My first, and until now, only short story has become a device with
which I could make friends from all over the world and create new
friendships. These old and new friends have translated my short
story into 58 European, 13 Asian and 6 African languages.
Because of its lucidity, "The Norwegian Bible" short story has lended
itself particularly well in representing the languages in Europe and
some outside of Europe.
As a basis for qualification and description of languages I used the
book "Lords Prayer in 121 European Languages" in which the prayers
were collected, compiled and the commentaries were written by
Zsigmond Németh. All the translations are from a reliable source
because they were written by persons who were writing in the language
of their mother tongue. The only exceptions are the Esperanto and
the other artificial languages and English, because the English was
written by me, a Hungarian. The translation into Classical Greek,
Latin, Turkish, Croatian and Gipsy was carried out by native speakers
of Hungarian. Most friends speak English as a second language, so
the language of our friendship was in many cases English. In some
other cases the common language was Hungarian, Polish, German,
Russian or Spanish.
To some extent I wrote this book for my friends. They can get to
know each others language from my book. If anyone wants to learn a
language on the basis of the similarity and differences between
grammatical structures and vocabulary of languages, they can use my
book as a textbook. In addition I wrote this book for my 650
students in the secondary school where I work as librarian and
English teacher. They can use it as a reference about languages of
the world.
Originally, the book was published in 1994 in 50 languages. In the
last 6 years, the short story was translated into an additional 27
languages.
During this time, the 50th year anniversary of the death of my
grandfather was celebrated at a memorial session in Sopron and in
Budapest Lutheran Theology. I got to know even more about my
grandfather from these presentations and came to treasure him more
than I had previously. I began to appreciate what a precious
treasury of jewels he left for us. I met there many theologians and
pastors who were once educated by him, love him still and carry on
teaching his nuggets of precious truths.
I changed the theme of the "Appendix" of the first edition of my book
and have placed therein an essay which presents the life and work of
Baron Pál Podmaniczky, professor of Lutheran theology, lover of God
and the World of God. I also included two of his beloved hymns which
were translated by him from Finnish into Hungarian, and which are,
even today, sung often in Hungarian Lutheran and Reformed Protestant
churches. In the Appendix, I also submit an autobiography and a
short sport story of mine. And hereby I should like to express my
gratitude to Mr. Zsigmond Németh for his kindly permission to quote
the most peculiar features characterizing different languages
described in his works published and forthcoming respectively The
language collecting game continues and I ask you, the reader, once
again, to translate the original short story into any language not
present in this book, and send it to me. I would like to publish a
new edition in the year 2005 with 100 languages in it. Thank you,
dear reader, for your help.
Martinovitsné Kutas Ilona
language collector