"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 :)