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!!