Phase 2

Happy half-birthday to me!!!! Yes, today is my half-birthday. I was born on December 17, so today is exactly half-way through the year! I think it's a great excuse to celebrate, don't you?

Today pretty much marks the end of Phase 1 of this adventure. Up until this point, I have been working with dictionaries and anything else A needed a hand with. Since I am leaving for the road trip tomorrow and she is leaving before I get back, today was the last day I will see her! She was really grateful for all the help and is excited to have some dictionaries ready to print after all this time. Phase 2 will consist of lexicostatistics. This is basically trying to determine whether certain speech forms are related closely enough to be considered dialects of the same language or only separate languages. We input a lot of data (the minimum is 300 words from each speech form, but we're doing anywhere from 600 to 1700 each) and run it all through a program that will analyse the similarities and differences between words that mean the same thing. For example, Spanish "casa" and Portuguese "casa" and English "house": the Spanish and Portuguese forms are similar enough to be considered cognates (they don't have to be identical, but show a certain degree of similarity), but the English form is not a cognate of either of the other forms. So, the program would indicate 1 cognate relation between S and P, but none for E for this 1 term. After looking at the complete set of data, the computer will give us percentages of number of cognates per total number of words. If the percentage is high, this tells us that there is some kind of close relationship between the speech forms. If the percentage is low, they are likely separate languages. That's a basic overview, but as you can imagine, there are quite a few details to consider, not to mention all the data entry! So, this is what I will be working on until the end of my time here. I'm pretty excited about it and I'm looking forward to getting my hands into raw linguistic data!

Please remember all those who are traveling in prayer! The Bible dedication is on Saturday and it is in a very remote area. Many people will be traveling - not only missionaries, but Mozambican pastors and others. Pray that the ceremonies and presentations will go smoothly and that all travels will be safe. Pray that the Meeto people will be excited to receive the Word in their language (it's not the full Bible, but 4 books) and that God would speak powerfully through those books.

Thanks for your prayers!