Monday, July 1, 2013

Grammar: Boring or Fascinating?

One of the courses that we teach at the Missionary Training Center is grammar. In school, English grammar was never my favorite subject. In fact, I thought that it was rather boring. But now I find grammar fascinating as it relates to learning languages.

Recently, I read a letter from a missionary in Africa that demonstrates the importance of grammar.

Missionaries discovered that the verbs for a particular African language consistently end in one of three vowels, i, a, and u. But the word for 'love' was only found with i and a. Why no u?" they wondered.

In an effort to truly understand the concept of "love" in this African language, one of the missionaries began to question the translation team which included influential leaders in the community.

"Could you dvi your wife?"

"Yes," they answered, "that would mean that the wife had been loved, but the love was gone."

"Could you dva your wife?"

"Yes," they responded, "that kind of love depends on the wife's actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well."

"Could you dvu your wife?"

Everyone in the room laughed.

"Of course not!" they replied. "If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water and never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would have to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say dvu. It just doesn't exist."

The missionary sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, "Could God dvu people? There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started trickling down the weathered faces of the elderly men of the tribe.

Finally they responded, "Do you know what this would mean? This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, while all that time we rejected His great love. He would be compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people."

The missionary noted that changing one simple vowel changed the meaning from "I love you based on what you do and who you are," to "I love you, based on who I am. I love you because of me and not because of you."

God encoded the story of His unconditional love right into this African language. For centuries, the little word was there—unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable.

(Adapted from a letter titled One Little Vowel, published to staff of Wycliffe USA on 30 July 2012.)

It is amazing how languages work. When God confused the languages, He did a fantastic job. While some concepts are difficult to translate from one language to another, nevertheless it seems that God designed every unique language so that the message of the gospel could be communicated with all mankind. It is the job of the missionary to discover how that message can be communicated to the speakers of any given target language. And it is our job at the Missionary Training Center to prepare the next generation of missionaries to effectively communicate the good news of Jesus Christ to those who have never heard.

Bob

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"There is no reserve in God's love; he has given the best in heaven for the worst on earth, and in this way has rebuked distrust and established confidence. If we only want what God gives us we shall be perfectly happy. Nothing is of real value to us that we cannot take from our Father's hand and thank him for." — Selected