Masbatenyo New Testament (OT Portions) (MSBWBT)

Overview

The Masbatenyo New Testament, titled An Maayo na Barita Hali sa Dios ("The Good News from God"), was published in 1993 by Wycliffe Bible Translators [1]. The translation was produced through the work of SIL linguist Dr. Elmer P. Wolfenden, who spent two decades (1972--1992) conducting linguistic and translation projects in Masbate province as a volunteer researcher with the Summer Institute of Linguistics [2][3]. Wolfenden's extensive linguistic work on the language also resulted in a 736-page Masbatenyo-English dictionary containing approximately 6,000 main entries, compiled with the assistance of native-speaking language consultants Miriam V. Barlet and Felixberto V. Granado Jr. [3]. Masbatenyo (also called Minasbate) is a Visayan language of the Bisayan branch of the Central Philippine languages, spoken by over 600,000 people on the islands of Masbate, Ticao, and Burias and adjacent parts of Sorsogon in the Central Philippines, located about 200 nautical miles southeast of Manila; sitting on the northern edge of the Visayan continuum, it shares roughly 79 percent lexical similarity with Capiznon and 76 percent with Hiligaynon [2][4]. The translation has served as a significant written resource for the language community, and has been used as a reference text in orthographic studies of Masbatenyo [5].

Language and People

Masbatenyo (ISO 639-3: msb) is spoken by approximately 474,000 people in Southern Philippines. [Glottolog: masb1238]

Publishing and Organizations

Published by Wycliffe Bible Translators USA. Translation type: First.

References