"Ling"...Part 3

(Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2).

Our Linguistic course is split into two major sections.  The first section takes place in our classroom. We have been learning Phonemics and Grammar (like I wrote about in the last two posts), and doing a TON of homework to apply what we learn.  We have looked at so many languages--most of them are real languages, some are made up--to learn these concepts.  There have been some very late nights and times of frustration because sometimes the homework was just really hard!  But most of the time it wasn't so bad :)  Okay, so that's what we have been doing since January.  We finish it on Friday, praise the Lord!  And then we will be in IN for the summer!

Okay, so the second part of our Ling training is a Practicum and it will be in the fall.  Basically, we will put everything we have learned into practice!  So we will move down to Oklahoma for 8 weeks (mid August through mid October), and we will practice our Linguistics on the Cherokee language.  We will be staying at a camp, along with our fellow Ling classmates/families.  We will have real language helpers (we will pay them) and we will have to "figure out" the Cherokee language.  It's an amazing opportunity that will really help prepare us for the REAL thing in Papua New Guinea.  And I'm sure I will blog plenty about it later :)

Okay, so there ya have it!  Our Linguistic course in a (very small) nutshell.  I hope it helped somewhat!

Oh, and this is an understatement, but we are so excited to see you all for the summer!  Cannot wait to be back in Indiana!


Some pictures from my mom's recent visit:

This woman blesses my socks off when she comes to visit!  She plays with the kids 24/7 (seems like it anyway!)...she brings ALL the food we need for her entire visit, plus tons of snacks.  She takes us out to eat, out to the coffee shop, out for ice cream.  It is always SUCH a treat to have her come!  And of course, we love having my dad too, but he's not as flexible because of work.  But he blessed us by being without mom for a week, which is a sacrifice!  Thank you, mom and dad!

The only thing Daisy wanted at the coffee shop was a bagel.  I really didn't think she would like it, but she LOVED it.  Her preferred system was to first lick off all the cream cheese, and then eat the bagel :)  Lol, that girl!

See all you Indiana folks verrrrrry soon!!!

"Ling"...Part 2

Grammar.

After we finish the Phonemics for a language and make a good alphabet, we are ready to start Grammar!  Of course, we will have been looking at some Grammar while doing Phonemics, but now grammar becomes the focus!

So, I know you are all picturing English grammar (like from middle school--remember diagramming sentences?)  Well, try to wipe English grammar from your mind because most languages have structures that are completely different than English!  (I will give some examples later).

Oh, and also, lots of people hated middle/high school English grammar (Nathan actually failed it!!). But we have really loved learning Grammar in Ling class!  It is fascinating, especially if we keep in mind the fact that we will be doing this with a REAL language someday, and how well we learn the grammar of our tribal language will determine the accuracy and readability (is that a word??) of the Word of God that our team will translate!  So this is a huge responsibility that we do not take lightly at all.

Okay, so basically, Grammar is the way that people use words and their parts in order to form sentences.  So obviously, understanding the grammar of our tribe's language will be absolutely vital to communicate clearly with them!  And communicating clearly is of the UTMOST importance when considering we will be sharing with them the greatest message of all time--the Gospel.

As we write down the words that we hear people saying, we will be breaking them up into their parts to find out how the language works.  For example, in English, to say who owns an object, we use possessive pronouns ("my dog").  However in another language, they may have possession be a part of the word.  (Like in the Mamusi language of PNG--to say "my dog" is the word "kouneou".  The "ou" on the end is the part that means "my".  The rest of the word means "dog").  And that is just one simple example--there are thousands of different ways that each language varies from the other.  Figuring out our tribal language's grammar someday will be huge--long and difficult.  But with our training, we have seen that it is very do-able!  Many have gone before us and done it--by God's grace it can be done!

Grammar has many levels--even once we know the language well, there is still a level of Grammar called "Discourse".  Discourse is basically a bigger piece of conversation--like a whole story.  Or preaching a sermon, or something like that.  And every culture does this differently.

Here is a good example.  In English, if someone were preaching and saying, "God is great!  God is mighty!  And God is faithful!"...to us, we would know that the preacher was just really emphasizing God!  He really wants us to get how awesome God is!  However, our Ling teacher told us about a tribal language in South America.  On discourse level, if we would keep emphasizing "God is this...God is that...etc",each time the word "God" is said, we would be referring to a different person every time!  So you can imagine the extreme confusion we would cause if we would teach our tribal people the ways that we do in English--it is so necessary to learn the way that they do it, in order to avoid confusion or even unintended heresy!

Well, that's a crash course in Grammar.  And we are very thankful for the ways in which New Tribes is training us, because it's a very. big. deal.

Here are our girls with their missionary kid friends :)  Can't wait to see how God will use each of these sweet girls for His glory!

