Category Archives: Linguistics

Africa Night!

Have you ever wondered how people make their first alphabet?

Starting this summer, we are giving people a taste of Bible Translation work in Africa, through small group meetings designed to be interactive and engaging. We introduce people to the language work we do with Wycliffe Bible Translators, in three parts (total 90 minutes):

  1. An interactive exercise for anyone who can read short English words. See what it’s like to discover your vowels for the first time!
  2. African foods typical to many of the places we have worked
  3. Testimonies, videos, slides and information from Wycliffe Bible Translators and our own experience. Q&A as time allows.

We have worked so far with groups of 6-25 people; we’d like to keep them small enough to allow everyone to participate. If you have a small group or Sunday school class that would be interested, or if you would like to join or host a group, please let us know, and we’ll get you on our calendar.

That said, if you have any questions about Africa, Wycliffe Bible Translators or our work, please don’t be shy; we’d love to discuss it over coffee, too. 😉 🙂

Epiphany 2017

the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
the LORD loves the righteous. (Ps 146:8 ESV)

I took two days off altogether from writing, for Sunday worship and rest, then Christmas day, and yesterday I got back to putting edits into my manuscript. While doing this somewhat mundane work, God opened my eyes to see something in my analysis that I’ve been looking for for over a year.

Last week, when meeting with a mentor in Canada, he encouraged me to rethink something I’d decided to leave out of my dissertation, since I simply couldn’t get it to work. And also, I had plenty of other things to write about, including a fairly important theoretical issue in the development of new tones.

But yesterday I took another crack at it, made an assumption that I hadn’t liked (and still don’t really like, honestly), and the rest of the pieces just started falling into place.

So in the middle of the afternoon on Boxing Day, God opened my eyes. I thank God that he still does that. And thank you for your prayers for us, and especially for my ability to do my work. We really can’t do this without your support, and we’re grateful that you’ve joined us in this work.

Merry Christmas!

Home Stretch

I know it’s been a while since I’ve written much about my progress through my degree program, but I hope it has been for good reason. I guess we all hope that we do what we do for good reason, but in any case, I hope a short update will begin the road to making amends.

I met with my advisor this week, and it sounds like I’m on track for graduating this year, as early as May 2018. That will involve finishing a complete draft of my dissertation by the end of 2017 (i.e., about two more weeks), in addition to a number of other deadlines to revise it according to comments from each of the three members of my committee, before defending it and turning in a final copy for posterity (Lord willing, in early May).

So, as I feel the push to finish the home stretch well, I realize I need your help more than ever. Please join us in praying specifically for the following:

  • Diligence to write, edit, and correct my work (especially with the boring/tedious stuff, like checking the clarity of what “this” refers to.…), that it would be clear
  • Clarity in analysis, that I would be writing what is accurate and true about these languages, and what they say about language more generally
  • Time management, as I try to balance the above with communicating more broadly about our work (e.g., a long overdue newsletter!), spending time with our family (e.g., Christmas!) and ministry in our local church
  • Financial support to make all of the above possible, without additional stress

That’s about it. We covet your prayers as we seek to do right by the various responsibilities we have. Thanks so much for being behind us in this!

Now I need to get back to my second day of Edit/Find… on the word “these”; apparently there are 178 of them left to check. :-)

Presenting New Research

attach5420_20171101_1140281375700215.jpg

Yes, I was somewhat blinded by the projector, but on October 20 I got to present some new directions my research has been taking at the Metroplex Linguistics Conference, hosted this year by UTA.

In summary, the comparisons I was hoping to make to analyze what’s going on in languages today have not been as fruitful as I had hoped, while they are saying a lot about what has happened to these languages over time.  Which will likely make this work significantly more interesting to most linguists, though less immediately valuable for writing system development. I still hope to maintain value for the people who speak these languages, though it is not as immediately available as I had thought it would be.

Reformed Doormat

Joel and I had the pleasure of staying in a house with this doormat greeting us as we first walked in the doorː
IMG_20170722_101226143.jpg
My immediate thought was that it was a relief to be staying with people who were so OK with their frailty that they would greet people with such an openly selfish doormat. Just come out and say it: “I’m a rebel; I only really care about myself.” It seems like we spend so much time putting on a good face, it’s very refreshing to have someone admit selfishness (which we ultimately know is really in each of us) up front. Not only is this refreshing to the rest of us (who see another’s good face as intimidating, because we know what we’re really like inside), but it is prerequisite to receiving Good News. If we insist we are OK, then forgiveness of sins doesn’t really do much for us. But

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9 ESV)

And that is good news, that the rebellion I feel inside can be confessed and forgiven in Jesus’ name!

