How does this sound?

Tomorrow I’m giving a guest lecture as part of a subject I’m teaching in a Masters of Interpreting and Translation program. Normally I just teach tutorials but this week I get to do part of a lecture. I’ll be teaching a bit of phonetics and phonology in the hope that it will give the students a tool for improving their pronunciation in their B language. For most of the students, English is their B language, but there is a small handful of native English speakers whose B language is Spanish or Japanese. The idea of the subject as a whole is for students to learn how to keep developing their proficiency in both working languages, beyond the period they spend studying.

 (image from http://introling.ynada.com/category/phonetics-phonology)

I like the following quote from Daniel Jones, who was a British Phonetician who became Professor of phonetics at the Sorbonne University in Paris. He is thought to be the person upon whom George Bernard Shaw based the character of Professor Henry Higgins in his play ‘Pygmalion’ (see also My Fair Lady). Obviously we want our students to master grammar and vocabulary as well, as most of them are looking to be professional translators or interpreters, but since pronunciation can be such a barrier, not just to understanding but to interpersonal relations, I think equipping them with some phonetic training is important too.

“I gradually came to see that Phonetics had an important bearing on human relations – that when people of different nations pronounce each other’s languages really well (even if grammar and vocabulary are not perfect), it has an astonishing effect of bringing them together, it puts people on terms of equality, a good understanding between them immediately springs up.”

Daniel Jones (1881-1967, phonetician)

I quite like teaching phonetics. It’s not my main area of expertise in that it wasn’t the field of my doctoral research, but I remember how much I enjoyed as a student learning how to classify sounds and produce strange sounds and gaining a more technical knowledge of the sounds of speech and how they are used (or not used) in different languages. I have a reasonably good ear for differentiating sounds so I enjoyed being able to put that to use.

One reason I like teaching phonetics is that it requires you to get rid of your inhibitions and be willing to be laughed at. My past phonetics lecturers have involved me singing and making all kinds of strange sounds in order to illustrate a point, e.g. to illustrate the point that vowels are sonorant (i.e. singable), I demonstrate that you can’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ (apart from the rhythm) on the consonant [k]. I also love it when the students can’t help themselves and start trying out the sounds as you explain them. You get some very interesting facial expressions and sounds coming from the lecture theatre – somehow the students seem to forget that they are in a lecture and don’t even realise they are making the sounds!

There are also lots of interesting videos about how the human vocal tract works, which liven up the lecture quite well. If you’re interested (and not too squeamish), here’s a video of a laryngeoscopy showing the vocal chords (larynx) of a female singer while she makes sounds with varying loudness and pitch. A slightly less graphic one is this x-ray video (no sound) showing how the shape of the vocal tract changes for producing different vowel sounds.

Language: from the mouth of...

In the course of my search for blogs about language/linguistics and faith, I came across this very interesting post about whether the human language in which the Bible is written limits God’s ability to communicate with us. The discussion was based on Article IV of the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy – a statement of affirmations and denials prepared following an intensive 3-day conference of about 300 evangelical pastors. The Article in question reads as follows:

We affirm that God who made mankind in His image has used language as a means of revelation.

We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God's work of inspiration.

There are two points I would like to make about this now, but I might return to it in a later post after I’ve thought and read some more.

Firstly, God ‘made mankind in His image’ (see Genesis 1:26) and I take it that, as part of his creation of humans, God created language also. God, who is a relational God, created us in his image to be relational creatures, and it seems to me that God has given us language so that we can relate to each other, but also so that we can relate to him.

I was recently reminded of the way humans reflect God’s image in terms of communication when I read Psalm 94. The psalmist cries out to God to bring justice and judge wrongdoers, who keep doing what they are doing, thinking that God can’t see them. In verses 8-11, the psalmist then goes to address these wrongdoers:

 ⁸ Understand, O dullest of the people!
Fools, when will you be wise?
⁹ He who planted the ear, does he not hear?
He who formed the eye, does he not see?
¹⁰He who disciplines the nations, does he not rebuke?
He who teaches man knowledge -
¹¹ the LORD - knows the thoughts of man,
that they are but a breath.

This reminded me that our ability to see, hear and reflect on the world in thought is a reflection of God’s ability to do all these things, since we are created in his image. The ability to hear (v.9) particularly struck me: what is God hearing (and, we assume, understanding) here but the cries and prayers of the people he has made? The characteristic of being communicative must also be a reflection of God’s communicative nature. Jesus’ testimony about God helps us see that God is communicative within the Trinity: there is communication between God the Father and God the Son (e.g. Matthew 11:27, John 14:10, 15:15; Matthew 26:39,42; John 14:6-7, 16), God the Son and God the Spirit (e.g. John 15:26), and God the Father and God the Spirit (e.g. John 14:16, Romans 8:26-27).

