The WHAT of God?

Though our goal thus far has been to learn Gmz words, we are not doing that in a vacuum. In other words, all along we have in mind the goal of our work – to serve and equip the Gmz church through the translation of Scripture. So, that is to say, we are especially keen to keep our ears open for words that might become important down the road – words like belief, love, sacrifice, worship, trust, etc. Finding such key words is one of the hardest parts of Bible translation. One particular key word that the Catholic Fathers gave us as an example of where they struggled was with regard to the word “kingdom.” You see, the Gmz seem to always borrow the Amharic word “mengist,” but such borrowing of key terms is a big no-no in producing mother tongue Scripture. That was why I was so surprised this past Tuesday when Wohis volunteered a new word: “t’isa malet mengist” (trans. t’isa means government.).

 

“Ah ha,” I immediately thought, “wow that was easy” as I remembered the Catholic’s wrestling with finding such a term. After class that day, I remember looking at the word “t’isa” in my notebook and imagining it in Scripture down the road as “t’isa ala Musa” (trans. “the kingdom of God”).

 

Now, if these first 6 weeks have taught me anything about language learning, it is that our first impressions on a given word’s meaning, may not be correct. Because of this, we have been diligent to check every new word with at least one of our other language helpers. Whether it is the less than perfect Amharic that we all are trying to communicate in, difference of dialect or just plain error, we have found and made many corrections in our data. But, none of the corrections were as big or as significant as the word “t’isa.”

 

On Thursday morning, we routinely checked our Wohis words with Habtamu, so when “t’isa” came up, I was excited to get confirmation of this important key term that, in my mind, had already been printed in the Gmz Bible. I said the word “t’isa” and waited for Habtamu’s response. Now, Habtamu is probably my brightest language helper so I expected an immediate response “mengist.” However, his unanticipated silence caused me to look up from my notebook. I could tell by Habtamu’s expression that he was thinking of how to explain this word, which told me that it wasn’t as easy as the generic and common word for “government” that I had hoped for. Well, my hopes and dreams for “t’isa” came crashing to the ground when Habtamu finally spoke. “T’isa” in Amharic is “fesa.” Now, I knew the Amharic word “fes” but I was certainly hoping that that was not what he was referring to. The explanation that he gave thereafter confirmed that in fact it was “you know, air in the stomach comes out.” “On the bottom?” “Yea, on the bottom.” Yikes. I confirmed Habtamu’s understanding of this term with Bizare two days later only to solidify that the word “t’isa” has no place in Scripture, much less the prominent role I had envisioned. (Then again, maybe a lost verse will be found…“Jesus said to Judas, ‘can you go buy some Beano for Peter? The Last Supper isn’t sitting well with his stomach.’”)

 

Anyway, as I have thought more about it, I couldn’t help but smirk at the translation I had created in my mind: “The t’isa of God is near;” “the t’isa of God is within you;” and what’s with Jesus’ obsession with encouraging people with the idea of one day entering the “t’isa” of God? So yea, moral of the story, it’s always good to check your first impressions.

 

Ps. As mentioned in earlier blogs, there are normal, explosive and implosive consonants in Gmz. Appropriately, the “t” in “t’isa” is clearly explosive. I don’t even want to imagine an implosive “t’isa.”

In Search of Ch, Ch, Ch and Ch

Before starting to learn Gmz, I tried not to read too much of the previously written stuff on the language (so as to not taint and direct my beginning interpretations of the language). However, I did want to understand and use the recently government-approved alphabet from day one so I studied up a little bit on this. Then came the warnings from all those who had worked with Gmz before – “good luck on the weird ‘ch’ sound, I can never get it right.” Thoroughly frightened by what is linguistically described as a voiceless alveo-palatal affricate, I looked at the alphabet chart to see that there are both explosive and non-explosive varieties to this beast. So when you add these “ch’s” to the normal “ch” that we have in English and the explosive variation of it, that makes a total of FOUR  different sounds in the Gmz language all of which you would write with a “ch” (and probably not hear any difference). 

