Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Learning about Languages (and a video)

Today is our final class of Structures of Communication. For nearly the last week we've been working on what our teachers fondly called "the works". Basically, we're taking a language and breaking it down to its ittiest little parts and figuring out where everything fits in. It was pretty detailed and time consuming, and Dennis and I were both up really late last night trying to figure things out.

It was a nice reminder of the complexity of God. It also reminded me of the orderliness of God, Who has designed each language around a basic set of rules. All languages follow rules, so if you figure those rules out you can figure out the language.
I can remember asking my Dad about languages when I was young and just starting to realize how many there are out there. I couldn't believe that not all languages would have 26 letters in their alphabet. I remember being very overwhelmed when he told me that some languages have a lot more letters and some had less. It all seemed so arbitrary and unpredictable at the time. I've since learned that while it is true that languages are all formed different, they are definitely not arbitrary (except for English, maybe...:) ).
You can tell we've been thinking about languages a lot, at the very beginning of this video you can hear Dennis saying, "Imagine a language where you had to have a finger in your mouth..." after Button spent awhile trying to articulate around her finger.


We've had some mild days and Button took advantage of the melty, packy snow by making a snowman.


These two crack me up. They are listening to our ipod together, connected by a dual headphone jack... They were dancing all over the place until I worried that the ipod would suffer some damage and put a stop to all their fun. :(

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did you ever wonder about the Tower of Babel and how God confused the languages in terms of the people, yet being a God of order, left them with something with which they could communicate. Language is interesing.
I wasn't sure in the video, "What THEY did today?"

Jean said...

the burning question is "What happened this morning?" Did anything happen or was that just to try and get those cute little girls to talk. What did Button win that she was so busy talking about?

A video of the dancing would have proved it. We took T. tobogganing on Sat. and I took lots of pictures but I should have done some video. I'll have to experiment with that function some more. Then I'll have to learn how to post them.

We have lots of soggy rain and ice right now on top of the snow or working its way into the snow. No good for navagating on foot.

Kate said...

I'm a tad jealous of all the language learning - it must be that communicator in me! What's your favorite language so far?

Anonymous said...

At first I hoped she was saying "Bee" but isn't she cute anyways!! What a sweety!! Thanks for posting, hope your girls learn this language stuff too!