I’ve been wanting to give you (well, at least the interested ones) a taste of the linguistics courses that I’m taking. I could have put this post in my “Translator’s Page,” but I decided to go ahead and put it here. Linguistics is the science of language. Consequently, it uses very scientific terms to describe linguistic phenomena. The terms are quite complicated (I guess, to justify spending so much for the linguistics education!), but the concepts they represent are sometimes quite simple.
Today in Morphology we talked about allomorphs. Allomorphs are simply parts of a word (i.e., morphemes) that have the same underlying part (i.e., morpheme) but different pronunciation (I guess those complicated terms are needed, since it’s really hard for me to explain things without them!). We looked at Luganda words (a Bantu language spoken in Uganda) to determine what the allomorphs are. We were looking particularly at the affix that indicates causation (there I go, using complicated terminology). We also looked at words in Turkish and Swahili to determine what each morpheme represents. The professor noted that letters of affixes (e.g., prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes–English doesn’t have the last two, for the most part) often assimilate to the phonetic shape (i.e., sound) of the letters in the stem (i.e., main word).
In Phonetics/Phonology, we have also been discussing how the phonetic environment of an affix affects how it is pronounced. For example, the affix for “impossible” is actually “in-”, but because of the way we articulate “p” (with our lips), the “n” assimilates to a sound made by the lips. Try saying “inpossible” and you see why we prefer “impossible.” But lest we think our tongue always takes the easier route, we need to keep in mind what is called “transparency.” In other words, ease of perception actually trumps ease of articulation. If a word so changes that it becomes impossible to understand, it is no good. So, some words, like “unfulfilled”, don’t change (to something like “umfulfilled”) because of this reason.
The textbook for this class marvelled at the way evolution changed our vocal tract in such a way that we can make such a larger range of sounds than animals make. As believers, we marvel at our Creator’s ability to create our vocal tract with this ability and then to mix man’s languages so greatly that an incredible variety of sounds exists in each language. We have studied all the various phonetic sounds, but thankfully, we have to memorize only the English ones. The morphology was just trying to pronounce a sound that occurs in some languages but was having a hard time doing it. Though we all have the same “equipment,” we basically only use it the way in which our language requires.
In Syntax, we’ve been discussing the constituents of a sentence. A constituent is a grammatical unit of a sentence. We’ve been studying how the various constituents of a sentence function together and what the hierarchy of them is (e.g., which ones can be separated more easily, which modify which, etc.). I’m not exactly sure how this will be applied to “real life” (i.e., translation work), but it has been interesting. The professor is very good at leading us along, so I’m looking forward to where this leads out. I hope to figure out ways to apply what I’m learning to translation work, but I’m not quite there yet. I think some of my future courses will help connect the dots better. Of course, since I also oversee the linguistics aspects of our ministry, none of this material is without significance (well, almost none of it!).
Check out recent pictures at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=27028&id=613716245 and http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=26509&id=613716245.