 

So, early on in our study of verbs, I asked for the word “to give” and Wohis said “dach,” which I immediately recognized it as the same word for “to rain.” So, I asked Wohis and he confirmed that “to give” and “to rain” are the same word because God GIVES the rain.” “How nice,” I thought, “the Gmz language reflects God’s giving of rain by using the same verb. That will make a great blog story!” But my story was soon foiled when a few days later, Habtamu, another of my language helpers, corrected me “no, rain is ‘dach’ and give is ‘dach’.” “Oh great,” I thought, “here we go down the ch-road.” Apparently, “rain” uses the normal “ch” and “give” uses the weird, unpronounceable “ch” that I had been repeatedly warned of. However, that was Thursday and when Habtamu came again on Friday morning, he had apparently forgotten the distinction and changed his story to “no, they are the same word.” Curious, I brought up the subject with some Gmz living near us and after some thought and discussion they definitively confirmed Habtamu’s Thursday distinction. Then Saturday, Bizare (our third language helper) came and I presented him with the question only to find him initially noncommittal. So I told him “ok, I talked with your dad yesterday and he said that dach (rain) and dach (give) have different ‘ch’s, can you recognize the difference?” He nodded his head and so I preceeded, “Ok, let’s take the word for “to plant” (danch), is that “ch” like the “ch” in dach (rain) or the “ch” in dach (give)?” Without much thought, his response was matter of fact - “ine inga” (which is flippant Amharic best translated into English as “Heck, if I know!”)

 

So, are there really four different ‘ch’s in the Gmz language? Probably, but that doesn’t mean that they will be easy to distinguish, even for the Gmz themselves. You see, these guys have never read or written anything in Gmz, so they have never had to stop and think about each sound they are making. As literacy and availability of printed materials in the Gmz language increase, so will clarification of this in their minds, if in fact the language actually requires the distinction as the alphabet reflects.

The 1000th Word

Well, as stated in our first update since beginning our Gmz language learning, we had the goal of finding, recording, entering into our computer database and making flashcards of 1000 words before our first trip back to Addis (to pick up Micah’s first visitors - Andrea’s parents). So, we are happy to report that we arrived at that goal the day before our last language session. It’s was interesting because in the first two weeks we found 500 words, but in weeks 3-5 we only added 200. Realizing that this pace wouldn’t allow us to meet our goal, we kicked up the word collection and got just over 300 in this last week. So now, as we drive back to Addis we are sitting at 1021 words.

 

So what was the 1000^th word? Well, I wasn’t sure at first. You see, I purposely don’t enter data during the language sessions for two reasons. First, not entering data forces me to have recordings of every word for future use. If I forget to record a word, then it won’t get entered in our database and won’t get learned. Secondly, I don’t enter data during language sessions for a pedagogical reason. You see, during every language session I will make a handful of recordings. Then, I wait a few days before I listen to the recordings and enter the data for the first time. So this way, I am hearing the new words on the day that we discover them and then again when I enter it a few days later. It’s built-in review. Not rocket science, I know.

 

So, Friday afternoon, I was working with Wednesday’s and Thursday’s recordings as I watched the word count nearing 1000. Ok, so I was hoping for a really cool word that I could write about in a “1000^th word” blog. Maybe it would be a funny word like word #983 “naked;” word #984 “cutting teeth;” word #987 “to gag someone into throwing up;” Or maybe God would show me something, or encourage me through the 1000^th word entered in our database such as word #989 “shepherd;” or word #993 “God’s creation.” I continued listening as I was collecting words for the condition of foods in the late 990s: #997 “unripe;” #998 “ripe;” and #999 “rotten.” So there I sat, on the brink of my blog entry, as I listened intently to the recording.

 

“Achisa” I heard myself say on the recording and I smiled at the realization that the 1000^th word was about to be the verb “to smoke” (as in a cigarette). But, when I heard Habtamu say the Gmz word “dapil” I remembered that we had already discovered that word in a different context – you see the same word is used for how dust puffs up in the air when a car passes by. So, I went to that previously-entered word and added a new sense, leaving my number at 999. So once again I sat poised for the kickoff of what I was sure I would creatively twist into a fun blog.

