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.