On to Phonemics

From the moment a missionary sets foot in the tribe, their life is a living, breathing example of God’s Word. But God’s Word not only needs to be seen it must to be introduced to the mind…stored in the heart …applied to life’s everyday situations. It’s what every missionary dreams of and prays for.

The application of God’s Word into tribal people’s lives requires a careful translation of the Bible into their “tongue” so they can read and understand it for themselves. This is all awesome in theory but how is possible to produce a meaningful scripture translation for people with no written language!? How will God’s Word ever be woven into their lives? Praise God, with Him all things are possible!

Here at MTC , we are training our missionary students to do just that with the teaching of phonemics. What is phonemics? Does it have to do with phones? No, and it’s not "techno" babel of a communication company either but it is related to communcation. Phonemics is the principle used in creating an alphabet. Our students are taught the processes and reasoning for not only learning and reproducing the way a language is spoken (verbal) but to also produce an alphabet for the language (written). Phonemics is this process which takes the “verbal” sounds in a language (only spoken) and produces a “written” form of those sounds (orthography-alphabet).

But just producing an alphabet is not enough! The people must be  taught to recognize and read their own alphabet if they’re to be introduced to the written Word of God in their own language. When the people begin to "read" God’s Word for themselves based on their own alphabet,  it’s light will boldly make an entrance where only darkness reigned before and it’s truth will penetrate their empty, searching souls, and engage them to turn their eyes to the life-changing person of Jesus Christ!