Unfortunately, moving the door and doormat a bit more makes the above homily into a lesson on linguistic context. Show a bit more context, and the message changes a lot:
IMG_20170722_101244423.jpg

Making and Maintaining Connections

Photo op with Simon (left) and the Ndaka chief (center)
Photo op with Simon (left) and the Ndaka chief (center)

I have found myself saying a number of times over the years, “I didn’t get into missions to do ___.” Fill in the blank with supervising other people, managing money, raising money, helping people get along with one another, keep my family in working electricity and water; there are so many things this can apply to.

One thing that is more necessary than you might think in Congo is paying respect to authorities. The first time I remember doing this, I was completely at the mercy of students of mine, who were taking me to their home area to present work we had done together on their language. I was surprised at this last minute stop along the road, then surprised that it was NOT optional (we were late, but they were clear that we had no option to just pass by). But then when the guy we were supposed to see wasn’t there, and after we had done due diligence in waiting for him (in the presence of his office staff, who could tell him how long we had waited), we finally moved on. Pardon me if I admit that the whole scenario sounded like just a bunch of posturing to me.  But someone once said to me, that if you only have one thing you do, and someone takes that away, what do you have left? So the guy who puts a particular stamp on a particular form has to put his stamp on your form, or you’re denying his value (and his livelihood, where money is involved).

Fast forward to more recent times, and I’m much more comfortable schmoozing with bureaucrats. Partly because I know they really do have a lot of power, even if its different than the kinds of power I’d been used to. But also because I want to confirm and establish the legitimacy of what we’re doing, and this is not only the simplest and most straightforward way to do that, but also the right one (anthropologically speaking). And it’s also very validating to simply show them what we’re doing, and let them see the value of it.

The Ndaka chief pictured above was hard to get ahold of; I think this was our second or third visit to his office this trip. But all he had to do was see the vowel booklet that we’d done the time before, and he was smiling (but obviously not in the photo; never smile in a photo). Yes, he has lots of power, and spends lots of time traveling with other Congolese bureaucrats (at least based on how hard it was to see him). But show him an alphabet chart and vowel booklet in his language, perhaps the first printed materials he’s ever seen in his language, and he immediately gets the value of what we’re doing. I frankly doubt that he gets the eternal significance of our work. But it is clear that he got that there were people visiting him from another country, that were willing to come and work because they cared about him and his people. And that care communicated gave us an open door to do this work in his community.

A bit aside, I was curious to see that he had an office worker that I had met some seven years before, while doing alphabet work for that worker’s language. So in addition to the printed work in Ndaka for the chief, I also had a Nyali-Kilo man (and his employee) telling how I had been a part of this same work being done in his language. Given my reticence to put too much time and energy into hobnobbing, it’s great to see how God went before us, preparing our path to clearly communicating our good work in the community, based on our care for the community, so the leader of that community would give us the go ahead to keep it up. But then again, I’m not sure why I should be surprised by that, given the word on authorities:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.
(Rom 13:1 ESV)

 

 

Theoretical Musings

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. That is, figuring out what makes up language more generally, as opposed to how things work out in a particular language. So far, I have been content to figure out what’s going on in a particular language, since that’s my concern: I want to see particular people groups able to read and write. While studying for my M.A., a teacher once described theories as tools in a toolbox. One may be useful for solving one problem, and another may be useful for solving another, so we use the tool that is useful, then set it down when we finish that problem.

Needless to say that for some linguists, this is a horrifying idea. For some, the whole purpose of doing linguistics is to understand the principles of language generally, not the details of a given language. The desire is to understand the language functions of the human mind, not how a particular subset of humans uses it. But there is another reason the concept of theory I picked up at Oregon horrifies some: for many, a linguistic theory is not just helpful (or not) in a particular instance, it is supposed to be True (note the capital ‘T’; this is not the ‘my truth’ v ‘your truth’ kind of truth). So if a theory is supposed to reflect what’s actually going on in the mind, then it shouldn’t be dropped in favor of another theory to deal with the next problem.

During my last several years at UT Arlington, I’ve had plenty of chances to interact across this divide; few people here are interested in descriptive linguistics. And I often get the question, after presenting a good (IMHO) description, “so what does this mean (i.e., about language in general)?” And “it means that this is how these people use language” is not a sufficient answer.

