and, on the German side, Pertz the historian. Bunsen added reports on these London Conferences and the proposals as an Appendix to his Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History Applied to Language and Religion. In the end, the Lepsius system was chosen. Consequently, Zimmermann switched to that, starting with their 1857 Genesis. As a result of all this, we can see the same translation in both the old and new schemes, comparing the 1855 Gospels (D&M 1483) and the 1859 New Testament (D&M 1491) The Standard Alphabet version is included in Gilbert and Rivington as Acrâ, or Gâ, probably from a later edition, as it seems to correct a couple of accents in the last word.

Hâ wọ ngmẹnẹ wọ dâ ngma;
Hãwo̲ ṅme̲ne̲ wo̲daṅma;
Hãwo̲ ṅme̲ne̲ wo̲dāṅmã;
give-us today our-daily-bread

Zimmermann's “Vocabulary” in Volume Two of his Grammatical Sketch defines ṅmã as 'food of every kind', but more specifically as 'a kind of wheat, very small and black, of which bread is made'. Is that some sort of millet? In any case, it seems a local 'bread' association was international.

Since no discussion of nineteenth century Europeans in Africa is complete without an appearance by Richard Burton, here is a Gã proverb from Volume One of Zimmermann's Sketch,

Blo̲mo̲ ds̆ee ṅmã nì ayeo̲.
Quarrel is not a food which is eaten.

which is reproduced from there in Wit and Wisdom from West Africa, but not before a complaint about the source.

Nothing can be more distracting than the misprints of the work — too much, however, should not be expected from the printing house of M. Steinkop [sic], of Stuttgart — and nothing can be more Teutonic than its learned and copious disorder.

Missionary activity began rather late in Australia and consequently only the largest collections have any translation: 1 in 250 and 300 and 3 in 500.

Lancelot Threlkeld began work on Awabakal in the mid-1820s, with an informant named Biraban, publishing grammatical works, with some scriptural verses, in 1827, 1834, and 1836. In 1850, he published his translation of the Lord's Prayer with interlinear glosses. (He also includes several Polynesian specimens there, mostly to show how much they look like one another and how little like Awabakal.)

Nguwa ngearun purreung ka yanti ka tai takilliko.
Give to us day to be as it is continue for to eat.
Ġuwoa ġearun purreȧġ ka takilliko.
ngu-wa ngayaran parrayang-ka yaNTikatay tjaki-li-ku
give-Imp 1plAcc day-Loc always eat-Nmls-Purp

The modern analysis at the bottom there is from Part 3 of Amanda Lissarrague's Salvage Grammar, from here (or here). Note how the 'daily bread' idea is done by Biraban with verbal forms. Already by 1850 the community of Awabakal speakers had greatly dimished.

How many a speech has become lost in the extinction of numerous nations in the inscrutable ways of the providence of God since the confounding of the tongues at Babel! and how steadily, silently, and certainly is the progressive extinction still marching on in its devastating course amongst the Aborigines of this Southern Hemisphere.

Threlkeld's work, including the Pater Noster, was used by Friedrich Müller in 1867 and 1876 to illustrate an Australian language. But not picked up into the straight Pater Noster collections until its revision and publication in 1892, along with a completion of his translation of Luke. It is this latter, using the slightly different orthography for ng and no 'always' with 'eat' for the 'daily' in 'daily bread', as shown above in the middle, that was included in Gilbert and Rivington's 500 collection. That is also the version given here in the online transcription.

The earliest to be included in the collections, in fact, was George Taplin's 1864 translation into Ngarrindjeri. He gives a short version as the prayer (D&M 6966) and a slightly longer one for the Matthew verse. Taplin does not give a word-for-word translation, but his 1871 and 1879 notes together explain all the vocabulary. They also explain an abbreviated form for personal pronouns, which I think mostly accounts for the difference between the two versions.

Pemp our ind arn krepowe hikkai nungge.
Give IMP thou us bread this day.
Pemp our yan arnangk arnauwe krepowe hikkai nungge.
Give IMP ACC us.DAT us.GEN bread this day.

This page likewise gives the short one on the front page and the longer verse in its online bible. krepows / krepauwe is bush bread; in typical fashion, Wikipedia scrupulously distinguishes this from the (European) wheat damper and points an accusing finger at those who use the same word for both. My experience, as a collector of Aboriginal art, is that bush damper seed dreaming or some subset of those words is the sort of thing that a painting might be called, though I admit that some exoticizing by dealers is always possble.

The last before the turn of the century is from an 1897 New Testament in Dieri by Reuther and Strehlow: Matthew Luke (D&M 3249). Again it only makes it in the largest collection and is also available online here. Modern spelling can be found here.

Buka ngaianini ngaianingu karari jinkiamai.
Puka ngayanirni ngayaningu karari yingkiyamayi.
food(vegetable) of-us to-us today give.

The Pater Noster as the default text for comparing languages never really went out of vogue.

  • James Bowman Lindsay's life's work was a dictionary of fifty languages. (Which was never finished. He did produce, but not capitalize upon, some technological innovations, such as incandescent lighting, for which he was celebrated by a recent Instagram from Dundee, where he lived.) Along the way, and in hopes of gaining support for the dictionary, he published Pentecontaglossal Paternoster; or, the Lord's Prayer in Fifty Languages, in Native and Roman Characters: Accompanied with Verbal Translations, and with Glossological and Historical Notes. With Dissertations on the Time and Place of the Origin of Man, and on the Origin and History of Alphabets; Specimens of the Hieroglyphics, and of Twenty-Five Alphabets (1846). I have not found a scan of this online anywhere. It does have a novel way of correlating a word-for-word translation by numbering the words.
  • W. B. Lockwood wrote a couple of fun little trade paperbacks, such as you might find on the side table in a college bookstore in the '70s, Indo-European Philology, Historical and Comparative and A Panorama of Indo-European Languages. (They can be borrowed online from the Internet Archive, at least while that lasts.) The first choses the Lord's Prayer for detailed analysis and comparison and the second includes it whenever possible as one of the sample texts. This includes Sanskrit (using the New Testament, Third Edition, described above) and the author justifies this nineteenth century translation on the grounds that most important Sanskrit works date from after it was in use as a spoken language.
  • At least up until the dawn of the Internet, new printed collections were still being published, such as 1990 Lord's Prayer in 121 European Languages, with notes on each language in Hungarian and English; or 1994 On Earth as It Is in Heaven, which continues the tradition of poaching from earlier versions, taking pages from The Album of Language and adding new color background images.
  • A Wikipedia page on a random language is likely to follow the section with the IPA chart with a Prayer translation, often with little or no grammatical analysis.

It is not unreasonable to presume this ubiquity. I supposed I could find a scan of the Albanian Ati ynë written using Vithkuqi, one of the locally invented alphabets. The alphabet is in Auer as Albanisch (bottom of a middle column), using a new typeface they cut in Vienna. But the translations, 342-348 (lower half of rightmost column), are in Roman type. Still, with a little digging, there it is in Veqilharxhi's 1844 spelling book, scanned here: I can't figure out how to deep link on that site, but it's page 6, the lower half, with the text in the Greek alphabet in parallel.

