[PhasmaFelis]

This reminds me: some years ago, someone noticed that some translation engine, maybe Google's (vague enough for you?) advertised a whole lot of obscure languages but didn't work all that well for some of them: if you translated from English to whatever and back, you'd get mostly gibberish with a lot of oddly Biblical turns of phrase embedded in it.

I got to thinking about that, and I came up with a theory: Machine translation of course requires a corpus of texts that exist in at least two languages, a Rosetta Stone. The Bible is the most translated book on Earth. For tiny or dying languages, the kind with some thousands of speakers at most, the Bible may be the only written work that's ever been translated into or out of that language. So the Bible is their entire training corpus, and it's not enough.

[Our_Benefactors]

Major respect to the missionaries who did the translations though!

[technotony]

I spent a summer in Papua New Guinea in 1999 where I had the opportunity to meet one of these folks. He was a british man, from Yorkshire, who through force of believe made first contact with the tribe in the 1970s. His first job was to chop down the forest to make a runway, from which he could bring food from the sky which secured his position with the tribe. From there he developed a writing system for their language so they could read the bible, he'd recently finished the New Testement and was starting on the Old Testement. Sometime after the runway he'd brought over his wife who'd essentially built a british farm house with crockery in the jungle and they'd had 4 or 5 kids who mostly flew for the Missionary Airforce. Talk about a lifelong dedication!

The most fascinating thing about the place was that later the whole area had been designated a special scientific survey protection region. They protected the environment by scientists bringing money to do research to pay the locals (kind of like eco tourism protection for areas that aren't very safe for tourists). These folks were mostly hardcore evolutionary biologists rather than creationists like the missionaries, so there were older folks living in the village who in their life had gone through the history of western philosophy: they grew up with animast beliefs, converted to christianity as teenagers and now are experts on evolution. Conversations with them about the nature of existence remain some of the most inspiring and interesting in my life, I recorded a bunch and keep meaning to transcribe off cassette tape sometime.

More information for the curious here: https://pngbiodiversity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Crate...

[im3w1l]

Wow that's fascinating! Please make sure to back up the tapes before they degrade!

[AlecSchueler]

Just a massive pity that they rarely thought of writing down any of the original stories or histories from the culture's they were pushing Christianity onto.