I’ve grown more competent in developing more theoretically interesting conclusions (i.e., interesting to those interested in theory development, not only theoretically interesting…:-)), but I have remained mostly uninterested in developing theory, nonetheless. So I continue to do my descriptive work, showing what’s in a particular (set of) language(s), and I throw in more theoretically interesting conclusions for those more interested in theory.

Until recently, when I got hit by something I hadn’t expected. What would happen if you were working on a complex job, and you realized you needed two different tools to make it work? What if those tools were not designed to work together? What if you could only figure out a couple ways of making them work together at all, and any one of those ways limited the operation of each of the two tools? This is something like what I’ve run up against.

For over a decade, I’ve been using a theory of what makes up tone that has been described in The Geometry and Features of Tone, by Keith Snider. It builds on earlier work in Feature Geometry (how the bits that change one meaningful sound into another interrelate) and Autosegmental theory (how things like consonants and vowels interact with things like tone and stress). Perhaps the most important contribution of GFT is that tone is made up of two features that distinguish sound, and each has its own contribution to how a word with tone is pronounced.

More recently, as I’ve interacted more with languages with Consonant-Tone Interaction (see this blog entry for more on these consonants), I’ve been using a theory ([L/voice], from Bradshaw 2000) that says that low tone is intrinsically bound to voicing (when your voice box vibrates, more or less). This theory has proved helpful as well, though perhaps in a smaller selection of languages. But in any case, those are the languages I’m working on now, so this tool is in my hand, as it were.

But as I was writing up some of my work based on these two theories, I realize that GTF says that low tone is really two features (low tone and lower register), while the [L/voice] theory says that low tone is intrinsically linked to your voice box. But neither theory explicitly addresses the other, despite the fact that I need to use them both at the same time. I originally thought that I would sit down one afternoon and sketch out a number of different ways to possibly make them work together, but I could only come up with two. The longer I beat my head against this problem, the more I found arguments against any other way of making the two theories fit together. That is, voicing must be bound to either low tone, or lower register. Period.

I had been assuming that I would be able to make both tone and register features bound to voicing, but that simply can’t work, at least not without making radical adjustments to either or both theory.

Anyway, I’ve been presenting this information to my committee, and for the first time in my career as a linguist, I’m seeing not only very practical implications of our theoretical assumptions, but I’m seeing things that need to be figured out on a theoretical level, and I might be the person best placed to do it. Which is to say that I entered this Ph.D. program to help develop a number of languages in eastern DRC in a more strategic way, but I may well end up with something of broader implications (with whatever theoretical claims I make informed by, and informing, the description).  But maybe that’s why they call this degree Doctor of Philosophy, and not Doctor of a couple things I wanted to write about.

Anyway, as I make this turn, I’m looking forward to see how these musings can benefit a larger set of people groups, which remains the point of what I’m doing at all. I remain committed to linguistic description, and trust that the languages I describe in my dissertation will have good tone work represented there, at least, and that the people who speak those languages will be better able to read and write as a result of it. And as a result of that, that they would have better access to information about this life, and the next.

 

 

The Function of Tone in Ndaka

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 is one verb conjugated two ways:NDK Conjugation 1
If you have studied another language before, you might recognize this kind of listing of the forms of a verb for each of the people who do the action. In English, this kind of thing is boring:

  • I walk
  • you walk
  • he walks
  • we walk
  • you all walk
  • they walk

The only thing of any interest in the English is the final ‘s’ on ‘he walks‘; everything else is the same on the verb. But that’s not the case in many languages, including the languages I’m working with. For instance, there are lots of differences in forms, and you can correlate the differences in forms with differences in meaning. If you line up the verbs as below, you can separate the part that remains the same from the part that changes. You can also notice that in the meanings on the right, there is a part that remains the same, and a part that changes. This is the case for both conjugations:
NDK Conjugation 2

So with a conjugation paradigm like this, we can deduce that for each line in the paradigm, the part of the form that is different is related to the part of the meaning that is different (e.g., k- = “we” and ɓ- = “they”). Likewise, the part of the word forms that stays the same is related to the part of the meaning that stays the same (e.g., otoko = “will spit”).

But, you might ask, this logic gives us otoko = “(did/have) spit” in the first conjugation, but otoko = “will spit” in the second. Which is it? In fact, if you compare each line for each of the two conjugations, you will see that the consonants and vowels are the same for each first line, for each second line, all the way down to the sixth line. So whatever form indicates the difference between “will” and “did/have” is not found in the consonants or vowels. Where is that difference indicated? In the tone. If you compare the second column for each line of the two conjugations, you will see that the lines representing pitch for each word form is not the same between the two conjugations.

