September, 1942
THE K I NG ’S BUS I NESS
330
H en !$ a sample word of a Polysynthetic language, Cak- chlquel, a language spoken by 300,000 Indians in Guate mala, C. A. By themselves, its component parts have no meaning, but when arranged in this order they constitute a linguistic unit, in short a word, marked by one stress. Translated r o u g h l y , the word means: “She will come on various occasions and put them to sleep with a cradle, because it Is her duty, and having completed the task, will go away and leave them sleeping." Mr. S e d a t is shown at;the left.
„. ' ’• ’„v'; .•> '^ \ Biola
Other
Tongues a By WILLIAM SEDAT All too often the equipment of the pioneer missionary includes every thing from medical handbooks to mos quito netting—but no*linguistic train ing, equipping him for learning the odd sounds and deciphering the com plex grammatical s t r u c t u r e of the primitive language with w h i c h he must deal. For language is the first barrier met by every missionary on every foreign field. The missionary, who seems to be born for troublé as sparks fly upward, soon finds himself in a sea of stops, clicks, hisses, buzzes, and •grunts. Queer and': strange sounds meet his ear, and the pioneer who opens new territory must encounter them without the heïp of alphabet, dictionary, gram mar, primer, or a translation of the Bible, and only his ,ears can tell him the nature of the items involved. The human voice can produce thousands of different sounds. Yet the ear recog nizes but very few of these unless it has been specifically trained to do So. The science of phonetics does two things. On the oné hand, it teaches the student a wide variety of speech sounds and even rare types insofar as they have been reported in the languages of the world. It'teaches the .student not only to hear the sounds,
but also to analyze their formation, to prbduce them, and to write, them. On the other hand, it: gives general training so that one-becomes a profi cient vocal gymnast for many differ ent kinds of oral formations: The stu dent who is capable of producing many types df outlandish s p e e c h movements and has achieved the abil ity of scientific mimicry can produce many sounds w h i c h he has never heard. The significant sounds in any
OD HAS a word to say to this 5» _ world. It concerns His Son, ■X.- J the living Word, and is con* . tained within the CQvers of the Bible, the written Word of God. Will He say - “Chi jocan quixra Dibs li ruchichoch” (Kekchi) or “quitasojtac to Dios in talticpac ijeoin” (Axtec) or “Porque de tal manera amo Dios al mundo” (Spanish) ? Certainly He will not use the English expression^* “£or God so loved the world,” in speaking to the thousands of people in hundreds of tribes who are without the written Word in their own tongue. For many years past, the Bible Insti tute of Los Angeles has been one of the pioneers in providing a course in. missionary phonetics for prospective missionaries. This fall, Biola takes a new step in adding a course in the, grammar of aboriginal languages and in an analysis of exotic speech forms as found among primitive people. The value of morphology and. grammati cal studies for a missionary can hardly be overestimated. They provide him with a tool for learning a languag’e, reducing it to writing, preaching and translating the Bible in the language, and preparing literature for the peo ple.
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