𐕱𐖷𐖨𐖟𐖬 𐖞 𐖬𐖡𐖗𐖜𐖥𐖛𐖫𐖞 𐖬𐖞 𐖫𐖬𐖗𐖞 𐖳𐖮𐖵 𐖞𐖝𐖞 𐖬𐖗 𐖬𐖜𐖟𐖧𐖞 𐖠𐖗𐖧𐖞𐖵𐖟 𐖵𐖮𐖬𐖗,
Μπύκε̈ν ἑ γκανδίτζμε νέμναε σότ ἐδέ νὰ νδε̈γέ φάγετε̈ τόνα,
Bukën e ngadiçme nemnae sot edhe na ndëje fajetë tona,

What about the others? The Elbasan Gospel Manuscript unfortunately does not include the relevant verses of Matthew or Luke. Still, there is a subreddit lobbying for the use of the Elbasan alphabet for the Arbëresh language with a The Lord's Prayer in the Script post.

Bucnë tënë tëdiscmen emna sòt.
Ұүрɴҫ vҫɴҫ vҫɟисрhzɴ zhɴє сòv.
𐔁𐔟𐔂𐔓𐔈 𐔝𐔈𐔓𐔈 𐔝𐔈𐔄𐔍𐔛𐔂𐔒𐔇𐔓 𐔇𐔒𐔓𐔀 𐔛𐔖𐔝.
bread our give to-us today

(The Cyrillic is chosen because the letter shapes are similar.) That version matches Sicilianisch-Albanisch. 348. on the Auer page above, from Hervás 186. Greca-Siciliano. Okay, what about the Todhri alphabet? Michael Everson's Unicode proposal for Todhri encoding reproduces pages from Early Albanian Bible Translations in Todhri Script that have a version.

𐗂𐗤́𐗔𐗊𐗘 𐗢𐗚́𐗘𐗊 𐗢𐗊 𐗛𐗊𐗝𐗆𐗒́𐗅𐗉𐗘, 𐗉̄𐗛𐗘𐗀 𐗘𐗉̄𐗉̄ 𐗟𐗚́𐗢, 𐗇𐗉 𐗇𐗓𐗉̄ 𐗘𐗉̄𐗉̄ 𐗋𐗀́𐗓𐗉𐗢 𐗢𐗚́𐗘𐗀,
búkën tónë të përdíçen, épna née sót, nde ndjé née fájet tóna,

(Todhri is new in Unicode 16, which is only a few weeks old as of when this was posted and maybe not supported by the browser yet. Again, if a font is needed, Noto is a good choice: Vithkuqi Elbasan Todhri.)

Even still, in 1862 an E. F. could send to Notes and Queries a query whether a collection of the Lord's Prayer translated into a number of languages had been published. The immediate answer inserted by the editors was A New System of Geography, which has a few, and The Bible of every Land for An Alphabetical List of Specimens in Native Characters, though most of those are from elsewhere in the Bible. A more complete answer was given in three weeks by Henry G. Bohn. He refers to what he remembers: Mithridates, Alphabeta Varia, Fry, Hervás, Chamberlayne, Wagner, Marcel, Sprachmeister, and a couple not covered here yet. One is plugging his own “Antiquarian Library” edition of Mallet's Northern Antiquities, with a “Specimens of Languages,” along the lines of what Bishop Percy had done in his translation. The other is Franz Xaver Stöger's Oratio Dominica Polyglotta Singularum Linguarum Characteribus Expressa, with “43 plates of the Lord's Prayer in different languages, embellished with designs of Albert Durer.” I cannot find scans of the whole work online, just single pages. There is a Hungarian reprint from the '90s. This work copies the lithographic plates of Johann Nepomuk Strixner's blank borders, which are based on those Dürer did for Maximilian I's prayer book, and adds the various translation texts in their various scripts. So Anglice takes a page with the end of Psalm 18, reduces to just the border, and adds the Our Father in italic type (the Romance languages are in regular and the German Fraktur). This bookseller's original copy has a pasted-in “Avis” explaining some of this, but their image of it isn't really legible and there is nothing like that in the reprint. Stöger also did a reproduction of the prayer book using the same borders.

I am not sure that squeezing the first line of the Pater Noster onto land masses in the maps at the back of the Synopsis Universae Philologiae (decent scans there; somewhat better here; the whole book here) really works. It does not help that much of Africa and all of the Americas are punted. As for “Bontiorum Characteres in Iaponia, Scribunt hæc secundum methodum Brachmannianam,” 'Bonze characters on Japan, these are written according to the Brahmin method', they come from here and were part of a Tamil text.

There are physical world analogues of these collections. Atlas Obscura has a small piece on the Pater Noster Church in Jerusalem, which has ceramic tiles in the walls of various translations. I have not found a single place that lists all 140 languages covered; Wikipedia just says over 100. There used to be a site from the '90s that I think aimed to do that and more: with photos of some tiles and entries for a claimed total of 1817 translations, many with image scans readers had sent the maintainer; but since early 2018 it only remains in the Wayback Machine. Google Image Search finds more recent photos, many from tour companies; that list can be narrowed by clicking / adding a Tiles tag. Recent additions appear to be Bicol and Cook Islands Maori. Naturally, like those reports, media cover the hometown favorite: here is a piece from Papua New Guinea showing the Tok Pisin version,

Givim mipela kaikai inap long tude.
give us food enough along today.

Only kaikai 'food' does not have an English source. It is from Polynesian kai. The Hawaiian cognate of kai is ʻai:

E hāʻawi mai iā mākou i kēia lā, i ʻai na mākou no neia lā.
IMP give to PRO us on this day, - food for us for this day.

ʻai is 'food', specifically 'vegetable food', as opposed to iʻa, which is 'meat'; or, almost all the time, poi and fish, respectively. The Maori on that same page uses its 'food' cognate kai, but a more common version uses taro, the root vegetable generalized to 'food'.

homai kia matou aienei ta matou kai mo tenei ra,
Homai ki a mātou aianei he taro mā mātou mo tēnei ra.
Give us now the food we need this day.

Sagrada Família's narthex has seven bronze doors (representing the seven sacraments) by Josep Maria Subirachs. The largest (representing the Eucharist) has the Lord's Prayer in Catalan in relief in the center and 49 translations of el nostre pa de cada dia doneu-nos senyor el dia d'avui carved around it. Here is a post on the artist's site from when it was installed. (But note that it quotes a slightly different Catalan prayer version.) Here is the best photo I could find. Booklet 8 here has an image with less resoltion, but it isn't cut off.

When collectors ran out of languages that people speak, at least to which they had access, there were always languages that no one speaks any more, of that no one really speaks at all. Sanskrit has already been mentioned as a special case.