A similar problem exists for the prefixes that refer to subjects. That is n- is used for both “I” and “you all”, and the absence of a prefix is used for both “you” and “he”. But looking at this last one first, we can see a difference in the tone:NDK Conjugation 3

So even though there is no difference in the consonants or vowels to indicate a difference in meaning, there is a difference in tone which does. The same is found for “I” versus “you all”, circled here:NDK Conjugation 4

So the bottom line is that for (almost) every difference in meaning, there is a difference in form that indicates that difference. Sometimes that difference is in the consonants or vowels, as we might expect in languages more closely related to English (and even in English, with the -s above), but sometimes that difference is only in the tone.

But the story is a bit more complex than that, since the tone doesn’t do just one thing. We saw above that tone indicates the difference between “will” and “did/have” in these conjugations. But tone also indicates the difference between c, as well as that between “I” and “you all”. That means “you will”, “you did”, “he will”, and “he did” all have the same consonants and vowels, and are only distinguished one from another by the tone. And there’s another quadruplet with “I” and “you all”, and these quadruplets exist for almost every verb in the language: this is a systematic thing.

So with two minimal quadruplets for each verb in the language, it makes sense to ask what is the contribution from each meaningful word part to the tone, and how they come together. For instance, what is the contribution of “you”, as opposed to “he”, on the one hand, and what is the contribution of “will”, as opposed to “did/have”, on the other? And how to these different bits of tonal information combine to form the tone patterns we hear on full words? (Hint: they are a lot harder to chop up than the consonant prefixes above).

Anyway, that’s the essence of what I do, in brief. By looking at the actual pronunciations of words in a system, we can deduce what the contribution of each meaningful word part is, then make hypotheses about how they come together, and test those hypotheses until we come up with a coherent system.

 

 

Consonants

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) and vowels (with shaped, but not obstructed airflow) from English, but probably about half the world’s languages also use tone (and some estimate 80% of those in Africa). Other languages (which are more like English) use contrastive stress, meaning that the stress on a word changes not only the pronunciation, but the meaning. If I say emPHAsis instead of EMphasis, you get what I mean, though it sounds wrong. But CONvert and conVERT are two different words, the first being a noun, and the second being a verb. We don’t do this kind of thing much, but this is just one of the several ways languages communicate the difference between one word and another.

So you know that tone is like stress (though more complicated, and used a lot in Africa, but not really in English). And you know about ATR, which gives some African languages interesting vowel harmony patterns (and more vowels than Spanish, but less than English). But what about consonants? You might think that I don’t work with consonants much, since I’m studying tone, but that’s just not so. First of all, almost every word has consonants, so they can’t be avoided.

Secondly, and slightly more importantly, there are slight and meaningless (i.e., not changing word meaning) but potentially distracting changes to pitch made by consonants, as in the spikes circled in the following picture:

calculated pitch spikes surrounding voiceless consonants

It would be easy to look that those quick jumps and drops in pitch, and say “wow, something’s going on there”. But there isn’t. These are just a result of the vocal folds starting and stopping vibrating as they go between vowels (with vocal fold vibration) and voiceless consonants (where the vocal folds are relaxed). So as I look at pitch traces with these effects, its important to understand what they are, and to abstract them away, rather than pay much attention to them.

There is a third reason, which is more important to my research. Not only do I work with tone, but the languages I’m working on now have what we call Consonant-Tone Interaction. That is, the tone of these languages is actually impacted by the consonants around them. So it’s important to understand what consonants are in each word.

Normal consonants (in these languages) have a slight negative pressure (sucking) before release, and these consonants don’t impact tone. But those where the airstream is more like typical English pronunciation are less common, but they impact the tone. So how do we tell the difference? There are many ways, but one I’d like to show you can be seen in the following picture:Find the egressive, implosive, and voiceless consonants

I originally developed this image as an exercise, so rather than just go and give you the answer, I’ll pose the question, and you can submit answers in the comments. 😉

I’ll help you out with a few points:

  • The three categories are named and described in the key on the right
  • The vowels are the dark vertical bands; the consonants are between those. 🙂
  • Most of the vertical space for consonants is blank/white, but there is a small dark band at the bottom for some, which indicates voicing.
  • If you look at pitch, recall that tone is relative pitch, so compare the drop over a consonant to the pitches over the vowels on each side, which may not be the same.

So, which consonant types can you find? How many of each, and in what order?