> From: "don asay" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> RE: Aymara translation of the Book of Mormon > [From don asay] > > > Right The first attempt was 1977, I happened to be in LaPaz and Achacachi > that year and knew the people doing the translation. I was not aware of > any other orthography and did not even know it was called CALA. This is why > I an am curious regardging the different orthographies today. Ken Beesley: Jorge Pedraza Arpasi has done a great service by posting a chart of the various orthographies that have been devised/proposed for Aymara. http://www.aymara.org/arusa/qillqa.html While spoken language is a human universal, orthography (a writing system) is a technology, like metalwork or agriculture, that must be invented or (more often) borrowed and adapted from some already existing example. Even when an orthography exists, it is not unusual for it to be understood and used only by a small, specially trained class of scribes/ secretaries. Even now, some specially trained secretaries write and read English and other languages in shorthand, an orthography in which their bosses (who merely dictate) are illiterate. These specialized orthographies are only partially standardized. My mother was a secretary and learned the "Gregg System" of shorthand, which is widely used in the United States (or was, a generation ago). In Britain and Canada, the older Pitman system is still used. Various linguists, often linguist-missionaries, have proposed orthographies for Aymara. Bertonio and other early Jesuit missionaries adapted Spanish orthography in various ways in their early descriptions. CALA was apparently what many "standard" publications were using in the 70s. Recently, IGR (Ivan Guzman de Rojas) and Juan de Dios Yapita proposed orthographies for at least academic use; the Yapita orthography is indeed used in the publications of the "Florida School". The Maryknoll orthography was another proposal by a missionary organization. It is not at all unusual for a language to have various competing proposals for orthography. The Alfabeto Unico is almost identical to the Maryknoll orthography and would appear to be the practical choice for anyone wanting to write Aymara today. It has been formally accepted for use by both Peru and Bolivia. It is also interesting to note that it is possible to have a standard _orthography_ but not a standard _dialect_. There are, of course, significant differences in the Aymara spoken in various regions, and one might expect that writers from different regions would simply use Alfabeto Unico and write words reflecting the way they pronounce them locally. Does anyone know more about standardization of the _dialect_ used in dictionaries, newspapers, books, etc? > > allmost no one could read aymara, > Aymara was not a > written language then but apears to be a fairly recient invention ( > reinvention? did > it not exist as a written language long ago somehow?) As I pointed out above, every normal human being _speaks_ a language, but there is nothing natural or necessary about reading and writing, which is a cultural technology. It appears that no orthography was devised for Aymara until the arrival of the Spanish, and even then it was not standardized and did not become widely used. My current morphological analyzer accepts either Alfabeto Unico or Yapita orthography. If I find some time, I'll try to augment it to accept CALA as well. Ken ********************************************************************** Kenneth R. Beesley [EMAIL PROTECTED] Xerox Research Centre Europe Tel from France: 04 76 61 50 64 6, chemin de Maupertuis Tel from Abroad: +33 4 76 61 50 64 38240 MEYLAN Fax from France: 04 76 61 50 99 France Fax from Abroad: +33 4 76 61 50 99 XRCE page: http://www.xrce.xerox.com Personal page: http://www.xrce.xerox.com/people/beesley/beesley.html ********************************************************************** _____________________________________________ Lista de discusion Aymara http://aymara.org/lista/lista.html _____________________________________________