And so, because we have been created as relational, communicative beings, ‘God has used language as a means of revelation’. So all three members of the Trinity also communicate with people at different times (e.g. the Father in Genesis 1:28-29, Exodus 3:3-6; the Son in any of the gospels, also Acts 9:4-6; the Spirit in John 15:26, Acts 2:4).

God’s use of the human phenomenon of language to communicate with us reminds me of another beautiful way in which God used a human phenomenon to reveal himself - about 2000 years ago, in the form of a human, Jesus Christ. Because we are humans who use language, God uses language to speak to us through the Scriptures. Because we are humans who have physical, frail and mortal bodies, God sent his Son, Jesus, as a human, to point us back to God, and used his human mortality to demonstrate his love for the world. It was the ultimate communicative act.

What people are saying about language

There are some big questions that I'm thinking about at the moment and want to start writing about soon, but need to do a bit more reading. So today I was thinking I should find out what other language blogs are out there and what kinds of things they’re on about. Language is a broad topic, after all, so blogs about language could (and do) include funny ones about Chinglish as well as more serious ones about language teaching/learning resources.

There is even a ‘World Top 100’ competition of language blogs run by bab.la – you can see the 2011 top 100 list here. The list is mainly populated by blogs about language learning and teaching, translation, and language humour. Two that caught my attention were The Yearlyglot, by a guy who has made it his aim to learn a new language every year, and A Walk in the Words, with amusing language tricks, puns and observations.

So far I haven’t seen any doing anything similar to my blog – that is, thinking about issues of language and faith. I’m sure there are some out there, including many focusing on Bible translation (like God Didn’t Say That), and there are probably contributions to more generic blogs that do it occasionally (e.g. this one about what language God speaks, or this one about Bible Translation). I’ll keep looking… I’d be interested to hear of any interesting language blogs you know of, too.

Soundbites and cliches (part 2)

Last week I wrote some thoughts about the unhelpful effect of media ‘soundbites’ or uses of labels in un-thought-through ways. Referring to the perpetrator of the Norwegian bombing and shootings as a ‘Christian’ in early reports added to the public misunderstanding of what Christianity is actually all about (and see this article for a comparison with the effect of 9/11 on the public perception of Muslims). It also left its legacy of giving religion sceptics a foothold to say ‘well, see? It’s not just Islam that makes people violent – it’s all religions!’ In fact, you can take religion out of the equation and it turns out that people are often just inclined to be violent and treat one another badly (compare obvious examples such as Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao). But I digress...

I recently rewatched some episodes of ‘The Vicar of Dibley’, which I remember enjoying watching with my family when I was younger. Now I find it rather cringe-worthy, not just in terms of the humour that often descends into the slapstick, but in terms of the way the Dibley church (including church services, the Vicar’s conduct, relationships between parishioners, and lack of knowledge of the Bible) is presented. Obviously it’s a fictional church, and the characters and storylines are designed to be humorous, but it makes me wonder why that would be considered legitimately humorous material. Fiction or not, it’s no laughing matter when people who are supposed to be followers of Jesus behave like that.

But what I think is most unhelpful, in terms of the public understanding of Christianity, is that the mismatch of the characters and storylines with biblical Christianity is not being pointed out as something funny or strange in itself. I think viewers (particularly British viewers) are supposed to feel like that community is perhaps not far from their experience at all, and so the humour comes from the caricature of people you might almost have met before or could imagine in small village life. That is, there is supposed to be a degree of closeness to reality in it to make the humour work. And because the viewers are supposed to feel like that is what village church life is like (with some exaggeration), it plants untrue and unhelpful ideas about what the life in the church of Christ is like. A much more helpful picture of church can be discovered in the pages of the Bible (especially Acts 2:42-47, 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy 3-4), but few seem willing to discover it for themselves.

Currently, Australian comedian Judith Lucy is appearing in a series called ‘Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey’ which I haven’t seen yet (and it’s on the wrong night for me to be able to watch it) but I don’t anticipate that her treatment of Christianity will be any more helpful to those who might seriously want to know. I don’t doubt Lucy’s personal sincerity in wanting to discover the answers to her questions “Why are we here? What happens when we die? How do you find a reason to get out of bed in the morning”, but given that her spiritual journey has been produced as a television program, I can’t help but be cynical about how the religions will be presented and how much value that will have for public understanding. Entertainment, yes, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with entertainment. But entertainment based on religious exploration by those who are not in a position to properly understand or accurately present the crucial features requires critical viewing, which I fear is lacking to a large extent.