Throughout most of my career as a linguist, I have enjoyed doing descriptive work. Practically, that means I describe what is found in languages, rather than prescribing what should be in a given language (as a teacher might). But descriptive work can also find itself set against more theoretical work. Read more…
I was asked this question in our home group recently, after a larger discussion on church discipline, and forgiving the repentant. I found a large number of documents online with various opinions. I read through the first nine that showed up on a google search, and summarized their positions below. Read more…
In an earlier post I mentioned work I was doing to show the importance of tone in the Bantu D30 languages. Here I’d like to go through the conjugation of one verb in one language, to show how tone works, in relationship to consonants and vowels. To start with, here Read more…
I was thinking this morning about the proverb “numbers don’t lie”, and how taken for granted it is, when I realized that there are at least two problems with it. First, it reflects our own individualism and efficiency driven culture, and second, there are times where the numbers themselves may Read more…
For those of you that have followed my analysis of sound systems in (so far) unwritten languages, I’m sure you’ve already heard enough about tone and vowels. So today, I thought I’d write about consonants! Language sound systems generally store information in three places. We know consonants (with obstructed airflow) Read more…
As we approached the Christmas season, I’ve asked various groups to pray for the depressed on a number of occasions. I’ve been aware of the general increase in depression around Christmas for some time. But I hadn’t thought seriously recently about my own struggles in feeling left behind in the Read more…
As the democratic process in Congo seems to be winding down, it’s weird to think that we saw its beginnings. When we first arrived in Africa, we spend three months in the village house-sitting for a colleague, and learning language and culture. It was during those three months that the Read more…
What a rush the last several weeks have been! I was sicker than I’ve been in a long time, and it took me another week or so to get back to 100%. I’m not sure everyone in the family was completely well when we had a record drop in temperature Read more…
I presented a poster earlier this term at the Metroplex Linguistics Conference, a conference for linguists throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area. This year it was sponsored by the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (G.I.A.L.), where a lot of our colleagues either teach or get training before heading to the field. Read more…
For our second weekend in the rainforest, it seemed right to visit Simon’s father’s church, which was just 25 km north of Nya-nya — in fact, while it has another name, it is typically referred to as “25km”. Simon’s father traveled down to work with us a lot in 2014, Read more…