Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 18:31:53 -0500 From: "Peter L. Patrick" Subject: Re: Gullah Bible Dan, thanks for your comments relating the (recent?) publishing of bible translations into vernacular and esp. pidgin/creole languages BY native speakers of them, for their own ends. I hadn't thought of them in that light (though I have heard of "postcolonial lx" before). However, I'm not sure the "lx" part of the label applies here. Apart from the Gullah Bible, which Sali comments seems to be pretty authentic, one of the striking things about the Jamaican and what I've heard about the Black Bible Chronicles is how they differ from the vernacular speech that speakers speak and linguists know. I get the feeling that even though these folks are in some sense validating the variety by publishing important stuff in it, they're still very reluctant to see it as linguists do, and very prone to dress it up or Anglicize/standardize it-- while celebrating its "difference"! This ambivalence is a very familiar, and very understandable, attitude in a post-colonial society, but it also reveals the very same confusion of social values with linguistic structure, the acceptance of a non-arbitrary (even "natural") relationship between them, that members of dominant groups show-- and which is perhaps the main target of sociolinguistics. So though the translators of these efforts are doing something good, and progressive, I think there's still an essential point they're missing, which only linguists seem to be teaching. --peter