 

“Yehe minden new?” I asked on the recording (trans. ‘What is this?’ Obviously pointing to something visible). I leaned forward with anticipation, (as if that somehow that helped me hear my headphones more clearly), only to slouch back in my chair, laughing to myself at the non-climax of the moment. It was neither funny, nor encouraging, it was the boring word for “chin” (angilisa). Though I tried, I couldn’t think of a way to make such a word sound important or profound, without crossing into absurdity. Oh well, I guess I will have to hold out for #2000, if I ever get there. You see, when we return from Addis Ababa, we will continue learning the Gmz language, but we will not be in mass word-collection mode. Instead, we will start to focus more on using the words that we do know (ie. in sentences and stories).

 

Stupid, Fat Hobbit...

One of my favorite parts of the Lord of the Rings movies is when Gollum and Sam argue about how rabbit (or, if you will coneys) should be eaten. Gollum can’t stand the idea of killing something and then taking the time to roast it over a fire and serve it up with some complimentary dishes (you know, POE-TAY-TOES?). Anyway, I always laugh at that scene and even now as I remember it. Well, I laughed again tonight at dinner as Andrea and I probably repeated Sam’s same terrible offense with the Gmz food called “una.”

 

You see, during our first day of learning Gmz, we were collecting new words when we came across a root vegetable called “una.” The Amharic translation (“boya”) didn’t help us as our Amharic-English dictionary had no such entry and just looking at the above ground vine left us clueless as to what we might call this veggie in English. “So,” we said, “when the “una” is ready to be dug up, we want to see it.” And sure enough, yesterday afternoon, Bizare (one of our language teachers) shows up at our door with two freshly exhumed “una.” We thanked him profusely and asked “how do we eat it?” “You just boil it in water for two hours and then eat it” was his response. And so, in the name of good anthropology, we decided that we would have ONLY boiled una for dinner that night. And so we did.

 

Turns out we still don’t know the English word for una but I can add “taro” to the list of foreign words it has collected. You see, I remember eating this same veggie in Papua New Guinea, where it was called “taro.” The English translation there was “sweet potato,” but it is nothing like the yams we think of back home. What did it taste like? Well…it was like a potato with a little more flavor and a little less starch. It wasn’t bad, but with the mind of Samwise, we looked at the leftover una and thought “we could do better.”

 

So the next night, we took our reheated una, added some cooked zucchini, some little steaks and smothered it all with peppered beef gravy. Had Bizare been there to see what we had done to his beautiful una, then maybe Gollum would have had a sympathizer – “Stupid, skinny foreigners…it ruins my precious una!”

Mercy = Withholding Deserved Punishment

A few weeks ago, a short-term volunteer from the US asked me “so, I’ve been here three times and haven’t pick up any more than a few words of the Gmz language, how do you go about learning a language on your own (without a textbook)?” Wow, that’s the kind of question that linguists dream about being asked. I didn’t think that he was wanting to start a long conversation, so I tried to spare him punishing detail that such a question had rightfully earned him.

 

“Well, we start with just collecting words. Any words will do, we just need to get a lot of them because the first thing we want to understand about a language is what sounds are used. By collecting and learning several hundred words, we are training our ears to hear the sounds correctly and distinctly. For example, early on, we saw that the word for “there is none” is “”bija” and the word for moon is “b’ija.” The only difference between the words is the implosive “b” used when referring to the moon. Therefore, whenever we hear a “b”, we have to listen closely to hear if it is implosive or not (as well as listening for other implosive sounds which are likely used). Once we have a handle on the sounds of the language, then we can move into basic grammar to see how sentences are put together. It is subject-verb-object, like English? Or subject-object-verb, like Amharic? Or does the word order not matter because of special case marking, like Greek? So, we build simple sentences like “Goat eats grass” or “I eat goat”, and gradually add negation, adverbs, descriptive noun phrases, time words, conjunctions, subordinate clauses, etc...all the while looking for and noting patterns such as phonological rules, inflectional and derivational affixes, discourse level participant-reference marking, valence-increasing morphemes and…” No, as I said above, I showed mercy to this poor fellow by sparing him of such rich and wonderful details, as I will now spare you…

 

Ps. I fully realize that each one of us can speak technically about our areas of expertise in such a way so that we might as well be speaking another language. Much of what we learn in college is just how to speak the language of our chosen line of study. That’s fascinating to me.

