Day 2 of the WoW course and we started getting into the process of transcribing languages using the International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s an amazing system for writing down sounds of words. So we learnt a bit about how the Chatino language was spoken and eventually tried out buying some things in a pretend market situation.

Terms that I’m now basically happy with include,

• voiceless constanants and vowels
• Glottal
• Nasal sounds
• labialise stops
• palletalise

and some others.

In the afternoon we did some more looking into phonology and trying to find rules in languages.

There’s lots of detail work associated with all of this that I’d love to be able to explain to you. The problem is I just didn’t get it. That’s not true exactly, I could sort of see where things were going and I’m happier now in seeing that there are some ways I could contribute to language study, but it would be wrong to say that I understood everything that was going on. I really found this afternoon pretty tough.

I’ve said already in earlier posts that I think there’s very little more important than putting the Bible in the hands of as many people as possible, in a way that everyone can understand. Today I became even happier that God can use lots of different skills to accomplish one aim, because I now know that I’m not about to run off overseas and start a translation project, but there are people equipped with the skills necessary who can.

What I did get from today is the following…

• 20% of all 11 year olds in Britain are not functionally literate after 6 years of school (not sure of source).
• when orthography closely matches the phonology, illiterate adults can become functionally literate in about a month – basically this means that when what’s written closely matches what is spoken, adults can learn how to understand a written language more quickly.

These points serve to illustrate two things. One is that English is a difficult language to master. We have rules but they aren’t constant. Then it also shows how language work, when it’s done well, can really benefit a community and make literacy easy to achieve.

The other thing is that all these languages that exist, where ever they are in the world, have fixed rules and patterns. Even in oral traditions where the language hasn’t been written down, the language still has fixed rules that people stick to. This makes it possible to learn and write languages that can be understood by native speakers.

Some people in the group were commenting at the end of the day, about how vital the mother tongue is to someone’s identity. An individual’s personal value is completely wrapped up in the language that they speak. Stories illustrating this have continued to come out all through the week.

My mind wandered a bit, to wondering if part of the English reluctance to learn other languages is that we have very little national identity to hold on to. Let’s face it, there’s little that’s uniquely British anymore. Our national dish is curry, our beers are European, television is American, clothes are made in the far east, companies have been sold off… The language and the cricket team are about all we have left.

OK, the idea needs work, but I am using this to think out loud.

So, at the end of day two I’m hoping that something other than languages is going to come into the course before the end of the week. If Paul’s comment from an earlier post, about only 1/3 of Wycliffe people being directly involved in translation, and the need for management skills is real we need some of this to be covered during the week. That said, I’m really pleased that I took part in today because I have a much better idea of the process for studying a language.

More tomorrow.