According to Wycliffe, the global authority of Bible translation, the complete scriptures have been rendered in some 518 languages and dialects as of 2012. There's a Bible in every language you can name, plus hundreds that you can't. Speakers of Esperanto have their own version, and Klingons soon may.
In what can only be explained as a case of gross negligence, the Good Book has never, as far as we can tell, been translated into Texan. A previous effort to do so stalled a few chapters into the New Testament.
But now, behold. John Dyer, a Dallas Theological Seminary professor, has filled Bible translators' glaring omission, creating a web app that automatically replaces the second-person plural "you" with "y'all."
For example, here's what Jesus really said during his Sermon on the Mount:
Blessed are y'all when people insult y'all and persecute y'all, and falsely say all kinds of evil against y'all because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for y'all's reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before y'all.Y'all are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men.
Y'all are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let y'all's light shine before men in such a way that they may see y'all's good works, and glorify y'all's Father who is in heaven.
Dyer explains why he developed the app, which is available as a Google Chrome plugin or on the web, explains why he developed the app:
[J]ust about any time I teach from the Scriptures I have to point out a place where the English Bible says "you," but the original Hebrew or Greek indicates you plural rather than you singular. This means the original author was addressing to a group of people, but a modern English reader can't detect this because in common English we use "you" for both singular ("you are awesome") and plural ("you are a team"). This often leads modern readers to think "you" refers to him or her as an individual, when in fact it refers to the community of faith.Here in Texas (and in the Southern US more generally), I tell my audience that we have a perfect equivalent to the original Greek/Hebrew second person plural: "y'all" the contraction of "you all." This of course always gets me a good laugh. And this is not unique to the Southern US - many other areas of the English speaking world also have spoken forms of you plural such as "you guys," "yinz," and "you lot."
This happens quite frequently, as it turns out: 2,698 times in the Old Testament and 2,022 time in the new, according to Dyer. And Dyer thinks it's important to point these instances out to emphasize when the Bible is addressing the community rather than the individual.
"[S]ince the Protestant Reformation, we've tended to emphasize the salvation of the individual and, with inverse proportion, downplayed God's work in the Church as a community of people," he writes.
Now that God can address his people using the proper "y'all," the pendulum's bound to swing in the opposite direction.
(h/t Christian Post)