The Gilbert and Rivington 500 collection added some in dead languages done specially for the work: three in cuneiform, labeled Accadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian, and three forms of Egyptian, Hieroglyhphic, Hieratic, and Demotic. The British Printer reporter had specifically called out cuneiform and hieroglyphic type “curiosities.”

𒌓𒁕𒉈𒂊 𒀭 𒊺𒌁𒈨𒂗 𒆕 𒌓𒁕𒋗 𒅇𒈨𒉌𒋧
ud-da-ne-e (dingir) ezinu-me-en du ud-da-šu u-me-ni-šum
today (det) grain all days give.us

𒌓𒈬 𒀭𒉌𒌋 𒀭 𒀸𒈾𒀭𒉌 𒃻𒆗 𒌓𒈨 𒀉𒈾𒀭𒈾𒀀𒅆
û-mu an-ni-u (îlu) aš-na-an-ni ša kal û-me id-na-an-na-a-ši
𒌓𒈬 𒀭𒉡𒌋 𒀭 𒀸𒈾𒀭𒉌 𒃻𒆗 𒌓𒈨 𒀉𒈾𒀭𒈾𒀀𒅆
û-mu an-nu-u (îlu) aš-na-an-ni ša kal û-me id-na-an-na-a-ši
day this (det) grain of every day give.us

These cuneiform versions appear somewhat more different than they really are; in fact, for our 'daily bread' verse, the second and third differ in only one sign, due to a different vowel choice in the same word. First, there are three different typefaces. This is particularly evident for the dingir determinant: Akkadian 𒀭, versus the simplified Neo-Assyrian 𒀭 and Neo-Babylonian 𒀭. (If those don't look different or the text otherwise doesn't resemble the printed version, the fonts here may be needed.) Second, because the same 'grain' word is transliterated ezinu, the Sumerian form, but ašnan later. Some brave soul has started to fix the Unicode for this translation in the Wikisource scan of this book. But some ? problems are left, such as because ezinu is usually spelled še.tir, as pointed out by the CAD, s.v. ašnan.

𓅧𓈎𓏔𓐰𓏥𓈖𓐰𓏥𓏌𓐰𓏤𓌨𓐰𓂋𓏏𓐰𓏛𓉔𓐰𓂋𓅱𓇳𓐰𓏤 ꜥq-n n˙w ḫr˙t hrw 'bread our daily' has a somewhat recognizable loaf shape. (If the glyphs are not stacked properly, try G35-N29-X4B:Z2 N35:Z2-W24:Z1 T28:D21-X1:Y1 O4:D21-G43-N5:Z1 in the MdC tool here and maybe download Microsoft's Egyptian Text font pointed to there; it seems to be the only one that does it right yet.) This is not the earliest such translation: hieroglyphic is the final number CCL in Marietti. It has more or less the same ꜥqw.n 'bread.our' word.

Somebody on Quora offered a translation into Proto-Indo-European.

dh₃dʰí nos h₁edyés h₁édnom térpontm̥.
Give us today (our) needed food.

This well-established pattern for language cataloguing is followed by a page on a Conlang wiki for Our Father. It has, for instances, two versions of Volapük, differing mostly in word order:

Bodi obsik vädeliki givolös obes adelo!
bread our daily give us today.
Givolös obes adelo bodi aldelik obsik!
give us today bread daily our.

bod is just Germanic *brod- 'bread'. And Lojban,

.i fu'e .e'o ko dunda ca le cabdei le ri nanba mi'a
Please give us today, today's bread.

For a more detailed analysis, see here. nanba is a mashup of 麵包miànbāo, nan, and pan.

Because the Internet is still full of weird stuff of the good / harmless sort, as well as the other kind, one can find at least two version of the Pater Noster in Klingon: videos or poster.

DaHjaj tIr ngoghmaj ghonobneS
today grain-brick-our IMP(you/us).give.HON
DaHjaj maHvaD DaHjaj Soj yInobneS
today we-for today food IMP(you).give.HON

Even these show the 'bread' / 'food' dichotomy. I am myself unsure whether there is some meaning difference in the first person object form of the second person subject imperative. Or is it like English, where there are claims for both a dative case (like Latin) and that verbs like give take two objects (either one can be passivized)? Sadly, it still isn't possible for those who should wish to to write the Klingon script in Unicode. I suppose the Consortium, being beholden to governments and corporations does not wish to appear silly or worse. As might be expected, there are also copyright issues. The Wiki says, “efforts continue.”

Tengwar in Unicode is in the same stuck state. Not surprisingly, Tolkien wrote translations of the Pater Noster into his invented languages. The Quenya Átaremma has:

Ámen anta síra ilaurëa massamma
IMP.us.DAT give today every-day-ly bread-our

That is the final form of the last of six given and analyzed in Vinyar_Tengwar 43. Two of the authors had earlier done their own Attolma in issue 32. The first four of Tolkein's have mastamma, which is more etymologically transparent: the relevant entry in The Etymologies is (p. 372):

MBAS- knead. Q masta- bake, masta bread. N bast bread; basgorn loaf [KOR].

📅🍞🥖🫓

Daily Bread 4

Continued from part 3.

Some of the collections were, like Trumbull's, specific to a language family. And even the larger works tend, over time, though not uniformly, to be organized according by family, rather than just alphabetically, as such schemes developed within emerging language sciences. Conversely, the study of language increasingly devalued Pater Noster collections, as it became a real science, say, during the (long) eighteenth century. This stage of its development is sometimes given in personal shorthand as Leibniz to Humboldt.

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Leibniz is a short-list contender for the “last man who knew everything,” but I think it is fair to say that his interest in language comparison stemmed from a bigger goal of working out the origin of nations, where a new scheme beyond Biblical literalism was needed. In his Nouveaux Essais sur l'Entendement, his reaction to Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he has his character say,

Sans parler de l'origine des peuples, qu'on connaîtra par le moyen des étymologies solides, que la comparaison des langues fournira le mieux
Not to speak of the origin of nations, which becomes known by means of solid etymologies, which the comparison of languages will best furnish.

He saw collecting source material, including in particular word lists and translations of the Pater Noster, as key in such a plan. The posthumous Collectanea Etymologica contains correspondence with Witsen, detailing his efforts to obtain these.

Je n'ay pas encore reçû les Pater en Langue Scythique, Samojede, Baskire &c.
I have not yet received the Pater in the Scythian langauge, Samoyed, and Bashkir, etc.
Depuis ma derniere lettre, j'ay reçû les deux Oraiſons Dominicales ci-jointes; …
Since my last letter, I have received the two attached Lord's Prayers; …
Ayant reçû ces jours-ci l' Oraiſon Dominicale en Langue Samojede, je vous l'envoye ci-joint.
Having received a few days ago the Lord's Prayer in the Samoyed language, I am sending it to you attached.

There follow some of the results, including one in Hottentot, with an explanation of clicks (which sadly do not occur in the daily bread verse).

Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language, in one on Leibniz, when describing this program and the correspodence, has a footnote with a translation that makes these principles much more exact and scientific. Although this passage has been quoted frequently since, it does not seem to actually correspond to Leibniz's Brevis designatio meditationem de originis gentibus, ductis potissimum ex indicio linguaraum, which, if it has a big thesis, is about how locations get named. Kruszewski would use the German translation of Müller as the motto at the head of his Очерк науки о языке 'Outline of Linguistic Science'. I wonder where the passage really comes from.

Humboldt contributed to Vater's volumne 4 of Mithridates a section on Basque. The inclusion of the Vater unser seems to have been primarily occasioned by needing to correct spelling errors in the versions given in volume 2 that were taken from Hervás.

I do not know that Humboldt explicity devalued Pater Noster collecting in his theoretical writing. But Pott's introductory volume that accompanied an edition of Humboldt's Über die verschiedenheit des menschlichen sprachbaues und ihren einfluss auf die geistige entwickelung des menschengeschlechts (Englished as On Language: the Diversity of Human Language-structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind) does.

Vater unser Polyglotten dagegen, ehemals ungemein beliebt, erhoben sich selten darüber hinaus, Gegenstand religiösen Interesses, oder gar nur eiteler Liebhaberei, zu sein, zu wesent lichem Nutzen für die Wissenschaft. Als zu abstract musste dies Gebet den Uebersetzern öfters grosse Schwierigkeiten bereiten.
Polyglot Lord's Prayers, on the other hand, once extremely popular, rarely rose above being an object of religious interest, or even of idle hobby, to be of significant use to science. As this prayer was too abstract, it often caused great difficulties for translators.

One of the Vater-unser-Polyglotten cited in Pott's footnote there, along with Auer and Dalton, The Album of Language (not Languages) by Gábor Naphegyi (not Nahegyi) is one of those unfortunate works inside Gale Sabin Americana and so not scanned by anyone else or available outside a subscribing library.

So too, Jürgen Trabant in Europäisches Sprachdenken (p. 239),

Genau diese Art der Beschreibung der Sprachen als Ansammlungen von Übereinstimmungen und Abweichungen von einer als Normalität gesetzten europäischen (griechisch-lateinisch-spanischen) Grammatik wird Humboldt kritisieren, und er wird dem Mithridates — ohne Vaterunser, die Vaterunser sind gerade ein weiteres gravierendes Hindernis für die echte Sprachforschung eines Vergleichenden Sprachstudiums entgegenhalten.
It is precisely this kind of description of languages as collections of similarities and deviations from an assumed to be normal European (Greek-Latin-Spanish) grammar that Humboldt will criticize, and he will counter Mithridates — without the Lord's Prayer, the Lord's Prayer is just another serious obstacle to genuine linguistic research in comparative language studies.

Comparing Humboldt with the Mithridates authors, Grimm wrote to Bopp (12 Jan. 1828),

Hätte doch Adelung und Vater nur Funken gehabt von solch universalem Sprachtalent, so wäre der Mithridates ganz was anderes!
If Adelung and Vater had only had sparks of such universal linguistic talent, Mithridates would have been something completely different!

Between the times of Leibniz and Humboldt, the Pater Noster contributed even more directly to testing the hypothesis of a Finno-Ugric language family. In a scene somewhat reminiscent of Cardinal Mezzofanti, the Demonstratio. Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse tells how Hell had Sajnovics listen to a Carelian informant recite the Lord's Prayer. (That is the 1771 Trnava edition. The 1770 Copenhagen edition has a somewhat shorter description. This paper implies that the changes were made less to give Hell his due and more to downplay the role of Scandanavian scholars.) Earlier some principles are given for how to recognize true cognates and not loanwords, noting that religious terminology would be particularly likely to be borrowed. It also discusses the 'bread' word, Leibe (láibi) and possible relations to German Lab or Russian Gleba (хлѣбъ); the Sami (and Finnish) is indeed, just like the Russian, a loanword from Gothic (or some early Germanic language).

Not that the timeline was the same in all philologist subcommunities. For example, though there was concern among European Christian Arabists about the propriety of teaching with Quranic texts, it did become the norm by the seventeenth century. But for a while the Pater Noster and other prayers were preferred. Postel (1538) ends the Grammatica Arabica section with the Pater Noster and the Fatiha (with no title and Amen added) in Arabic script without transliteration and with Latin translation (which has problems in the latter case). The same version is given by Gesner 1555, Rocca 1591, and Megiser 1593 and 1603, all with different transliteration schemes; Rocca also include the Arabic script, with slightly different vowel pointing. But Postel's grammar was also issued separately bound. Two works, both titled Alphabetum Arabicum, by Jacobus Christmann 1582 and Giovanni Battista Raimondi 1592, also include the same text in the sample readings, again with different pointing and transliteration. Except for an extra preposition, the 'daily bread' verse is the same as the MSA version.

خبزنا كفافنا أَعْطنا في اليوْم
ẖubz-nā kafāf-nā āʿṭi-nā fī al-yawma
bread-our sufficiency-our give-us on today
hhobzna châphaphna ahtana phi liaum
chobzana chephaphona agtona phil i aumi
hhobzna chäphaphana ahtana phi liaum
chobenza cephaphna ahhttana phi aljomi
chobezna cephaphna ahhttana phi aljomiʼ
chobenza kaphaphena aatna phil-iaumi

Thomas Erpenius, in his Grammatica Arabica (1613), at the end of the first book, after introducing the alphabet, takes several verses (51-55) from Ad-Dukhan and fully points them step-by-step, Later posthumous editions, such as from 1748, add Luqman fables and adages. His own Rudimenta Linguae Arabicae (1620) gives as Exercitatio Surah 64, At-Taghabun. Erpenius was the standard Arabic grammar in Northern Protestant Europe until the nineteenth century. See Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe.

The online equivalent of wall text, in a Library of Congress exhibition of Vatican rarities, for a copy of Ambrogio's Introductio, also credits Scaliger for the rejection of the Pater Noster among Arabists. As with Humboldt above, I am not quite sure whether that refers to a specific passage in some work or letter.

Nevertheless, yet another Alphabetum Arabicum, from the Vatican in 1715, is unà cum Oratione Dominicali. The text is a bit different from the above.

أعطينا خبزنا كفاتنا كل يوم بيومه

It also seem to have a compositing / printing error for كفافنا.

There is a hadith, Sunan Abi Dawud, Book 29 Medicine (كتاب الطب kitab al-tibb), 3892, with an Islamicized Lord's Prayer as a healing incantation; sadly it loses the food petition.

Trumbull spends some time summarizing the transcription errors in the Algonquin entries in Mithridates, specifically the (33) Shawnee one (its 430) that appears at the front of these posts.

