Airplane?

It is now less than two hours until we wake the sleeping “baby” for the excitement he has been talking about all week – going on an airplane. For all those waiting for us back in the States, we decided to stir your little heart strings just one last time with the attached video. This was one hour ago, but shows something that he did numerous times these past few days – nearly every time he would hear a plane fly overheard.

Discourse Analysis (aka. How to Ruin a Good Story)

Is it possible to explain a joke without killing it? You know, you tell a funny story and hit the punch line only to get a confused stare. Attempting a quick fix, you repeat one significant detail and then again the punch line…still no response. Here you face a cross-roads, either you repeat the story from the beginning, offer an explanation of the humorous point, or abandon ship and embrace the awkwardness. My recommendation? Well, repeating the joke could leave you in the same position with one less option the next time. Explaining the joke, 9 times out of 10 will kill it, leaving you with the token response offered only out of courtesy– “Oh yea, I get it…that’s funny.” Embracing the awkwardness is definitely the best way out! Why is it that explaining a joke destroys its humor? Because much of what makes a joke funny is the way in which it is told. The words spoken are chosen carefully, but so also are the words not spoken. Often times, the language we use leads the listener to expect one thing, yet hides the real picture until just the right moment. Telling a good joke is an art form, built on one of several different joke-telling template structures.

 

In reality, all forms of communication are built on various templates. Sermons, for example. There is the typical three-point sermon, the topical “bounce around Scripture and then add application” sermon, and the underused first-person narrative sermon. When deciding how to communicate a particular message, a preacher chooses a culturally-defined template and then shapes his message in the appropriate “church language.” The same is true of political addresses, graduation speeches, commercials, lectures to children, excuses to bosses and even the unusual way we speak to our pets.

 

All communication functions within templates (which include template-breaking features), which is why if you take a joke out of its template and put it into a different one in order to offer explanation, it dies an ugly death. Which leads us to the important principle: communicating something outside of its natural linguistic template can not only distort, but actually destroy the message. In the work of Bible translation, this is something that we must take very seriously. And so, from May 14-June 8, the Gmz translation team participated in a Narrative Discourse Analysis Workshop in Addis Ababa (that is, a workshop designed for discovering the story-telling templates in our language - Gmz).

 

In preparation for the workshop, we recorded, transcribed, and translated seven Gmz stories for analysis. Dissecting a good story sentence by sentence, word by word, quickly killed our enjoyment of the stories themselves, much like a dissected frog isn’t much fun to chase around the room. However, to someone fascinated by language, slicing open and pinning back the skin of a story opens a whole new world of discovery – discovery that would help us as we would soon be suturing up our own narratives in the translation of God’s word.

 

Overall, the workshop went well. We discovered some important things, we were further stumped by others, but all in all, we felt it was time well spent. What kinds of things did we study? Well, if you look at the picture above, you can see the white board on which each day’s topics are listed out. Sounds like a barrel of fun, doesn’t it?

 

I realize that most of those words mean very little to you, so let me give you one example from the topic of “participant tracking.” In English, I can write an ambiguous sentence, “John hit Bob and he hit me.” The ambiguity lies in the question, “who hit me?” Was it John or Bob? In English, we make the distinction with stress – “John hit Bob and he hit me.” This sentence stresses the conjunction, and the unstressed pronoun ‘he’ naturally draws the same subject from the previous verb. In other words, John is the one who hit me. If I say “John hit Bob and he hit me” stressing the pronoun signals the change in subject from the previous verb. In other words, Bob hit me. Can you hear the difference?

 

Well in Gmz, there are no stressed and unstressed pronouns, but they have another important way to mark this. Verbs in Gmz are conjugated for person so there is a marking on the verb that tells the listener who the subject is (thus making pronouns unnecessary). So, I can say “John he-hit Bob and he-hit me.” This means that John hit me because the subject of the second verb is retained from the first. If I add the unnecessary pronoun, however, it changes the participant. “John he-hit Bob and he he-hit me.” Adding the pronoun signals the listener to understand that the subject of the second verb changed from the first, meaning that it must be Bob who hit me. Looking briefly at one of our translated texts in Acts, we found at least one construction where this rule had not been applied correctly, leading to a completely wrong translation. Someone who translates word for word, or even sentence for sentence will unknowingly make these types of mistakes, which is why zooming out to study and learn the Gmz story-telling template (aka. narrative discourse) is extremely important to producing the correct translation off God’s word.

