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After the recent church evaluation, our family left Mibu and started a 2 week long course called the Advanced Language Workshop. We're just about finished with it at this point and my brain is feeling overloaded! Don't get me wrong. The information is GREAT! It's just that it's a LOT!
To learn about the deeper levels of how a language works we...
Break texts down into propositions on a chart.
Chart out all the grammatical features of each proposition.
Chart out all the semantic features of the text.
Note the hierarchical organization of the pieces of the text.
Review the chart trying to discover the patterns the language uses to communicate.
That's the chart. The chart is the tool. But then we need the knowledge for how to use it. That's the part that leaves our heads spinning at the end of the day! You see, each language has it's own specific way of doing things like helping the hearer keep track of what or who the speaker/writer is talking about and to keep track of what is important versus what is just background info. Each language handles the breaking up of information into 'chunks' as well as relating all those chunks together in different ways. And to complicate things even further, each speaker/writer has at least a subconscious awareness of shared knowledge and experience with the recipients of their message. All this (and much more than I could possibly write about here) comes together to determine a very specific combination of sounds, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, all structured and related to each other in ways that are fully capable of communicating just what the author intended. This is true of every single piece of communication that has ever left the lips of one's mouth or otherwise been penned. In fact, the only time these principles of communication are violated, one quickly concludes that the author suffers schizophrenic!
These principles are true for every language on planet earth (even the dead ones).
Learning these things gives us insight into the nature of human communication (and even how God created us to process information). Awareness of them is hugely beneficial to better understanding of how the language works into which we desire to translate God's precious word. They also help us grow further in our understanding and conviction of just what God intended to be communicated to us in the original language that his word was inspired to be written.
At this point, we've had this crammed into our heads with just a kick off in the application of it. My head hurts!
Why spend all this money (yeah, it costs!) and time to try to learn this stuff better? Is it so we can feel smarter? Is it so we have an excuse to buy more aspirin for our headaches? Is it so that we can get so into it that the thoughts of communication patterns keeps us awake at night because we just can't let it go? Nope. Nope. And nope. We do it because Jesus did it. That's right, by being born an actual human baby and being raised as part of a specific people, culture and language, these things became so much a part of him (in the unique patterns of his mother-tongue) that they all happened in his communication to people without him even having to think about it; just like we do with our own mother-tongue. Jesus communicated to people in the normal everyday language, and he did so by first becoming one of them. In following this model as best we can (and since we can't be 'born' again into Mibu culture) we find other methods by which to learn how to communicate naturally with the people we serve. Understanding these things also helps us on the other side, when we're trying to understand what the biblical authors may have been communicating when they wrote because the translations available to us are largely based on Greek forms. Those Greek language patterns are hard to understand clearly. (Do you ever struggle to understand what was being said when you're reading your bible? There's a reason for that!). So we need to sort through the forms available to us in order to better discern what the authors intended to communicate. It's when we can discern these things accurately that we can then turn that message around and put it in a form that works in the Mibu language. That is why we take the time and expense to attend workshops like this!
We're looking forward to being able to use these tools and this knowledge better so as to better serve the Mibu people!