As mentioned above, we previously encountered Adelung's Mithridates in a peanut post, when Leo Wiener corrected its Judaeo-German. As he notes, 145. Jüdisch-Deutsch comes from Hervás, 194. Giudea-Germanica. Corrected, it is:

Aun gib aunat hithí aunezereth gezi haltin beruith;
Un gib uns heite unserem gesetzten Brojt;

The geography was not always reliable. This paper follows the peregrinations of a Tupi specimen.

Araiauion ore remiou Zimëeng cori oreue.
Aräiauion ore remiou ëimëeng cori oréue.
day-each our food give now us.

Note the snarky keywords on the paper: «Notre Père, collections, copier-coller» / “Lord’s Prayer, collections, cut-and-paste”. This paper traces the intellectual origins of Thevet's translation. This paper covers the roles of Amerindians in the composition and dissemination of the Lord's Prayer in Brazil at that time. And this paper compares ten versions of the Lord's Prayer in Tupi-Guarani from around the same time.

It also lays out, in particular, the consistency of the 'daily bread' verse.

Notre (ore) nourriture (remiou, remju, remiri, remiu, rembiù, remiou, rembiù) de chaque (iauion, bondoara, yabiȏdoara, yabiondoàra, yabiõ ndoâra, ñabò guàra, aiedouare, ñȃbȏ’guâra) temps (ara, àra, âra, àra, are, ara), donne (ëimëeng, eimeeng, eimeng, eimeeng, emeè, eimé, Emeȇ’) nous (ore) maintenant (cori, curi, ioury, coára pĭpe).

Sometimes there are intentional substitutions. Wilkins explains in the Preface about the Bengali entry,

Bengalicam ego litteris genti huic propriis lingua autem Malaica expreſſi, quod ea ibi quam maxime uſitata & quod Orationem Dominicam ſtylo Bengalenſium conquirere non potuerim. De lingua Bengalica notandum eſt, olim fuiſſe adeò communem ut in multis circumſitis regionibus ſeſe diffuderit, aſt introducta Malaica univerſali ſerè totius Indiae Orientalis lingua, tantum inter limites Bengalae ſeſe continuit, atque priſtinum uſum amittere cepit, ut praeter litteras à pauciſſimis nationibus adhibeatur, in primis tamen à Mahumetanis Magni Mogolis ſubditis, uti hoc ex ore civis cujuſdam Bengalenſis hauſi.
I have expressed Bengali by the Malay language in the proper letters of this nation, because it is most commonly used there, and because I could not find the Lord's Prayer in the style of the Bengalis. It is to be noted about the Bengali language, that it was once so common as to have spread in many surrounding countries, but when Malay was introduced as the universal language of the whole of Eastern India, it continued only within the limits of Bengal, and began to lose its former use, so besides the letters it was used by very few nations, but primarily by the Mohammedan subjects of the Great Mogul, so I have gathered from the mouth of a certain citizen of Bengal.

And, indeed, the Bengalice specimen has a reading identical to the Malaice one, which is taken straight from a translation of the Gospels by Dutch missionaries.

Onſ dagelicks bꝛoodt gheeft ons heden.
Roti kita derri ſa hari-hari membrikan kita ſa hari inila.
رُتِ کِيتَ دَرِّ سَهَرِ هَرِ ممَبِرِيکَنْ کِيتَ سَهَرِ اِينِلَ
রওঠ​ি ক​িথঅ দ​েরর​ি ষহঅ হার​ি মামবর​িক ান ক​িথঅ ষহঅ হার​ি িন​িলঅ

Note that Malay has vowel points like Arabic, rather than Jawi. I have done the best I can to approximate the Bengali, given that Unicode wants to render some vowels on the left. Sprachmeister reproduces for Bengalica both the script in a fold-out and the transliteration. But Pantographia, after reproducing some of the Bengallee alphabet from the Encyclopédie, in the Appendix gives only Chamberlayne's transliterated text, that is, Malay.

It seems almost inevitable that these far-flung collections should include some wholly spurious entries. Gramaye has several, such as the second one in the collection, labeled Antiqui Ægyptij.

Beko hibh pueum, theth hio memah,

Another work of the same year, Specimen litterarum et linguarum universi orbis, also has it (but with habh for hibh), with an explanation,

Orationem Dominicam communicauit mihi Ægyptiaco & Nilotico ſermone Bapt. Fererius ſequens.
The Lord's Prayer in Egyptian / Nilotic speech communicated to me by Bapt. Fererius follows.

This was picked up by Pierre d'Avity, in his Description générale de l'Afrique, describing the Moeurs Anciennes of the Egyptians (again with minor spelling changes: thet for theth — that is what you should Google for to see how wide spread it is), cited as Orat. Dom, 100 ling. (that link is the 1600 edition; it not in the original 1614 work that became his “Geography”; it is in the 1637 edition, too, but there only seems to be that horrible Gallica scan, so it's hard to make out any citation). From there, it was taken up by Müller, labeled Coptica quaſi Antiqua and cited as Grammaye ap. D'Avity Afr. 297. (that being the page in the later edition). That is copied by Motte, with the same label Coptica quaſi Antiqua and citation (though now with bibh for hibh).

But it is then called out by D. Wilkins in his preface to Chamberlayne,

Copticam ſtylo ut dicitur antiquo Editiones Collectionis Orationis Dominicae priſtinae ex Petri d'Avity Africa pag. 197. deſumpſerunt, eſt autem chaos vocum Ægyptiacarum, Hebraicarum, Græcarumque quæ nunquam uti hîc conjunctae ſunt, in lingua Coptica fuerunt in uſu ſed ab Auctore Grammaji effictæ, linguae Copticæ ignaros hucuſque illudere quaeſiverunt. Quid enim Theut habh ataſt en ornos aliud quam ⲧⲉⲩⲑ אב אתה ἐν ȣ̓ρανοῖς? Nonne arich eho derivari poſſet ab אֲרִיךֶ decorum Chald. et ךָ echa Pronomine Poſſeſſivo tuus! Annon bahl eho regnum tuum, à בעל Dominus & Pronomine ךָ tuus originem ducere poſſet? Ita etiam ah ſicut Hebræum אךֶ & iſi vox Ægyptiaca ⲓⲥⲓⲥ terra eſt. Reliquæ voces exoticæ nullam cognationem cum Coptica Æthiopica aut Arabica habentes lingua genium conſtructionis Africanae vel Aſiaticæ non ſapiunt, maleque tales quales ſunt ab Auctore ſunt expressae; …
Coptic style, as it is called ancient, in the Edited Collections of former Lord's Prayers from Peter d'Avity Africa page 197. They consumed a chaos of Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek words which were never used together in the Coptic language, but were invented by the Author of the Grammar, and sought to mock those hitherto ignorant of the Coptic language. For what is Theut habh atast en ornos other than ⲧⲉⲩⲑ אב אתה ἐν ȣ̓ρανοῖς? Could not arich eho be derived from אֲרִיךֶ in Aramaic and ך echa, the Possessive Pronoun your! Is it not true that bahl eho 'your kingdom' could originate from à בעל 'Lord' & the pronoun ךָ 'your'? So also ah like the Hebrew אךֶ & isi is the Egyptian word ⲓⲥⲓⲥ 'land'. The rest of the exotic words, having no kinship with Coptic or Ethiopic or Arabic, do not suit the language of the genius of African or Asiatic construction, and are bad such as they are expressed by the Author; …

And given in the main work as Coptice ſtylo ut dicitur antiquô. Nevertheless, it is still included in Sprachmeister as Coptica quaſi Antiqua again, with a note that, as well as the same citation, does observe that an different Coptic version had been supplied earlier; in Hervás as Orazione in Copto quasi antico; and in Fry as simply Coptic 3.

