One Little Vowel

This week we've been specifically looking at translation stories from the field, and today I wanted to share my favorite so far! This story was first told in 2012 by a missionary couple who worked in Cameroon, and there is an exciting update about this language below, so be sure to read all the way to the bottom!

Friends, this story encapsulates why I am on this journey in the first place, and why I long to take you with me! I love the concept that God has placed his footprint/fingerprint/blueprint into the history of all of His people, and that sometimes we can find the clues He left us that lead to Him right inside of language. 

We've spoken before about how closely tied to our identity language is, and I am astounded by the way that the process of translation makes us ask questions that lead to deep and lasting transformation.  

Dangwa Pierre, President of the Hdi Translation Committee,
with Lee Bramlett, translation advisor to the committee.

Translator Lee Bramlett was confident that God had left His mark on the Hdi culture somewhere, but though he searched, he could not find it. Where was the footprint of God in the history or daily life of these Cameroonian people?  What clue had He planted to let the Hdi know who He is and how He wants to relate to them?

Then one night in a dream, God prompted Lee to look again at the Hdi word for love. Lee and his wife, Tammi, had learned that verbs in Hdi consistently end in one of three vowels. For almost every verb, they could find forms ending in i, a, and u. But when it came to the word for love, they could only find i and a. Why no u?

Lee asked the Hdi translation committee, which included the most influential leaders in the community, “Could you ‘dvi’ your wife?”

“Yes,” they said. That would mean that the wife had been loved but the love was gone.

“Could you ‘dva’ your wife?” Lee asked.

“Yes,” they said. That kind of love depended on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.

“Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?”  Lee asked. Everyone laughed.

 “Of course not!” they said. “If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu.’ It just doesn’t exist.”

Lee sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?”

There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded.

“Do you know what this would mean?” they asked. “This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love. He is compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

One simple vowel, and the meaning was changed from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you based on who I am. I love you because of Me and not because of you.”

God had encoded the story of His unconditional love right into their language. For centuries, the little word was there—unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable. When the word was finally spoken, it called into question their entire belief system. If God was like that, and not a mean and scary spirit, did they need the spirits of the ancestors to intercede for them? Did they need sorcery to relate to the spirits? Many decided the answer was no, and the number of Christ-followers quickly grew from a few hundred to several thousand.

The New Testament in Hdi is ready to be printed now, and twenty-nine thousand speakers will soon be able to feel the impact of passages like Ephesians 5:25,  “Husbands, ‘dvu’ your wives, just as Christ ‘dvu’-d the church.…”  I invite you to pray for them as they absorb and seek to model the amazing, unconditional love they have received.

As God’s Word is translated around the world, people are gaining access to this great love story about how God ‘dvu’-d us enough to sacrifice his unique Son for us, so that our relationship with Him can be ordered and oriented correctly. The cross changes everything!  Someday, the last word of the last bit of Scripture for the last community will be done, and everyone will be able to understand the story of God’s unconditional love.

Bible Translation Acceleration Update! : 

The YouVersion community has now reached a truly global milestone: The Bible App just added its 1,000th Bible version! With Bibles available in more than 700 languages, that means that millions of people are now reading God’s Word in the language of their hearts, together.

Version number 1,000 is Deftera Lfida Dzratawi (XEDNT), the first digital translation of the New Testament into Hdi (pronounced huh-DEE), a language spoken mostly in Cameroon and neighboring Nigeria. Generously provided to the YouVersion community by Wycliffe, this Bible’s translation is an incredible story of perseverance and love decades in the making!