Language

For some thirty five years, a portion of my life has been linked to, and a practice of, foreign languages. From 1966, when my family first attended the University of Oklahoma, sleeping in antiquated dorms, cooled only with fans, to this day, I have been a part of a group, that studied language as means of relating between humans.

The study of language, is so complex, that I have met linguists who have worked on one language group for most of their lives. We think of objects like sheep and thread to be so common that we don’t give the definition of either, a second thought. For the Mayaruna Indians in the Amazon Basin, however, the sheep was as foreign as the car, before 1975 or so. To zero in on this group, the Mayarunas are a small tribe of indigenous people to the Amazon for at least 500 years. Before that, history is both ambiguous and unknown.

Linguists look for patterns in language, as well as parallel patterns between the languages, to try to find points of commonality, sometimes to provide links between language groups, sometimes to establish historical points, other times to get meanings to words and phrases.

One phrase the Mayaruna’s had, was a lengthy description for a picture of a sheep. The word or rather phrase, was nearly 30 seconds long and went something like this…”the animal which has four legs, two ears, a nose, an eye, perhaps two, a small tail, is rather simple minded, and has a lot of curly hair, which can be the color of the clouds or the corn when it is ready for harvest” That…was a sheep to a Mayaruna, until at least 1975.

Even amongst technologically adept languages, there is disparity in meaning because of where the language is spoken and how life progressed in that geography. Even adjacent countries have developed different words for the same thing. Lift for elevator, lorrie for truck, Truck for camio’n, then camion in Spanish, to camion in French, and camion in Spanish to caminhao in Portuguese. There are even differences in European Portuguese compared to Brazilian Portuguese, just as American English differs from British English.

Conceptually, the gap widens, when one attempts to describe scenes that are common to one region and foreign to another, even in the same country and language. Language is so intricate and complex, that the people who study it, are mostly bald! Ok, I exaggerated that one. I remember seeing linguists working into the early morning hours on translations of school materials and parts of the Bible to one of these remote languages.

New Guinea, with all of it’s islands and isolation, is divided into language families, because the count of distinct languages, is in the hundreds. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_map.asp?name=pg

The problem for linguist in any place, be the scientist English, French or Korean, is that each of the mother tongues of the translators, is also at a comparative disadvantage against its sister language.

Language is only pure to the group that bore it to life. For anyone who comes in from the outside, language translation, is an approximation of definition. Words in one language have a regional meaning that is different from any other region in the whole world.

Yes, in English, means different things in the US, whether you are on a farm, or in a city. A farmer with say yes to a banker who loans him money and asks for a promise to pay it back. The farmer says yes and means, ‘I will promise to pay you all this money and the interest, so help me God”. The City person will ask for a contract, because he doesn’t trust the banker, not to over charge him, and the banker will ask for a contract, so that if the borrower lapses on a payment, the banker has recourse to get some value out of the city person for that money he loaned.

Language and it’s use, is a mighty tool. A precious jewel, and a gift for all reasons.
God may well have done us both a favor and cursed us, when He divided us in to language groups at the ancient tower of Babel. I dare say it was a good thing, because it has caused nations to work hard, not only at understanding each other, but to explore the universe and give us meaning to life.

Thank God for language! It is a far better thing I do, to speak with humility, than to grunt in greed.