Dear Friends,
Greetings from cool, gray Lima. Nancy considers it cold and dreary, whereas I see it as an opportunity for the students to stay indoors and study. Judging from their phonology midterm, some did just that, while others may have spent a bit too much time outside coping with the cold. You might wonder what phonology has to do with Bible translation. Well, phonology is the systematic study of the sounds of language, partly how to identify and repeat them, and partly how to fit them into an alphabet. Both parts of this equation are important. To translate well, one must speak, and not just have an academic knowledge, of the language one is translating into.
Also, if the language has no alphabet, how do you write the language down? And how will people read it? We think that there is a core of phonological skills that all translators and village workers need if they are to work effectively across cultures. That's what we try to give them. Our students are all native (or very good) speakers of Spanish and classes are taught in Spanish. And they don't just study phonology. They have classes in grammar (language structure), semantics (language meaning) and sociolinguistics (language use). We're pretty much about language, which is really what incarnation is all about. So trying to flesh that out is important to Nan and me and our staff here, and we hope to model that for our students--becoming like those we hope to reach.
Class meets two hours a day, Monday through Thursday with an additional hour on Friday for review. We look at interesting sound systems from languages all over the world to help prepare our students for what's ahead. For example, over the last two weeks, we've considered data from the following languages: Nahuatl (Mexico), Tohono O'odham, Mohawk, Klamath and Cree (US), Damana (Colombia), Ganda (Uganda), Kipsigis (Kenya), Ewe (Congo), Gen (Togo), Amharic (Ethiopia), Quechua and Awajun (Peru), Daga (New Guinea) Leti (Australia), Palauan (Micronesia), Ossetic (Russia), Sudanese, Tibetan, Hebrew, Greek, Icelandic, Spanish, English, and of course, Mam.
I don't know too much about most of these languages (except the last three), but I've learned a bit about how some of the sounds work in these different languages and we look for things in the sound systems of these (and many other) languages that our students might need someday as they engage the speakers of languages perhaps as yet unknown.
We have just four more weeks of class and there is still lots yet to learn. Please pray that our students get all they need to prepare for future ministry. Most of the students hope to work as Bible translators or literacy specialists with minority groups around the world. So incarnation isn't just a theological term for them. We hope it becomes a way of life.
You might remember that we are planning to hold a training program aimed specifically at speakers of minority languages. We did this last year in Guatemala, and we're planning a second course in Pucallpa, in Peru's Amazon basin. Our academic partner in this work is the Intercultural University of the Amazon. I just learned that after a month of faculty and student strikes, the entire leadership team--president, dean, and chairperson of the language department--has been changed. I made agreements with the people who are now on the outside looking in. We're still hoping to provide this course, but pretty much everyone else involved in it is new. I'd appreciate prayer that we could get this thing back on course and that the original agreements would be honored. I plan to meet with everyone involved on Friday, July 2 in Pucallpa, as God allows.
We had a wonderful break over the long Memorial Day weekend. Nan's sisters and folks, and all the husbands, kids and grandkids met up in the Poconos. It was wonderful to hook up with everyone at once--19 in all. We celebrated Nan's folk's 60th wedding anniversary. They still live on the same farm that Nan and her sisters grew up on. They keep a large garden, and grandpa still tends a couple of draft horses, but they are slowing down--aren't we all?
We're extremely grateful that the Vacation Bible School at Parkside Church in Cleveland has taken on a literacy project for the Mam. They plan to raise money to help publish as many as 50 new booklets in Mam aimed at kids and new readers. Some of the books will be Bible study materials, others, are historical or cultural or educational--but all are aimed at helping new readers gain the skills they need to read well generally, and to read the Scriptures in particular. Even though our family left Guatemala in 1998, we still manage to keep in touch with good friends there. A special thanks to the kids at Parkside. I hear they'll have over a thousand VBS kids from June 21-25.
We plan to be in Ohio for three months starting in late July. We hope to see many of you.
God's best to each one.
Wes and Nancy
