The Verb is the Word!

Another busy week of Cherokee study done, and another set of new discoveries made! I (Jordan) am amazed to find how greatly my ability to distinguish important ‘non-English’ sounds has grown! (Examples of these sounds include different tones inside of words, syllables which have varying lengths, and sounds which must be pronounced nasally to have the correct meaning). This has made our work much more manageable. Yet each success helps reveal the next challenge, and one of the challenges this week has revealed is the Cherokee verb!

Verbs are the ‘action words’ of everyday conversation, revealing the progress in the lives of any story’s characters. (I am currently roasting outside as I write this blog post, suffering through a sweltering 105-degree-in-the-shade weather! :-)) English verbs are fairly straightforward… we change ‘run’ to ‘running’ if it’s happening now, and to ‘ran’ if it happened in the past. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter much who is doing the running, where, or for how long.

As you may have guessed, Cherokee verbs are completely different! Each ‘word’ encodes so much more – and in particular, you cannot describe an action without saying who did it. There are eleven different ways to say that a person is throwing an apple right now! It changes if you are talking about one, two, or more throwers… it is different again if ‘you’, ‘I’, or ‘they’ do the throwing. A Cherokee person can’t even just say ‘we throw’; they must clarify whether they mean “we three-or-more (but not you) throw”, or “we (you and I but no-one else!) throw, or something else entirely!

While challenging to understand, Cherokee-style verbs are more common in real world languages than their (somewhat) simpler English cousins. Tangling with them now is excellent preparation for what Amy and I will find in Mexico, as together we work to expand the reach of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Please continue to pray for us in our efforts here… but pray for more than success in our work with the Cherokee language.

Pray that God will use this entire time to prepare us to be His messengers in every way, so that one day… one more group of people will have the chance to hear everything that Jesus did for them.