Lingala

Hello! Spring break is over... back to work!

...work on... what?

I dunno!

Anyway, you know what I found last Saturday? Poking around once more at The Talking Bible blog led me to the Talking Bibles website which led me to Audio Scriptures. At Audio Scriptures, I can listen to the recordings of the Bible online for free! I might sound like some type of advertisement, but honestly, I love this website! As a linguistics major, I love languages, and so I love hearing the sounds that people make in different languages that speakers of English couldn't possibly try to pronounce--I just like hearing different things!

But let's not forget that these languages available for a little look-see (hear-listen?) at this website are more than just exotic sounds. Take Lingala for example. Heard of it? I've never heard of it. Not until I saw it on this website. So what do I do? I click on it to hear it. What do I hear? Something African.

"Something African."?! Pardon me, I'm Asian-American (Taiwanese to be exact!), so the only non-Western European languages my ears are familiar with are the East Asian ones. But still, I can't just write off a language that people think, feel, argue, forgive, honor, encourage in as "something African." So now what do I do?

What does any curious college kid do? Why, they look it up on Wikipedia! So what does Wikipedia say?

Lingala is a Bantu language spoken throughout the northwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) and a large part of the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), as well as to some degree in Angola and the Central African Republic. It has over 10 million speakers.

Shnikies! Over ten million people speak this language, and I've never even heard of it! People in four countries speak this language, and I've never even heard of it! The official language of two countries, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of the Congo (did you even know there were two Congos?), and I've never even heard of it! About eight million people live in New York City while more than twelve million people live in Tokyo. This many people, and we probably just write them off as "something African." That doesn't sound right.

And yet, the reason I only heard about this language and its "over 10 million speakers" is because I wanted to hear some exotic sounds. That in itself doesn't sound quite right either. So you know what I really like about Audio Scriptures? It acquaints me with a part of the world I was earlier ignorant of. It isn't right just listening to sounds, so I look up the language, then its speakers, then their countries... And now what? I can pray for them.

Joshua Project is a site I like to use for more detailed information. It's a website that compiles information about different people groups. So looking at the Joshua Project website, I learn that the Lingala of DRC are already primarily Christian. The church is already fairly widespread and established, so when I pray, I can praise God for this!

See? Isn't the internet good and fun? You should try it. And as I sign off--let me leave you with a view of a beautiful page of the Bible in Lingala...


--kowai-kawaii

"Flakes of info and fun!"

That's how I'd try, in my corny way, to promote Pageflakes. It's a start page similar to iGoogle or Netvibes. The idea is that you can put a whole bunch of things (ie, widgets/flakes) that you like all together on a page, or a tab. You could have a very basic "home" start page, with your email, a game that you always play, the weather, a calendar, and some RSS feeds. You can also have more specialized tabs--ones devoted to music, sports, science, etc. Then if you really want to, you can also publish this particular tab into a "pagecast" and other people can see it and use it too. It's a great way to share information, and so--I've made one!

Make your way on over, or just read my little summary of it here:

I've tried to keep it organized. On the right are RSS feeds to blogs I like to keep up with. Many are included in my blogroll. I'll need to update my blogroll. One of them is this blog you are now currently reading. (On a side note, a cool thing aboutPageflakes is that you can click a button and view a pagecast as if it were an RSS reader.)

To the left, under the introduction are two search engines (already loaded with search words) to keep us updated on current, related pieces of news and blog entries. And remember Maigemu? I've bookmarked his "mission" tags. I've also shamelessly bookmarked my own Diigo bookmarks.

And here's something juicy--the annotated bibliography I've been giving sneak peeks to! It's done really techno-savvily with Zotero, a source-bookmarking add-on to Firefox, and Citeline, an online tool that automatically types up bibliographies for you, made by those geniuses at MIT. It's okay if this isn't your favorite part of the pagecast, though. I understand if it's a bit dry.

Next, some websites for getting involved... All three of these websites are sites of organizations founded by a man named Cameron Townsend. The first is Wycliffe Bible Translators, an organization I've mentioned before. They are a mission organization aiming to send people out to translate Bibles. Besides actual Bible translators, included in the work force (partially through the closely related Wycliffe Associates) are language surveyors, literacy specialists, teachers for the kids of missionaries, even librarians, and many many more.

They work very closely with JAARS, of whose site I've included as third in the pagecast. JAARS is an organization aiming to aid missionaries in other, more specialized and technical ways (eg, radio transmission, aviation, information technology, contsuction).

The second website included (yes, I understand I'm explaining out of order) is OneStory. OneStory aims to make voice recordings of Bible stories for oral-based cultures. It's a great step toward actual Bible translation.

And the last little bit of this pagecast, tacked onto the right column under the RSS feeds are two websites full of great linguistic information--SIL International and its publication, the Ethnologue, a collection of the world's languages.

And.. that concludes my pagecast! I hope you have fun using the pagecast and looking at all the things I like to look at!

--kowai-kawaii

edit: I've updated and changed the pageflake a little bit, so it currently is a bit different than what I've written about here... And I'm sure it will continue to change, too, so just go there and check it out! :)

Record players

One day, I had a thought--how did people heat up milk before the invention of microwaves? I asked my mom, and she kindly reminded me about the stove. For heating things up--not just cooking! Weird-sad-inconvenient. To me, that is. And now, I realize that the younger generations probably won't know what is VCR is. So this is what it feels like to “get older.”

But you know, the way that these younger generations won't understand Walkmans and portable CD players is the same way I don't understand record players. I mean, I know it spins and there's a needle placed in grooves on the record... but that's all. And so... It's crazy to think about how God has used everything for his purposes. Harvey Hoekstra of The Talking Bible recently writes about 1964 in Ethiopia,

"Our house was a stick shack the local Majang had put up in a single day. Lavina cooked on three stones and we ate our meals using our boy scout aluminum utensils. This was about as simple as one could get...[One night] I was reading a little book by Joy Ridderhof, founder of Gospel Recordings. She was telling the story of how she began using phonograph records to multiply the occasions when new people could hear the Gospel message in their very own languages.

As I read that story, by the light of that flickering candle, I said to Lavina, "Honey, if we are going to reach this tribe, we're going to have to use those 'wretched records'." I had seen, while living in the Sudan, how unskilled, non-literate people would carry those heavy army surplus record players and the phonograph discs all over the place. I had seen how people were impacted by the message on those discs. And I had seen how just ordinary people became effective witnesses because the phonograph records having the message gave them confidence and a way to share their limited knowledge of Christ.

I suspect I used those words, "wretched records," because of their limitations. Those army surplus players were heavy to carry. And the fidelity of the records themselves was too soon distorted as the phonograph needle made its deepening groves in that turning disc."

So even though some things may be considered inconvenient (or just old-fashioned, in my eyes), I don't think God thinks of them that way. I think he sees value in everything, no matter what time period he uses any particular item in.

--kowai-kawaii