 

Venturing Into The Deep End

The first three weeks of our language learning have been pretty basic, we have tried to collect a lot of raw data on things that we are pretty sure on. Basically, this means collecting words for concrete nouns. Just like a young toddler, we can walk around and point at stuff, say our best attempt at the word in Gmz and then get showered with praise about how smart we are. Well, no longer content wading up to our ankles in the baby pool of concrete nouns, week number four found us venturing into the deeper waters of verbs.

 

Starting off in the shallow end, we collected about 100 simple verbs, but it didn’t take long before we noticed our feet were no longer touching bottom.  So, with our linguistic water wings tight around our biceps and holding on tight to our inflatable Shamu, we headed out to sea!

 

The toughest part about learning a language from a native speaker is that the average person does not understand their own language. They speak correctly, but they don’t know why. For example, if I ask you “what is the difference between the ‘I ate’ and ‘I have eaten’?” Can you explain it to me in a clear way? Both forms refer to a past event, but they are not communicating the same thing. What’s the difference? (for those of you who will lie awake at night puzzled by this, I’ll give you the textbook answer. For the rest of you, skip to the next paragraph: “I ate” is the simple past tense which describes an event as a completed action simply occurring in the past, nothing more. “I have eaten” is the present perfect tense which describes a past event as a completed action but that has results or implications for the present. So, when you arrive at the 10^th graduation party of a given Saturday in June and the graduate’s mother escorts you to a nearly untouched table of refreshments, “I ate” simply says that you ate (but can probably fit a few more deviled eggs in somewhere), whereas “I have eaten” says not only did you eat but that you are still full (which is the polite way of saying that just looking at more food is making you queasy). Ps. If you don’t agree with this explanation of the difference between the simple past and present perfect tenses, then that proves another difficulty we run into – the fluidity of language. (Oh…and you’re wrong.))

 

So, yeah, it’s does not surprise us one bit that the Gmz people can’t answer all of our linguistic questions right off. That’s where the fun starts as we get to crack the code ourselves. This week, I made one small, yet significant discovery. I had each of my three language helpers tell me the same story (how to plant, harvest, cook and eat the Gmz vegetable called “una”). Then in comparing their stories, I noted that one guy used most of his verbs with a “di-“ prefix whereas another guy used the “du-“ prefix and the other a “da-“ prefix. And none of my guys could tell me the difference. “Why did he say it like this?” I’d ask and they’d respond, “Oh, yea, you can say it like that too,” or “Well, that’s just the way he talks.”  So, is it a dialect issue? I would think not on such a major and consistent difference. This puzzled me all week until Friday afternoon, as I was relistening to my recordings, my clue came on the verb “to plant.” The normal verb is “danch” but when Wohis taught me this verb for the first time, he added “oh, but ‘dinch’ means to be tied up” and he motioned like a guy being handcuffed. Ah, so here’s the “di-“ and the “da-“ prefixes on the same verb and a noted difference in meaning. I can see how the ideas of planting and being tied up are related ideas since both are “bound,” one by the soil and the other by ropes. So what is it about “he plants” and “he is tied up” that is different? Ah ha! It’s a matter of what linguists call “voice” which distinguishes the difference between active verbs and passive verbs. So, the “da-“ prefix is the active verb (danch – he plants or he ties up) and the “di-“ prefix is the same idea but passive (dinch – it is planted or he is tied up). I went back to my stories of the una and confirmed it. One guy focused on the person performing the actions, while the other focused on the plant itself. It’s the difference between “he planted the una seed and when it sprouted, he put a stake in the ground…” and “the una seed was planted and when it sprouted, it was staked…” Same story, correct yet different grammars to reflect different foci. It’s something to watch out for because many times using the wrong “voice” will communicate a very different meaning. If I try to say “I ate goat” but use the passive “di-“ prefix instead of the active “da-“ then I will be communicate “I was eaten (by) a goat.” Whoops.

 

The Frozen Food Aisle

The perception I always had of the food eaten by those living in “the bush” always made me cringe. On top of that, my experience in PNG helped confirm the simplicity of the meal plan that was required. Dinner’s menu alternated between canned mackerel and rice or what was affectionately called de-ja-stew (just-add-water dried soup packets).Neither of the dishes were bad tasting, but after just a few weeks, the repetition alone makes one desperate for change. Well, thanks to Andrea’s good planning and access to a portion of the deep-freezer in a nearby house, I can assure you that you won’t have to listen to our sob stories of eating poorly. In fact, I don’t feel like we are sacrificing at all in the food department.

