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

拉祜语是一种藏缅语，有50多万人使用，分布在中国云南省、缅甸掸邦、泰国北部、老挝西北部和越南北部的山区。从1965-66年开始，首席研究员James Matisoff博士投入了大量的学术活动来记录这种语言，包括693页的拉祜族语法（1973/82），1500页的拉祜族英语词典（1988）和472页的英语-拉祜族词典（2006）。PI关于拉祜族的大部分工作都是基于他1960年代在泰国北部村庄收集的大量文本，这些文本被记录在磁带录音机上，并以手写方式转录，然后在1970年代的后续实地考察中进行修改。这些文本包括各种各样的体裁和语域，包括对日常活动的描述，通常以小品或小剧的形式颁布；对话（例如关于乡村生活及其艰辛）；笑话和轶事；骗子的故事;寓言和其他有寓意的故事；传统情诗情歌；来自泛灵论传统的前基督教神话和祈祷；基督教布道、赞美诗和圣经读经。它们反映了近半个世纪前的文化环境，在近几十年农村生活发生深刻变化之前。这些文本中的许多单词和表达不再常用，有时对当今几代人来说是不可理解的。在这170篇文章中，PI已经翻译了大约130篇。2011年春，一名来自泰国的拉祜族研究生将拉祜族的转录记录输入电脑。在预计的两年赠款期间，将采取以下步骤：(1)完成和修订免费翻译；(2)每个文本中每个语素的行间注释；(3)丰富的语言和文化注释；(4)整理文本和译文，以便在加州大学语言学出版物系列中出版。印刷版将附有一份按时间排列的60年代和70年代原始录音带电子档案。为了确保最大限度地对拉祜族本身有用，文本将以目前使用的所有三种正字法呈现：拉祜族在缅甸和泰国使用的浸信会传教系统；中国拉祜族使用的拼音正字法；以及PI在他的语法、词典和关于拉祜族的文章中使用的音位正字法。最终的结果将是一个几百页的卷，它将引起各种人文和社会科学学科的学者的兴趣，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.