1st session classes




I've been studying linguistics for about a month now. Here's what I've been learning about:

Phonetics

"Boats" and spittle

Phonetics involves learning the sounds that comprise human languages. A big part of my homework is trying to produce these sounds and paying attention to what my mouth does. I have mimicry quizzes where I have to try to repeat a phrase in another language making it sound as close as possible. We also have quizzes where we listen to words in other languages and have to transcribe them into the international phonetic alphabet.

The human's ability to make a multitude of distinct sounds to form a language and communicate is amazing. I never thought to praise God for all the various sounds in my language. God is very creative in all the ways he's given us to express meaning. He's also very gracious, because it's through these sounds that we hear and share the Gospel.

Fun tidbit: My phonetics textbook mentioned the MN/ND Scandinavian accent in the way we say "o." Virtually all English speakers make this vowel with a glide (they move their tongue and change the quality of the vowel as they say it). The Midwestern Scandinavian accent is the only one that produces this vowel un-glided. 

Grammer (morphology/syntax)

"The girl yawns the dog."

Where phonetics focuses on sounds of a language, grammar focused on how a language is constructed. In order to be able to translate the Bible into any language, you need to know how to figure out the rules the language uses.

You might imagine grammar lessons in high school English class where you had to name the part of speech of each word, but my homework is in foreign languages. I have to analyze the language and figure out how the language functions. Here's what my homework might look like:



Cultural Anthropology

Cultural anthropology is to help understand and participate in a different culture. One of the assignments for the class is to spend time in a different cultural context, so I've been attending a French-speaking African church in the Dallas area.

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