Finally, by Mithridates, v. 3, it is relegated to a long footnote, summarizing all that and concluding, somewhat begrudgingly,

Schlau ist der sehr wahrscheinliche Betrug dadurch versteckt worden, daſs man da einerley Laute wiederhohlt findet, wo man sie zu erwarten hat.
The very probable deception has been cleverly concealed by the fact that one finds the same sounds repeated where one would expect them.

George Psalmanazar's Formosan language hoax (see The Pretended Asian, especially chapter 3) included a translation of the Lord's Prayer and a native alphabet (although the prayers are not given using it; the scan of the following edition is maybe a little clearer). French, Dutch, and German editions followed.

Amy khatſada nadakchion toye ant nadayi,
Our bread daily give us to day,

Once again, the invented language does a pretty good job of appearing to have the statistical shape of a natural language; so I assume that the 'bread' word khatsada is meant to be related to an earlier described khatzadao, “a very good ſort of Bread,” made from one or the other of two roots, chitok and magnok.

Müller (and, copying that, Motte) already had a Formosana (copied; I believe this is understood to be Siraya), from a (now lost) catechism by the Dutch missionary Robert Junius. The cited authority, J. L., is Job Ludolf.

Pecame ká ca[n]gniang wagi katta,
Give-us - food-our day this,

Daniel Gravius's translation of Matthew, per Trumbull's breakdown, has 'bread' instead of 'food'. Adelaar analyzes this verse in Siraya: Retrieving the Phonology, Grammar and Lexicon of a Dormant Formosan Language (p. 213).

Ph'ei-kame wae'i k'atta ki paoul-ian ka mams-ing.
P’h’-ey=kame wäi k’=ăta ki paul=ian ka ma-m’sing.
Give-sj.uo=1pe.nom day lk=prox df bread=1pe.gen lk ao1-enough

Elsewhere, Adelaar derives kan-ǝn 'food' from kan 'eat'; and paul 'bread', “< Portuguese (via Hokkien?)”. Here are various Siraya translations side-by-side, including Psalmanazar's fictitious one.

In preparing the preface to Chamberlayne, D. Wilkins corresponded with M. V. La Croze (see above); to a letter listing some problem languages, he received a reply giving Gravius.

Formoſana eadem eſt, quae exſtat in ſuperioribus editionibus, hic uero ex autographo Ludolfiano in ſeptem petitiones diſtincta.
The Formosan is the same as that which exists in previous editions, the real one here from the hand of Ludolf, in seven distinct petitions.

And it appears, Formosane, with only slight differences in spelling from Müller and divided into verses. And the preface directly repudiates Psalmanazar.

Miraberis forſitan, Lector Erudite, quod Orationem Dominicam Formoſanam tantopere diverſam ab eâ quae ex ore Georgii Pſalmanazaaris in deſcriptione Inſulae Formoſae fluxit appoſuerim? Miraberis quod literis Latinis cam expreſſerim cum ex libro hoc Formoſanac hauriri potuerint? Sed ſcias velim me auctoritate Jobi Ludolphi in Epiſtola ad Mullerum monitiſque Amici Berolinenſis adductum Orationem Dominicam litteraſque ejus ceu ſubleſtae fidei ſpreviſle, mihi vero ſufficere utramque litteris Pſalmanazaarianis à me congeſtam inter privatas ſchedas latitare.
Perhaps you wonder, erudite reader, that I should have added a Formosan Lord's Prayer that differs so much from the one which flowed from the mouth of George Psalmanazar in his Description of the Island of Formosa? Do you wonder also that I should have expressed in Latin characters what has been taken from the book of this Formosan? But I would like you to know that I was influenced by the authority of Hiob Ludolf in his Letter to Muller, and by the advice of the Amici Berolinensis, and rejected that Lord's Prayer and those characters as being of little credence; indeed it was enough for me that whatever was collected in the Psalmanazar text should remain hidden in my private papers. (tr. Keevak & Cheney)

And, in fact, Psalmanazar's never did appear in a Pater Noster collection, except with qualification. Still, that is not the end of his influence on them. Sprachmeister, which aimed to be more than just a collection of prayer translations, included Psalmanazar's alphabet and parts of (the German translation of) his language description, including the outlandish explanation of, „Warum die Japaneſiſche Sprache von der Chineſiſchen und Formoſaniſchen differire,“ which has previously come up in a comment over at LanguageHat. Then in the Orationis Dominicæ Versio part of the book, the version from Chamberlayne is given, citing that as the source. But, as a compromise, a fold-out page is pasted in transliterating Junius's translation into Psalmanazar's alphabet. Recall that even Psalmanazar hadn't printed his supposed prayers using his alphabet. And, again, Auer included that version as “Formoſaniſch. 84. Aus Benjamin Schulze's V. U. S. Leipsig, 1748.” (Asien, second column of Ost-Asiatische Inseln, under Japanisch) with a typeface that is later given on the alphabets page (fourth column from the right).

And, finally, Mithridates includes Junius's version, cited as Aus Rob. Junii Katechismus, Delft, 1645, 12. The preceding language description has this footnote,

An des untergeschobenen Ge. Psalmanazars (N. F. B. de Rodes,) erdichteten Description de l'Isle Formosa, 1708 wird hoffentlich niemand mehr denken, wenn er gleich auch ein so genanntes V. U. welches sich anfängt: Amy Pornio dan chin orhnio vieg, hat. Er starb 1764 zu London, nachdem er daselbst die protestantische Religion angenommen, viel an der alten Geschichte der algemeinen Welthist. gearbeitet, und noch vor seinem Tode ein öffentlich gedrucktes Bekenntnifs seines in Ansehung der Insel Formosa begangenen Betruges abgeleget hatte.
Hopefully no one will remember the fictitious Description of the Island of Formosa, 1708, by the spoofed Ge. Psalmanazar (N. F. B. de Rodes), even though he has a so-called Lord's Prayer which begins: Amy Pornio dan chin orhnio vieg. He died in London in 1764, after having adopted the Protestant religion there, worked a great deal on the ancient history of general world history, and before his death had made a publicly printed confession of his fraud in relation to the island of Formosa.