We have been able to have some really good, quality family time.  This is pretty much the most amazing picnic spot we have ever found!

And...Daisy.  Just because...she's pretty much adorable :)

One more part to this series coming up! Stay tuned :)

So what exactly is this "Ling"?

Part One:  Phonemics

This post is for those of you who wonder what we are learning this semester.  Some of you may be fascinated by it (like we are!)  And many of you may be bored to tears :)

This semester, Nathan and I are in an intensive Linguistics course (we call it "Ling").  If you have been reading this blog for very long, you probably know that we are planning to soon go to an unreached people group (UPG) in Papua New Guinea.  These UPG's have unwritten languages--meaning, no one has ever learned it!  They have no written alphabet because no one has ever learned the language to make an alphabet for them.  So of course this means that the people can't read, either.  All of this will be a part of our ministry to the UPG that we go to.

(This is Dan, our genius Ling teacher.  He really is a ling genius!)

So in this Ling course, we are not actually learning a language.  We won't be able to do that until we move in to the tribe (because remember, no one knows their language.  So we couldn't possibly learn it before we move in with them!)  So we aren't learning a language right now.  Rather, we are learning Linguistics--how to even begin to go about learning an unwritten language.  There is way more that goes into this than I ever would have imagined!  I will try my best to explain it.

Okay, so like it says at the top, we first start with phonemics.  Phonemics is basically getting a language into writing.  But it's a lot more complicated than it sounds :)

First of all, we start with phonetic data.  Basically, this is when we will go out with the tribal people and write down what they say.  We write it down exactly how it sounds, which is called phonetics.  There is an international way to write down sounds, called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  That way, no matter what culture/language we go to, we will be able to write down the sounds that they say.  

Some examples of IPA symbols:
[ʃ]        This is called an "esh", which is the English sound [sh] as in "ship".

[tʃ]       This is adding a 't' sound to the ʃ, which makes the English sound "ch" as in "church".

[i]        This is the sound that we hear in English words:  "beet", "me", "key"...basically, it's a long e sound in English.  But as you can see, we spell this sound many ways in English!  If we are in the tribe and we hear the English long e sound, we will write it with the [i] symbol.

Okay, so we will write everything down that we hear with these phonetic symbols.  That is how the language sounds to us, as outsiders. 

However, then we need to do some more steps:  Interpretation and Analysis.

Interpretation is when we figure out if the people think they are making one sound or two sounds.  An English example of this is the one I listed above [tʃ]. This is the English sound [ch] as in "church".  To us, this is just one sound.  The [ch] is written as two letters, but it is just one sound to us.  However, in many other languages, they may think of it as two sounds:  a [t] and a [ʃ].  So we interpret tons of different sounds in this way, to figure out how the people view their language.  I'm not going to try to explain all the processes that go into this :)

(our latest homework...)

Then, with Analysis, we take all the sounds that we have already interpreted, and we analyze them to see which sounds are significant to the native speakers, and which ones are just variations of a sound that aren't significant.  Don't worry, here's an English example!

In English, we have many sounds that, to us, are all the [t] sound.  Here are two of them:
"top"
"stop"

To us, these are both just [t]'s, but really, they are different sounds.  In English, at the beginning of a word, we aspirate our [t]--meaning, there is a puff of air that goes with it.  However, when it follows an [s], we don't have that puff of air, which means it is unaspirated.  To us, we don't even notice the difference between this aspirated [t] and the unaspirated [t].  But in many other languages, they may have both of those sounds in their language and they may hear the difference.  So that is what goes into Analysis.

The goal to Phonemics is to create a written alphabet that the people will accept.  Here is a blogpost that I wrote last fall about creating an alphabet--read it if you want to :)  Once we create that alphabet, then we can teach the people to read their own language!  That will be such a glorious day.

Okay, Phonemics is half of what we are doing in Ling--the other half is Grammar, which I will blog about soon :)

If you read this whole post, I am impressed!  Thank you!!

our recent "pets"...

We started out Halle's kindergarten year by homeschooling her (back in Fall 2013).  She ended up going to public school halfway through that year, so our kindergarten curriculum that we had been doing only got half done.  So that meant we couldn't get to all of the fun experiements.

Well, we decided to do them this semester!  They consist of ordering caterpillars and ants in the mail, and we assumed that they wouldn't live if we ordered them all the way from Papua New Guinea...so we decided to do it while we are still here in the good old USA. :)

So first, our ants came!  A little tiny tube with 25 ants (biting ants, yikes!)

We put them in the see-through "ant hill", and for the past week and a half, we have been able to watch them build their tunnels in the sand!  It's pretty amazing really.  I don't think they ever. stop. working. Seriously, Solomon used them as the perfect analogy in Proverbs as hard workers!

