Window onto a Vanished World: Preservation and Analysis of Lahu Texts from the 1960's

拉祜语是一种藏缅语，分布在中国云南省、缅甸掸邦、泰国北方、老挝西北部和越南北部的山区，有50多万人讲拉祜语。从1965年至1966年开始，首席研究员詹姆斯·马蒂索夫博士将他的大部分学术活动都投入到这种语言的文献中，包括693页的拉祜语语法（1973/82），1500页的拉祜语-英语词典（1988），以及一本472页的英语拉祜语词典（2006年）。PI关于拉祜语的大部分工作都是基于他在20世纪60年代在泰国北方村庄收集的大量文本，记录在卷到卷磁带录音机和誊写在longhand，然后在随后的实地考察在20世纪70年代纠正。这些文本包括各种各样的体裁和记录，包括日常活动的描述，通常以短剧或短剧的形式上演;对话（例如关于乡村生活及其艰辛）;笑话和轶事;恶作剧故事;寓言和其他寓意故事;传统爱情诗歌和歌曲;基督教前的神话和万物有灵论传统的祈祷;基督教布道，赞美诗和圣经阅读。它们反映了近半个世纪以来的文化环境，在近几十年来乡村生活发生深刻变化之前。这些文本中的许多词汇和表达方式已不再常用，有时甚至无法为当代人所理解。在这170个文本中，约有130个已经由PI翻译。2011年春天，一名来自泰国的拉祜族研究生将拉祜文输入电脑。在预计的两年赠款期内，将采取以下步骤：（1）完成和修订免费翻译;（2）对每篇文章中的每个词素进行行间注释;（3）进行语言和文化方面的大量注释;（4）将文本和翻译格式化，以便在加州大学语言学系列出版物中出版。印刷本将附有一个按时间顺序排列的电子档案，其中包括20世纪60年代和70年代的原始录音带。为了确保对拉祜族人自己有最大的用处，这些文本将以目前使用的所有三种拼写法呈现：缅甸和泰国的拉祜族使用的浸礼会传教系统;中国的拉祜族使用的拼音拼写法;以及PI在他的语法、字典和关于拉祜语的文章中使用的音素正字法。最终的结果将是一本几百页的书，这将是各种人文和社会科学学科的学者感兴趣的，最重要的是，拉祜族人自己。

Lahu is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by more than half a million people scattered over the hills of China's Yunnan Province, Burma's Shan State, Northern Thailand, NW Laos, and North Vietnam. Beginning in 1965-66, Principal Investigator Dr. James Matisoff has devoted much of his scholarly activity to the documentation of this language, including a 693-page Lahu grammar (1973/82), a 1500-page Lahu-English dictionary (1988), and a 472-page English-Lahu lexicon (2006).Most of the PI's work on Lahu has been based on the voluminous corpus of texts he collected in Northern Thai villages in the 1960's, recorded on reel-to-reel tape-recorders and transcribed in longhand, then corrected during subsequent fieldtrips in the 1970's. These texts comprise a wide variety of genres and registers, including descriptions of daily activities, often enacted in the form of skits or playlets; conversations (e.g. on village life and its hardships); jokes and anecdotes; trickster tales; fables and other stories with a moral; traditional love poetry and songs; pre-Christian myths and prayers from the animist tradition; Christian sermons, hymns, and Bible readings. They reflect a cultural milieu nearly half a century old, before the profound changes in village life of recent decades. Many of the words and expressions in these texts are no longer in common use, and are sometimes unintelligible to current generations of speakers.About 130 of these 170 texts have already been translated by the PI. In the spring of 2011, the Lahu transcriptions were entered into the computer by a visiting Lahu graduate student from Thailand. During the projected two-year grant period, the following steps will be undertaken: (1) completion and revision of the free translations; (2) interlinear glossing of every morpheme in each text; (3) copious annotation, both linguistic and cultural; (4) formatting the texts and translations for publication in the University of California Publications in Linguistics series. The printed volume will be accompanied by a time-aligned electronic archive of the original audiotapes from the 1960's and 1970's.In order to ensure maximum usefulness to the Lahu people themselves, the texts will be presented in all three of the orthographies now in use: the Baptist missionary system used by the Lahu in Burma and Thailand; the pinyin-based orthography used by the Lahu in China; and the PI's phonemic orthography used in his grammar, dictionaries, and articles on Lahu. The end result will be a volume of several hundred pages, which will be of interest to scholars in a variety of humanistic and social scientific disciplines, and most importantly, to the Lahu people themselves.