Thursday, September 15, 2011

Credo and Quechua

Recently, I went to a talk at St Dom's on changes in the English translation of the Mass (I always did wonder why the Catholic CHurch, which should know its Latin backwards and forward, translated the first word of the Creed "We believe"). All the talk of why the Creed uses "we" or "I" and how Christian know what they know made me think, and not just about the Creed itself. On Memorial Day, I took a road trip with a friend and a priest, a man of Quechua descent specializing in indigenous theology.

Now, Quechua is a tongue with both clusivity and evidentiality. Clusivity is a recurring linguistic feature of this blog; it's the difference between we = you and I (inclusive) and we = I, but not you. Inclusivity (and, I suspect, a desire to separate the Church from the "personal Jesus" Evangelicals) was the goal of the inaccurate translation of "credo" as "we believe". It seems to me that if the Nicene Fathers had intended the first person plural they would have used it.

They certainly chose to use it in the phrase "crucifixus etiam pro nobis" "He was crucified for our sake" (a benefactive!), but how is it rendered in Quechua? It happens that I don't read Quechua well enough to tell which form "muchurqa" is (the Creed is never a fair comprehension st, since one already knows what it says) - I know more about the verb forms than the pronominal ones. It could go either way - inclusive to indicate that God's plan of salvation is for all, or exclusive to indicate the authority of the Catholic church. If I want to know, I suppose I'll have to find a Quechua grammar and dictionary. I did find this link:
http://www.yoyita.com/Quechua/Rosario/Inini_credo.php

The other interesting feature is evidentiality, the mandatory marking of how you know what you know. These epistomological endings, I expect, would have an impact on the composition of the Creed - one of the reasons the Pirahã of the Amazon have not been converted is an unwillingness to belive in more than second-hand information. Some languages have more flexibility than others in evidentiality, and I believe that Quechua is on the harder end. I wonder what Aquinas looks like in Quechua!

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