Jula class can make me laugh sometimes. Let me share with you the two things that made me laugh most on Friday:
1. In Jula you don’t say, “Here, kitty, kitty.” Instead you say, “Moose! Moose!” Ok, so it’s not spelled like that, but that’s what it’s pronounced like. I think my teacher didn’t quite understand why I thought that was so funny. But I laughed a lot.
2. Fatimata, my Jula teacher, told me how she and her sister sometimes talk in the equivalent of Pig Latin so that others don’t know what they’re saying. They say words backwards – either switching the letters or the syllables around. She tried it on me. It sounded so funny that it made me laugh. But after her saying each sentence once and me laughing hard, she was able to say it a few more times and usually have me understand. Then I tried to respond. It was the first day that I thought that it was easy to speak Jula – plain Jula is a lot easier than Jula that is all backwards and upside down. 🙂 But I did realize that speaking in the equivalent of Pig Latin could be very, very useful when I learn my next language, which won’t be a written language. Why, you may ask? Because even as we talking Jula Pig Latin I learned more about where word and syllable breaks are as well as whether they think of two consonants that are next to each other as one sound or two. When you flip syllables around in a word you have to know where the word ends. So, for example, you would know whether they think of a word such as “skipping” as one word (skipping) or two words (skip ing). It could also be handy for words like “shortcut” that could very conceivably be one or two words. By listening to Pig Latin you could learn that it’s one word. Who knew a crazy game could be so helpful?