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

拉胡语是一种藏缅语，有50多万人说，他们分散在中国所在的云南省、缅甸的掸邦、泰国北部、老挝西北部和越南北部的山上。从1965年至1966年，首席调查员詹姆斯·马蒂索夫博士将他的大部分学术活动致力于这种语言的文献记录，包括693页的拉胡语语法(1973/82年)，1500页的拉胡语-英语词典(1988年)，以及472页的英语-拉胡语词典(2006年)。国际社会关于拉胡语的大部分工作是基于他于20世纪60年代在泰国北部村庄收集的大量语料库，用磁带录音机录制并手写，然后在随后的1970年S的田野考察中进行更正。这些文本包括广泛的体裁和语域，包括对日常活动的描述，通常以小品或剧本的形式上演；对话(如关于乡村生活及其艰难困苦)；笑话和轶事；诡计故事；寓言和其他具有道德寓意的故事；传统的爱情诗歌和歌曲；基督教前的神话和万物有灵论传统的祈祷；基督教布道、赞美诗和圣经朗读。它们反映了近半个世纪的文化环境，在近几十年来村庄生活发生深刻变化之前。这些文本中的许多单词和短语已经不再常用，有时对当代说话者来说是陌生的。在这170篇文本中，大约130篇已经被国际翻译学会翻译。2011年春天，一名来自泰国的来访拉胡族研究生将拉胡族的成绩单录入电脑。在预计的两年赠款期间，将采取下列步骤：(1)完成和修订自由翻译；(2)对每个文本中的每个语素进行行间注释；(3)丰富的语言和文化注释；(4)编排文本和翻译的格式，以便在加州大学语言学出版物丛书中出版。这本印刷品将附有一份按时间排列的电子档案，里面有上世纪60年代的《S》和70年代的原始录音带。为了确保最大限度地对拉胡人本身有用，这些文本将以目前正在使用的三种正字法呈现：缅甸和泰国的拉胡人使用的浸礼会传教系统；中国的拉胡人使用的拼音正字法；以及在他的语法、词典和关于拉胡语的文章中使用的少年派的音素正字法。最终的结果将是一卷数百页的书，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，拉胡人自己也会感兴趣。

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.