Wow..what a whirlwind. After a wonderful time around Virginia, NC, and SC catching up with everyone, I’ve already finished up my first month of classes here in Dallas at GIAL (Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics), and have just a moment to breathe.
The classes here are accelerated, so I’ve already finished up the first half of 3 classes and I’ve had my midterms. Here’s what I was taking:
8:00AM Phonetics
Phonetics is the study of sounds in a language. Translators need to be able to listen to the sounds of a language and represent them precisely on paper. This class teaches to recognize, repeat, and represent “all” the sounds a mouth can make, and some my mouth doesn’t like to make. This will be useful as I work with translators who have lots of transcribed recordings and with understanding what’s going on in some of the dictionary work.
9:05AM Grammar
This is about how to study the grammar of a language that does not have written grammar books. We take wordlists and example sentences in languages from across the world and try to work out the structure. This will be really helpful as I work with translators to analyze texts and Biblical passages as they try to analyze what they inherently know about their languages.
10:15 Chapel
11:25 Language and Society
Here, we’ve studied the links between, you guessed it, language and society. We’ve studied Bilingualism and Multilingualism, how to recognize the health of a language (stick out your tongue and say “aah”), and how cultural identity and language are intertwined.
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