A Profound Respect

Up until this point, most of our blogs have been fun personal stories. This one goes a bit deeper into my (Travis’) thinking since arriving here in Ethiopia. Before I start, I must tell you: this is long and boring. There is no fun story, no good jokes and no wity punch line at the end. If you are prone to falling asleep while reading, stop right now. Consider yourself warned.

The topic: My growing respect for language. Sure, I’ve studied languages inside and out in the classroom, but my respect for languages has jumped to a new level in the last six weeks. Here are two points I have boiled down my thoughts into:

1. It is exhausting to be immersed in an environment where only a foreign language is spoken, even if you don’t understand a lick of it. I was surprised at how wearing it can be to hear Amharic all around me, even if I am not trying to understand what they are saying. Then, once I learn a little bit so as to pick up bits and pieces, listening becomes even more tiring. When someone speaks my mother tongue to me, I am relaxed and there is very little mental work going on. All the vocabulary and grammar roads have already been nicely leveled and paved in my mind. When working with a second language, the roads are still very rough. My ears strain to catalogue each sound because sounds come in individually - not as whole word or even phrase units as is the case in my mother tongue. My mind then strains to put sounds together into meaningful units and then connect those units to their proper meaning. Then the words need to be connected to each other in a meaningful way (that is, grammar). And that’s just one side of communication! The whole process needs to be reversed in order to respond to your conversation partner! It’s exhausting and therefore speakers of a second language have earned my respect (Americans, in general, are sadly way behind the rest of the world when it comes to knowing multiple languages).
   
   
2. I am amazed at the flexibility of language. I’m not talking about breaking grammar and phonological rules (like my Texas friends do all the time!). Rather, I’m talking about the flexibility of the actual language to communicate the same message in multiple ways. How many different ways do we have to say that something belongs to me? MY car, That car is MINE, That is Travis’ car, That is the car of Travis or the car of me. Then take this last form “car of Travis” and think of the “love of God.” Is this referring to the love that God has for us, or the love that we have for God. Actually it can mean both which leads to many exegetical decisions to make when we encounter this phrase in the Bible. Also, I think a lot about the flexibility to speak quickly or with slurred speech. For example, our co-workers who have been here for many years know Amharic pretty well, but when a native Ethiopian is speaking to another native, it is hard for even these experienced folks to keep up. Amharic has a lot of contraction in it. Like “can” and “not” contracting to “can’t”, Amharic likes to smash words together to make them come out faster and easier. That makes understanding slower and harder for us foreigners as we have to identify and un-contract these structures. In the same way, slightly differing pronunciation can cause problems for non-native speakers. Because many of our co-workers are German, it is not unusual for German to be spoken in the office or in social gatherings. This way, Germans can communicate without everybody knowing what they are saying. At first I was bummed because Andrea and I didn’t have a language like this, until I realized something. We can speak a little Spanish, which none of the Europeans know. Or, when our Spanish fails us, we can speak Pig Latin (igpe atinle). The extra step of taking the final consonant and making it word initial is a MAJOR difficulty for non-native English speakers (as it would be for us). Or, we have found that we can speak normal English with a heavy drawl or twang (thanks to our excellent teachers in Texas – especially Sherry, Logan and Libby). The exaggerated accent makes familiar words sound brand new to those who speak English as a second language. Therefore, language has incredible flexibility among mother tongue speakers, but much more narrow limits among the second language speakers. Is this a good case for mother tongue Scriptures? I think so.

Congratulations on reading this to the end. I applaud you (NOT you cheaters who skipped from the first paragraph to here!). I realize that the majority of you read it simply out of pity on my analytical mind, and maybe 5% of you might have actually enjoyed it - you should consider a career in linguistics as well! If you are part of the pity group and now need a Starbucks espresso to relieve your heavy eyelids, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.