Note the error vieg for viey. Wikipedia has vicy, due, I suppose, to OCR problems; you can thus tell when it was the source. Ornio versus Orhnio was a contemporary difference between the English and French (and German and Dutch, respectively) editions.

The Taensa language hoax, while having its own Oraison Dominicale, was evidently too late to gain any traction.

Pva k-yehônigin héfne-ayar-bre me-hebutgi-vunimpa-coukkabiao,
Give for-us day-this-during daily-our-bread,

J. Wilkins included various translations of the Lord's Prayer for comparison against the translation into his Philosophical Language.

ɩo velpɩ rɑl ɑɩ ril ɩ poto hɑɩ ſɑba vaty̯
Maiſt thou be Giving To Us In This Day Our Bread Expedient

That version is broken down word-by-word, first as the Real Character (logographic script) and then as the Philosophical Language (phonetic scheme) that is put on top of that. I do not know of any practical way of rendering the former here, but here is the flavor of the latter:

  1. (Sɑba) Sɑ denotes the Genus of Oeconomical Proviſions, (b) the firſt difference, and (a) the ſecond ſpecies, which is Bread.
  2. (Vɑty̯) (bɑ) is the Genus of Tranſcendental General, (t) the fifth difference, y̯ the ſeventh ſpecies; the change of b to v, denoted this Word to be an Adjective, and to ſignifie Expedient.

And, after that, A Compariſon of the Language here propoſed, with fifty others, as to the Facility and Euphonicalneſs of it. in the form of columns,

“ taken out of Geſner, Mithridates, and Megiſerus his Specimen, as they have collected and lettered them to my hands.”

He declines to go to the trouble of transcribing each of them into a uniform phonetic form, which would give a fairer comparison. But still hopes for second place.

In the comparing of theſe Languages, it may be granted that ſome few words of each Language may ſeem preferrible to others in this: But take it altogether, and in the whole, and it may at leaſt ſtand in competition with the beſt of them, as to its facility and pleaſantneſs. Tis moſt likely, that the generality of Readers will be apt in the comparing of theſe Inſtances, to give the precedence to thoſe Languages they are acquainted with. I ſhould deſire no more from them, but that they would be content to permit this new Language to come in the next place, which would be a ſufficient teſtimony for it.

A similar confidence in his readers drawing the wanted conclusions from a long list of Pater Noster translations motivated Pfeiffer, in Pansophia Mosaica e Genesi delineata 'Mosaic pansophy outlined from Genesis', mentioned above for Chinese. As well as finding all twenty-eight articles of the Augsburg Confession in the Book of Genesis, he claimed to show that Hebrew was the der Ursprung aller Sprachen 'the origin of all languages'. Starting his list of seventy languages with,

In der Ebraͤiſchen Sprache als der Stamm⸗Mutter/ und Koͤnigin aller Sprachen lautet demnach das Vater unſer am fuͤglichſten alſo:
In the Hebrew language, as the root-mother and queen of all languages the Lord's Prayer thus sounds most appropriate as:

4. Eth léchem chükkénu then lánu hajjóm.

Hierauff wollen wir nun zu allererſt herben ſetzen der Ebraiſchen Sprache naͤchſten Toͤchter / oder die Sprachen und Mund⸗Arten die ihr am alleraͤhnlichſten sehen / als
I. Die Chaldaͤiſche / und zwar Babyloniſche.
Now, first of all, we want to set out the closest daughters of the Hebrew language, or the languages and dialects that most resemble it, such as
I. The Chaldean, and specifically Babylonian.

4: Lachina di miſſetana habh lana bĕjoma dĕna.

And ending with Poconchi.

4. Chaye runa cahúhúnta qvih viic.

That starting Hebrew version is the same as in the author's Methodus Ebraea.

אֵת לֶחֶם חֻקֵּנוּ תֵן לָנוּ הַיּוֹם
eth lekhem khuqqenu then lanu hayyom

Trumbull's first three (or four, depending on how you count) versions are Micmac. 1. is from Mithridates, 435. Micmac, explained there as from a letter of La Croze (see above) to Bartsch. 2(a). is from a note (signed S., whom I take to be Shea) from Rev. Christian Kauder on “Micmac or Recollect Hieroglyphics.” 2(b). is the same version, with different transliteration, from Rev. Eugene Vetromile, in his Indian Good Book and then with a (different from Kauder's) interlinear translation of the hieroglyphs in The Abnakis and Their History. Trumbull has much to say (most of it negative) about the translation, and even the Micmac text; specifically for the 'daily bread' verse, “Neither translation is correct. In fact, the Micmac is untranslatable.” These Mi'kmaq hieroglyphs are used in prayer books: here is the Lord's Prayer in the 1866 Buch das Gut that Kauder had printed with a newly cut typeface in Vienna (cf. Auer) and the 1921 second edition by Fr. Pacifique de Valigny, Manuel de prières. I have not yet made it to the library to look at the recent Mi'kmaq Hieroglyphic Prayers, which presumably does a reliable job of lining up the glyphic components with the morphemes. As I understand, the resolution of some former controversies seems to be that the system was a native invention, adapted / taken over by missionaries, and that it is a genuine writing system and not just a mnemonic device, though perhaps not capable of writing an arbitrary utterance.

There is nothing special about Trumbull's choice of Algonkian languages, other than that he knew a lot about them.

Chamberlayne has an entry Mohogice, with a note that it was sent by “Rev Dnus Berkeley E. A. Presbyter in Albania Novi Eboraci.” This is copied into Marietti as CCXXXIII Mohogice. Hervás has a similar 51. Mohaux, o Mohogica, which was copied into Mithridates as 427. Mohawk, as well as Gilbert & Rivington, 300 and 500 Mohawk. Hervás regularly includes literal word-by-word translations, but not for this one. Mithridates has a footnote giving Mohawk primary sources, a 1781 Primer for Mohawk children and a 1769 translation of Morning and Evening Prayer; the prayers there were presumably close enough to have been recognized as the same. Bergholtz has a Mohawk-Indian, captioned “Capt. Brant's Translation,” taken from the Book of Common Prayer. The following entry in Mithridates, 428. Dasselbe 'the same', is from Smith's History of New York. Comparing Chamberlayne, Hervás, the 1781 Primer, the Morning and Evening Prayer from 1715 and 1769, the 1787 Common Prayer, and Smith from 1757,

Niadewigniſerage tagkwanadaranondagſik nonwa,
Niadevvigni serage tagkvvanaranon dagsik nonvva:
Niyadewighneſerage tacwanadaranondaghſik nonwa;
Niyadewighniſeroge taggwanadaranondaghſik nonwa;
Niyadewighniſerage taggwanadaranondaghſik nonwa;
Niyadewighniſeràge Takwanadaranondaghſik nonwa;
neatewehnesalauga, taugwaunautoronoantoughsick,
daily give-us food(?) today

The Morning and Evening Prayer translation is credited to “Lawrence Claeſſe, Interpreter to William Andrews, Miſſionary to the Indians,” the Book of Common Prayer to Captⁿ. Joseph Brant, An Indian of the Mohawk Nation. / T'hayendanegea. More on the story of these two translations here. The section of Smith's History giving the Prayer is quoting a letter from Elihu Spencer. Jonathan Edwards — the First Great Awakening guy — quoted the translation in his Observations on the language of the Muhhekaneew Indians. When John Pickering edited Edwards, he also compared it side-by-side with the version in the Book of Common Prayer. Observe the footnote on that page where he says that while Mithridates cited Primer of 1781 and Common Prayer of 1769, Harvard(!) only had Primer of 1786 and Common Prayer of 1787. Nowadays, we can check online that the 1786 Primer does not differ and have already shown the slight difference between the 1769 Morning and Evening Prayer and the 1787 Book of Common Prayer.

