Far too many years ago, I was helping run a course on language and culture acquisition. Part of the course was to help the students as they worked with a Congolese man, trying to learn his language – Lingala. I didn’t learn much Lingala and the little I did learn, I forgot quickly apart from […]
One of the things which links my interests in Bible translation and missional church issues in the West is the power of stories. Story telling is a wonderful way to introduce people to the Scriptures in a minority language or to the claims of Christ in post-modern Britain. I’m interested to see the launch of […]
One of the things which I often end up doing at international meetings is translating talks from French into English (and sometimes vice-versa). Simultaneous translation is the intellectual equivalent of adventure sports. You never know what will come next and whether you will be able to understand what is being said, much less translate it. […]
Paul Shaddick, who used to work on a neighbouring language to Kouya in Ivory Coast, has just updated his website and started blogging (but there is no RSS feed, Paul). Whatever the quality of the content of the website, it is hard to forgive him for the pun in the header. Paul is now the […]
Lingamish has just posted two interesting posts which are worth a read (not just because he calls Kouya Chronicle an excellent blog in one of them). These two posts get my award for the best titles of the week! Pudding Worship Sky Like Chocolate Cake
“If you really want to understand a culture, then you have to understand the language. It is no good visiting a country, looking at its historic sites, reading translations of its literature, finding out its history. That is why maintaing indigenous languages is so important to preserving cultural identity. The same is true of the […]
From the BBC: Teachers in Cameroon are concerned that the new language frananglais – a mixture of French, English and Creole – is affecting the way students speak and write the country’s two official languages. With more than 250 indigenous languages and both French and English as official languages, choosing the right vocabulary to convey […]
From the Independant. Many animals and plants threatened with extinction could be saved if scientists spent more time talking with the native people whose knowledge of local species is dying out as fast as their languages are being lost. Potentially vital information about many endangered species is locked in the vocabulary and expressions of local […]
When we worked among the Kouya we were always surprised at how family terms were fairly fluid. For instance any male of your own generation was a brother and a woman in your family of the generation above you could be called ‘mother’. People had no trouble recognising who their mother was, but family closeness […]
Dave Burke has a super New Year’s message based around three Aramaic phrases on his website. This isn’t complex linguistic stuff, but rather a heart warming devotional based on the words of Scripture. Well worth a read at the start of the year.