 

In the final days before coming out here, while I was busy fixing the car and shopping all around town, Andrea and Micah were busy at home planning, pre-cooking and stuffing portioned amounts into small zip lock bags, which were then labeled appropriately and stuffed in our freezer. Several coolers were the last to be filled the morning of the move and, upon our arrival, the first to be unpacked into the solar powered deep freezer. So, basically, we have our own frozen food section! Now, we’re not talking about TV dinners here, we’re eatin’ good – tacos, fajitas, beef hash, “chicken stuff,” potato soup, salmon chowder, stir fry, chili and corn bread, etc… Not all of it is frozen, as we would not have enough freezer space for that. But anything that is not canned, dry or accessible here is then frozen. That is the meat from two whole chickens, over 10 lbs of beef, a couple pounds of fish, dairy products, and many different types of fruits and veggies. No, I’m still not gaining any weight, but I don’t think I will be losing any either (like other down-country workers often do).

 

So, with most of the hard work behind her (in the planning and preparations done in Addis), Andrea has her routine down pat. Every morning, Andrea and Micah (as pictured above) take a walk over to the house with the freezer (a short 2 minute walk). They then grab the ingredients she has planned to use in our meals that day while at the same time exchanging the “cold packs” that we use in a small cooler at our house (by circulating cold packs in our cooler, we kinda have a refrigerator. Thus far, it has worked very well. So kudos to my wife! (Where did that “kudos” saying come from, anyway? Do they still make Kudos bars? Hmmm…writing this blog must have made me hungry.)

Full Speed Ahead

We hit the ground running by having our official Gmz language lessons start just 4 days after arriving in our new house. Now, two weeks later we have established our routine of meeting with our three teachers six days a week (each one comes two days) and our latest vocabulary count is up over 500 words. Now some of those words are not highly significant, such as “earlobe” and “snot rocket,” but you never know when those words might be needed – “Hey, your snot rocket just landed on my earlobe!” See what I mean?

 

Anyway, it’s been fun to be diving into these new words and starting to see some things. For example, after discovering what the negation suffix is (“-ango”), we look back through our vocab and see how many of our collection of opposites are actually just negations – for example, “deshi” means “heavy,” and so while “ashiango” may be a common word for “light,” it literally means “not heavy.” Andrea was the first to observe that two different words for the same thing often find their meaning in word combinations. For example, “borigiya” is the standard word for “flower,” but one of our teachers insisted on “borma” being the correct word. Why? Well, “borma” is the right word for any flower, but most flowers are “burigiya” because they stand alone (not on trees or bushes) and “burigiya” is the combination of “borma” (flower) and “giya” (tree/wood/stick).

 

The vocabulary itself reveals things about the culture. The Gmz have a lot of experience with maintaining beehives and collecting the honey. Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise me that there are four different words for honey based on the different types found inside the beehive. Let’s see, there’s the normal liquid honey (saangwa), then the white honey which is made by the baby bees (cididema); and then the thick stuff that is good for an upset stomach (kwant’ema), and one more that I haven’t understood yet (mecena). It’s also fun to see where semantic overlap occurs differently than English. For example, when we learned the word for “to spill,” it immediately rang a bell as the same word for “to rain.” Therefore, either the upset cup “rains” onto the table or the rain “spills” off the clouds and onto the earth. Then, Andrea keenly asked and discovered that the same word is used for crying as tears “spill” out onto one’s cheeks. Makes sense.

 

It’s one thing to write down what the Gmz are saying, but it’s another to actually spit it back at them. I say this because of the non-English sounds that Gmz employs. No there are no clicks for which African languages are famous (thanks to the movie “The God’s Must Be Crazy”), but it does have explosive and implosive consonants (neither of which are in English). Implosives are especially fun and Gmz has at least two (b and d). Try saying a word like “bike” or “riding” and instead of the “b” and the “d” being created with air being pushed out of your lungs, make it so that the air gets sucked in (thus implosive). If you can’t figure it out, ask us for a demonstration next time we are in the neighborhood (or on skype).

 

Anyway, we are having fun learning and although we still have a long way to go, it’s nice that we are growing in our ability to spit out (or suck in) a few Gmz words every now and then.