Phonetics and Grammar

Bimesters? Sessions?
So here at GIAL, our academic year is a little different than most places. Rather than semesters, we have bimesters, which go from July to December and January to June. Within each bimester, we have four sessions. Each session, we can take two or three classes, and they each last about four weeks (with the exception of one 8-week session). We go to these classes every day - sometimes multiple times a day, and we have nightly homework. Taking three classes in one session can be really difficult because they are jam-packed with information, but it is doable. This session, I only took two classes: Phonetics and Grammar.

Phonetics
Phonetics was a [blæstʰ]! This class is something like "Reading 101 for Linguists." Some people wonder how a person can write a language that is unwritten. Well, linguists have a special alphabet for that. It's called the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA.

(see wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet)

Most of the time, we were learning how to write sounds that we do not typically use in English, and we also practiced making them. My favorite sound is [ɮ]. To make it, you put your tongue like you're saying the sound for the letter "L" and hold it out. Now, close your teeth around your tongue, and it should sound something halfway between a "Z" sound and an "L" sound. Isn't that fun?! You just learned a new letter! It's called an Alveolar Lateral Fricative. It is found in some obscure indigenous languages of Central America, and probably some other places.

Grammar
Most people I know do not enjoy grammar, but here, it is considered fun. Perhaps it is because we all really like linguistics, or perhaps it is because it is completely different from any other type of grammar I have ever done in my life, the harder the homework, the more fun we have.

The grammar you learn in grade school is called "Prescriptive Grammar" because it Prescribes the "correct" way to speak. But linguists study "Descriptive Grammar" which looks at a language and the way people use it naturally and tries to figure out the "rules" for making a sentence. So instead of correcting people when they say something "wrong," we get to solve these wonderful logic problems from languages we've never seen or heard of before. Every day, we get new languages solve!

We might have a problem where we're given a list of sentences in the foreign language along with the translation of the sentences to English, and we have to look for patterns. For instance, if we have "The dog bit the boy," and "The boy likes the girl," we can look for a word that occurs in both sentences, and we will know that it is the word for "boy." When we get the whole list of data figured out, we look for other patterns and write rules to describe why the language runs the way it does. (Why do we say, "the big red balloon" but not "the red big balloon?")

Why is it so important to Bible translation?
A lot of people think that translation is really simple: you take one word from one language, and replace it with its equivalent in the other language. This is just not the case. In Turkish, there is one word for "Like you would be from those we can not easily/quickly make a maker of unsuccessful ones." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_words#Turkish) And in some languages, every verb must have a prefix or a suffix that tells how the speaker learned of the information, which we don't do at all in English. Greek has case markers; Mandarin Chinese puts a question word at the end of a statement; Spanish and German have gender agreement, but they're not the same genders; Portuguese drops pronouns, and so on and so forth. Grammar gives us the tools to figure those things out.

If you want a good Bible translation, the translator has to be able to understand the mechanics of the language they're translating into. And we have a lot of fun with it!

Now off to study for my exams tomorrow! [wɪʃ mi 'ləkʰ]! (Wish me luck!)