{"id":1295,"date":"2018-06-18T02:15:56","date_gmt":"2018-06-18T07:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/?p=1295"},"modified":"2019-01-22T09:47:12","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T14:47:12","slug":"why-do-i-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/2018\/06\/18\/why-do-i-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do I care?"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Do you see the picture above?\u00a0 Can you tell what it’s a picture of?\u00a0 If any of you have worked with a\/v, you may recognize the top part as being sound waves, and you’d be right. The one on the left is the sound wave of a speaker saying the noun version of the word “contrast,” and the one of the right is the verb version of that same word.\u00a0 The things on the bottom are called “spectrographs,” and are a different way of looking at sound.\u00a0 If you look closely you can see that the two wave forms don’t look exactly alike, which makes sense since they aren’t pronounced exactly the same either.\u00a0 What you see corresponds with what sounds someone is making and what someone else can hear when that person talks.<\/p>\n

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Ok, so that kind of makes sense, but why should you care?\u00a0 Great question!\u00a0 One reason I<\/em> care is because I have to write a report about things like this, due tomorrow.\u00a0 But the even more important reason is that learning how to see these differences and knowing what they symbolize will (hopefully!) help my team and I produce a better Bible translation in My Language.\u00a0 “How is that?” you may ask.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Well, in order to translate the Bible, we need to create a written language, including an alphabet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In order to create an alphabet, we need to figure out what sounds they think that they’re saying (that’s called phonology).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In order to figure out what sounds they think <\/em>they’re saying, we need to figure out what sounds they’re actually <\/em>saying (that’s called phonetics).\u00a0 (And yes, often what people say is different than what they think they say.\u00a0 For a quick example, say the words “stop” and “top.”\u00a0 The “t”s in those two words are actually different sounds and are expressed by different letters in other alphabets, but we as native English speakers think that they’re the same sound, so they’re written with one letter in English.\u00a0 Gee, it’s one way in which English is actually written well!)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Now, it would be great if I could just listen to people speaking My Language and be able to understand and write down what they’re actually saying.\u00a0 (There’s the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, for writing that down, for those of you who are wondering how I’m writing an unwritten language.)\u00a0 And it’s true that I have written down lots and lots of words.\u00a0 But I want to make sure that I’ve written them really accurately in order to be able to do the next steps well.\u00a0 That includes making sure that I’ve written the right “t”s and made a bazillion other minute distinctions that I’m not so certain about all the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

So, one of my classes that I’m taking this summer through SIL in North Dakota is called “Acoustic Phonetics.”\u00a0 In this class we have a lot of fun (or at least I do), playing with sounds, sine waves, statistics, computer programs, etc.\u00a0 We use those kinds of things to help us see <\/em>those minute differences that we can’t hear<\/em>.\u00a0 I’m really looking forward to our final project in which I’m hoping to be able to look at some words in My Language and figure out stuff that will really matter.\u00a0 In the meantime, I had better get back to writing that report about the sound waves that I mentioned above!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you see the picture above?\u00a0 Can you tell what it’s a picture of?\u00a0 If any of you have worked with a\/v, you may recognize the top part as being sound waves, and you’d be right. The one on the left is the sound wave of a speaker saying the noun version of the word […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":945,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[448],"class_list":{"0":"post-1295","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-ethnos360","8":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/945"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/susie-l\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}