A better alphabet?

I’ve driven many times past church signs written in a language I didn’t understand but knew to be Korean. Actually, I’m not sure I knew they were Korean until I married a Presbyterian, and learned about the strength of the Presbyterian church in Korea. Mostly, I still thought of the unreadable symbols as another of those Asian languages that don’t use the kind of letters we do.

Beyond that, I never gave it much thought. I like learning languages, but never had any inclination to learn a language that required learning a new alphabet, except for New Testament Greek (which wasn’t too difficult because I knew much of the alphabet from math and science classes, and many of the letters are similar to those in our own alphabet). I tried learning the Hebrew alphabet once, but quickly lost interest.

I do find the whole subject of linguistics fascinating, however, and for several years, as a teenager, planned on becoming a Bible translator. I knew that it meant having to learn a tribal language unknown to outsiders, and then develop a system for writing it down, before I could even begin translating the Bible, or teach its speakers to read and write their own language. The idea was daunting, yet also an appealing challenge, all the more so because it would bring the Word of God to people who had never heard it.

I never imagined using a completely different alphabet, however. There are languages with sounds that our alphabet cannot represent, but the International Phonetic Alphabet can account for virtually all of them. In college, I took a course in which we studied how different sounds are formed by the mouth, and how to represent them all using the IPA. (I also learned that I don’t pronounce “s” the normal way, and that I have a “lazy jaw” which results in a tendency to mispronounce certain vowel sounds.)

It’s been a long time since I did much reading on linguistics, but I was fascinated to read recently, in the Wall Street Journal, about the effort of some Korean linguists to export their alphabet to other countries. The Cia-Cia language, spoken by less than a hundred thousand people on the island of Buton in Indonesia, has never had a written form. Efforts to use our Roman alphabet to write Cia-Cia produced confusion. The Korean linguists are convinced that their Hangeul script is the answer.

Why, I wondered, would the Korean alphabet be better than the IPA? It turns out that Hangeul was designed specifically to make it easy to learn. Most alphabets evolved over time, but Hangeul was created to replace the difficult Chinese and Japanese characters that had previously been the only way to write the Korean language. Not only do the symbols represent the sounds of the Korean language, their shapes even indicate the shape of the mouth for forming those sounds.

In other words

Unless you make your living translating from one language to another, you probably didn’t know that today is International Translation Day. I’ve always loved words and languages, and I enjoy trying to use what language skills I have – but I’ve never developed the degree of expertise in any language to make my living that way.

I was more interested to discover that it is also World Bible Translation Day, presumably also on September 30 to recognize the translation work of St. Jerome (who died September 30, 420). I have long heard figures on how many languages the Bible has been translated into (over 2000 have at least been started), but today is the first time I found a list of all of them. Some include samples of the beginning of the Gospel of John, though I can read only a few of them.

I also found a site where you can read the Bible online in a number of languages. It even includes some limited Bible study tools. I can’t think what practical use I can make of it right now, except perhaps to try learning a verse in German and see if my older son (who is in his second year of high school German) can understand it. (I have a Bible in German but it’s that old style font that I find difficult to read.)

Another online Bible translation I was happy to find was La Sankta Biblio. It’s been decades since I studied Esperanto with my parents (at the home of a man in our town who was eager to share his knowledge of this easy-to-learn constructed language). Even so, between what I did learn, my knowledge of some of the European languages that Dr. Zamenhof used to create this language, and my knowledge of the Bible, I can more or less understand at least familiar passages.

Fascinating as all this is, however, my brain says it’s time for bed. So, good night. Bonne nuit. Buenas noches. Bonan nokton. Gute nacht. Dobranoc. (No, I don’t know Polish – but I found a site that tells you how to say good night in a whole lot of different languages.)

Native Languages

I’ve always been fascinated by foreign languages. I remember as a child, when my older sister began studying French, trying to understand what “French” was. As best as I could figure out, it was a different way of saying things. French for “please” was “s’il vous plait,” French for “thank you” was “merci,” and French for “What is it?” was “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” (which in my mind I spelled keskesay).

Having learned those simple phrases, I proceeded to ask my parents how to say “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” in French. They tried to explain that it was French, but I persisted in asking. In my mind, every word or phrase that I could understand had a French equivalent that was foreign to me. Now that I understand a new phrase, there should be a French (i.e. foreign) way to say it.

Tongues of men and angels

I have never “spoken in tongues” nor sought to, but I do enjoy singing praise to God in languages other than English. As a teenager I was privileged to take part in a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. We started rehearsing a full year ahead of time, in part because we had to first learn proper German pronunciation. To this day I can remember the plaintive “Wir setzen uns mit Tranen nieder” with which it ends, a tearful lament at Jesus’ tomb.

The church I had grown up in (whose choir combined with two other church choirs for the St. Matthew Passion) did not shy away from works in other languages. I enjoyed singing Bach’s Christ Lag in Todesbanden, and soon realized that Bach was my favorite composer. I left that church, somewhat reluctantly as I loved the music, to attend a fundamentalist church that preached the Gospel clearly - and insisted that all music had to be in English so that it could be understood clearly also.