Meating Their Fates

Many people warned us not to name our chickens as such a practice makes them become more like pets and less like protein-packed dinners. Despite seeing the truth in this advice, we named our hens anyway. Those names, however, were carefully chosen so as to ease their transition from the coup to the dinner plate. If you haven’t read our chicken naming blog (Jan 2011 blog entitled “McMuffin or McNugget?”), do that now as this is kinda a conclusion to that chapter.

In that Jan 2011 blog, you will remember that each chicken was given two names. The first reflected the egg dish that we wanted to make (Omelet, Overeasy, Deviled, Sunny (side-up), etc), provided that they held up their end of the egg-laying bargain. Their second name (McNugget, Cordon Bleu, Hot Wings, etc.) was nothing short of a death threat. And, believe me, we assure you that we don’t make empty threats. Yes, the latest news from the Gesas chicken coup is that the old hens of Christmas 2010 are finally “meating” their fates.

Overeasy Barbeque (aka. Barbie) was the biggest disappointment and also the first to die. She never was a good egg layer and died of probable typhoid in June 2011. Unfortunately for us, she never met the barbeque rack as her typhoid illness is the cause of salmonella and the medicine we gave her before she died is sulfa-based, which I (Travis) am allergic to. So moments after her departure, she made her final flight straight down, coming to land on a warm, soft bed of…well let’s just say we dumped her in the outhouse.

Quiche Teriyaki (aka. Terry) – Another lousy bird. Her eggs were small, infrequent and sometimes malformed with soft, transparent shells. Then in July 2011 she took a leave of absence from work (ie. she stopped laying eggs for us). So when my parents were here visiting in August, we invited Terry for dinner to help celebrate their anniversary. She was delighted, I mean delightful. Kyle you were right in your comment that Terry would be the first to meet the end of my knife.

Omelet Cordon Bleu (aka. Cory) – The best egg layer, in the 10-week stretch that I was keeping close track of eggs, she missed only 3 days. In addition she always had the biggest body size and so was an obvious choice for breeding. However, come January and February 2012, Cory began showing her age. As all the hens began getting older, Cory seemed to the grandmother among them. Right at about the time the older hens’ egg count dropped off, the second generation of chicks began laying their own eggs. Survival of the fittest meant I had to keep my knife sharp and Cory was the first to try it out. She was a tough bird, both in life and at the dinner table, but with the big slab of cheese and smoked pork, she made an excellent Cordon Bleu.

Sunny McNugget – Not long after Cory, Sunny’s rent was due. For several weeks in late March and April, we were averaging only about one egg a day, five of which came from Hot Wings and the others I guessed were coming from Eggnog. Not unlike a “Survivor” challenge, I separated Sunny and Eggnog in two separate pens. When Sunny’s pen went eggless for a whole week, Micah got his first tastes of homemade chicken nuggets.

Eggnog Kabob – Eggnog may have laid one or two more of her mammoth eggs after Sunny’s disappearance, but if you saw how much she ate each day, you would agree that her tab was well into the red. That was why the day before we left for Addis Ababa for a five-week training, I invited her along. The only catch was, she had to ride in the cooler, frozen solid. Eggnog made her final appearance as her second name suggested, skewered along with some nice veggies.

Deviled Hot Wings – The lone survivor…for now. She never had very large eggs, but she was a very consistent layer, and more importantly for her, she was the winner of the “last hen laying” award. What did she win? Life. But, as with any prize this world offers, it comes to an end and hers is very soon.  With her passing, this chicken chapter of our lives with close. In preparation for our extended time in the States, we are planning to give away all of our chickens to fill the bellies of many of our Gmz friends. Lord willing, we can begin anew upon our return in 2013.