Next, we got our caterpillars!  We got a little container with 5 caterpillars--it came with all the food, etc that they would need, so we just set up that container on our bookshelf for a couple of weeks.  Finally, they formed cocoons and we transferred them to this butterfly-habitat-thingy (this is not my picture...it's from google images.  It's a much better picture than any of mine!)

It was so cool to see them come out of their cocoons.  Most of them did it while we weren't home, but one of them did it while we were eating supper one night!  How amazing for our kids.  They loved it!

Our kids were able to feed them, and then after a few days we let them go.  I love this picture I got when they flew away :)  Even Nathan looks like he is filled with wonder!  Lol :)

Our last pet was Floppy.  A frog that we caught at some friends' house one evening.  Actually, our kids (mostly Halle) was catching a ton of them!  I bet they got at least 10 in a bucket.  We let them keep one--they were sooo excited!  And they named him Floppy.

Floppy provided hours of entertainment for our kids that first weekend that we had him!  Thank you for letting us keep him, Jason and Jonie!  You made their week :)

Halle even decided to test the "Princess and the Frog" thing--turns out it's just a myth :)  Nathan took this picture...I wouldn't really be in favor of letting my daughter get those kind of germs on her lips--gross.  But...the Lord is teaching me through things like this to LIGHTEN UP!  My kids will be growing up in the middle of a jungle, so I kind of have to be okay with this stuff!  But let's just say that their childhood will be VASTLY, 100% different than my childhood was!  Lol :)

And just so you know...Floppy is no longer with us.  The initial excitement wore off, and poor Floppy was pretty neglected in his plastic tub filled with a little water and one rock.  Poor frog!  So one morning, Floppy "hopped away" (with a little help from Nathan).  My conscience couldn't take the poor little frog just being so lonely in that tub!  

Love you all!  In two weeks we will be in Indiana!

goodbye to the foofs!

For the past four years, Daisy has slept with her "foofs".  (You may wonder why we call pacifiers "foofs"?  Good question!  I think Halle called them when she was a baby and it just stuck with our family!)

Back when Daisy turned 3 (April 2014), I told her, "You will probably have to give up your foofs now that you are three..."

To which Nathan said, "Oh...let's just let her keep them a little longer."  Haha!  That was a whole year ago!  You can tell she is our last kid--it's not easy to give up your baby :( 

So...she just turned four last week!  And she still LOVES her foofs!

But Nathan and I decided that it. was. time.  No more foofs for our Daisy girl.  Sigh.  So bittersweet--all you parents out there might understand how it is!  And many of you are probably thinking, Seriously?  Four years old???  Lol.  I know, I know. :)

Okay, so this weekend was the big weekend!  Nathan gave Daisy a few options of ways to get rid of her foofs, and Daisy chose...to bury them!  She said that way, someday if kids are digging in the ground, and they find the foofs, then they can suck on them!  Haha!  Great idea, Daisy!

One last time to put them in her mouth...

In the bag, ready for burial...

She was totally fine with this!  Didn't seem the least bit sad!  Probably a sign that we could have done this waaaaay sooner.  But oh well, I guess!

We are so proud of Daisy, and so completely IN LOVE with her!  She is an absolute joy.  And growing up way too fast!!

what God is teaching me through vaccines...

You probably wouldn't be surprised if I told you that Nathan and I had to "count the cost" before we started down this road to missions.

(Of course, every believer has to do that, don't they?  No matter what a believer does in life, there is always a cost to following Christ).

But anyway, I have seen some attitudes creep up in my heart recently and I feel God teaching me through these.  He is so patient with me!

The first lesson has come through this stage of getting vaccinated and filling out lots of paperwork.  I had to track down mine and Nathan's shot records from our childhood, calling around and compiling those.  I found out that our family had to get a LOT of vaccines.  Some were routine (mostly in the case of Layla and Daisy), but others are specific to going overseas.

I don't know about you, but I find medical stuff to be a big headache at times.

And then, came the kicker.  We found out that the Japanese Encephalitis Vaccine (JEV) is going to cost us $600 per person.  I was shocked speechless when I found that out!

So while I was kind of grumbling in my heart that all of this medical stuff is a big pain, and that the JEV is going to cost us an arm and a leg...I felt the Lord being so patient with me, and faithful to remind me of truth--this is all part of the "cost".  The "cost" of getting a bunch of expensive vaccines is so tiny in comparison to what we are privileged to do--help bring the gospel to a people group who would otherwise have no chance to hear it.

This is all just a part of what it takes!  I am so thankful that the Lord is so gracious to remind me of these truths.  Jesus is better than everything--including expensive vaccines!


(and just for fun...Layla was so brave when she got her shots!  No tears at all, and she kept saying all day how "fun" it was to get shots!  Lol...Daisy didn't feel quite the same way about hers, though!)