Spencer before quoting the Prayer and Edwards afterwards call attention to an immediately noticeable feature of Iroquoian phonology.

…, all the Six Nations ſpeak a Language radically the ſame. It is very maſculine and ſonorous, abounding witli Gutturals and ſtrong Aſpirations, but without Labials.
The reader will obſerve, that there is not a ſingle labial either in the numerals or Pater noſter of this language; and that when they come to amen, from an an averſion to ſhutting the lips, they change the m to w.

Joseph Bloomfield copied the Lord's Prayer translation into his Journal and declared,

The Mohawk-Nation pronounce their Words long soft, full, low & with surprizeing sweetness.

There is also Matthew 6 in the 1880 Mohawk translation of the Gospels by Sosé Onasakenrat. This is still the standard liturgical version of the prayer. A complete translation of the Bible into Mohark, which was only finished last year (2023), includes them. This can also be found spelled out syllable-by-syllable online on a number of church sites.

Takȣanont ne kenh ȣente iakionnhekȣen niateȣenniserake.
Ta kwa nont, ne, ken wen te, ia kion he kon, nia te wen ni se ra ke.
give-us today our life daily

I am curious whether anyone knows who wrote these notes, which do not appear to be signed, in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in 1817, where they work out some vocabulary using translations from Mithridates and the Gospels.

Mithridates has a section on Cheerake, but no Vater unser; its authority is Adair's History of the American Indians, which gives a few words. Bergholtz includes Cherokee-Indian using the syllabary and the larger Gilbert & Rivington Cherokee adds a transliteration, taken from the second edition of the Standard Alphabet of Lepsius (noted above for Cantonese and Hakka; he was featured here before for editing the Egyptian Book of the Dead, from which one of Trumbull's Gilded Age mottoes was taken; the alphabet will show up again below). This is the same as the modern form of the prayer.

ꮒꮣꮩꮣꮘꮢ ꭳꭶꮅꮝꮣᏼꮧ ꮝꭹꭵꮟ ꭺꭿ ꭲꭶ.
ni-da-do-da-qui-sv o-ga-li-s-da-yv-di s-gi-v-si go-hi-i-ga.
Nidadodagwise̥ ogalisdaye̥di sgie̥si gohi iga.
Daily our-food give-to-us this day.

The translation in Luke is somewhat more different in its details from Matthew, from which that is taken, than the source calls for, perhaps due to different translators.

ꭳꭶꮅꮝꮣᏼꮧ ꮝꭹꮑꭾꮝꮧ ꮒꮪꭹꮸꮒꮢꭲ.
O-ga-li-s-da-yv-di s-gi-ne-he-s-di ni-du-gi-tsv-ni-sv-i.
Our-food give-us every-day.

The history of Bible translation into Cherokee — see, for instance, here — is closely associated with the Cherokee Phoenix. The last page of the first issue, published in 1828, in addition to giving Sequoyah's syllabary, has (in the first column) the Cherokee Lord's Prayer, a versified version, and a literal translation back into English.

ꭳꭶꮅꮝꮣᏼꮧ ꮣꮩꮣꮘꮢꭲ ꮝꭹꮝꮑꮈꮝꭸꮝꮧ.
Our food day by day bestow upon us.
O-ga-li-s-da-yv-di da-do-da-qui-sv-i s-gi-s-ne-lv-s-ge-s-di.
our-food daily give-to-us.

For the 'daily bread' verse, the versification only adds ᎠᏴ ayv 'us' for metrical effect. No translator is given, but Samuel Worcester and/or Elias Boudinot would likely have contributed it. The newspaper then serialized the translation of Matthew by George Lowrey and David Brown, getting to verse 11 in issue #15. This matches the modern version, except that 'daily' is ꮓꭶꮩꮣꮘꮢ no-ga-do-da-qui-sv. When Worcester and Boudinot's translation, “compared with the translation of Geoge Lowrey and David Brown,” was published in 1832, it had ꮩꭶꮩꮣꮘꮢ do-ga-do-da-qui-sv. The editions of 1850 and 1860 established the modern version. Gallatin's Synopsis of the Indian Tribes of 1836 transliterates the version of 1832 with an interlinear translation. The same transliteration and translation were evidently printed separately (together with the other three in the same place); Harvard preserves a copy of that.

Daily (adjective) our food give us this (a pronoun of time) day.
Tawkatawlaquisung awgalis-tayungti skiungsi hawli iga.

All these versions use the same word for 'bread', ᎠᎵᏍᏓᏴᏗ a-li-s-da-yv-di, which means 'food' or 'meal', related to verbs for serving a meal rather than for eating. So that perhaps the materiality of the petition is the act of being fed rather than sustenance.

Missions to the Navajo were too late for any of the nineteenth century collections; Mithridates Nabajoa is little more than geography. Wiktionary has a citations page for the Prayer with interlinear glosses. The same text, but with an earlier orthography, stands in for Matthew in a 1917 partial Bible.

Chʼiyáán tʼáá ákwíí jį´ nihaʼiyíłtsódígíí díí jį´ nihaa náádiníʼaah.
Food every-day you-feed-us this-day to-us give-it-again.
Cʼiyaṅ tʼaakwi jiṅh nîḣaʻ iyiłˊtsōdîgi ėi diʻjiṅh nîḣa nādînîāh.

One of the translators listed is Leonard P. Brink, and he is credited with a 1908 translation.

Ta-akwi jin bea inaani naxxa-iyilthtsood.

Again much of this is recognizable, despite an even earlier orthography. But it does not choose chʼiyáán 'food'. Is bea modern bááh 'bread', a loanword from Spanish pan?

A rival translation was made by Franciscan Friars and published in The Indian Sentinel, the official publication of the Society for the Preservation of the Faith among Indian Children, in 1918 and in a Catechism with every vowel length explicitly marked.

dishji ch'iian bedaqini'na dolełi naqa dileł,
dīshjī́ ch̓ĭĭắn bēdắʻqĭnīʼnā́ dŏlĕ́łĭ năqắ dī́lĕł,

Again choosing 'food'.

Continued in part 5.