Spreading the word of God and Benga: the Presbyterian Church in Corisco Bay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since its inception, the Presbyterian Church aimed to bring God’s word to the people in the native language of those they wished to convert, and that is the task it brought with determination to Corisco Bay in Equatorial Guinea. This article draws on historical documents of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, publications by Presbyterian reverends in the Corisco Mission from the nineteenth century, and fieldwork notes and interviews. I use these resources to first contextualize the establishment of the Presbyterian Church in Corisco Bay. Then, I explore the linguistic work of Presbyterian missionaries in the selection of Benga as the language of translation of the Bible. And, finally, I highlight the fundamental role that the American Bible Society played – thanks to their massive printing of the Holy Scriptures in Benga – in the spread and maintenance of the language, not only in Corisco but in the region more broadly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".