discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 106
106 Intercultural Communication
with people. Being incarnational within a culture means being able to speak
heart-to-heart with other human beings. That can be problematic to achieve
when one goes to a country like Nigeria where scores of languages are spoken.
If, however, missionaries want to be truly incarnational, they will remember
that when Jesus came to earth, He did not speak some heavenly language that
required an interpreter. He grew up speaking the languages the Jews would
have spoken in that day (Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek).
Language Landscape
Arbitrarily Assigned Meaning
One reason language learning is so challenging is that the meanings of the
words and phrases of oral language have been arbitrarily assigned. There is
nothing inherent, for example, in the sound of the English word cat that signals
a small, domesticated feline. The act of translating will quickly highlight
how arbitrary the assignments of meaning for oral and written symbols have
been. Think about the English term hot dog or the phrase fixing a sandwich.
Was there a canine that got overheated or was the sandwich broken?
Complexity
A second challenge to cross-cultural communication is that vocabulary lists
from one language never match up exactly with the vocabulary lists of any other
language. An English speaker uses the word love in both “I love pizza” and “I
love you.” Spanish speakers, however, use two different verbs to express those
sentiments. Another challenge is that some words have multiple meanings that
can only be sorted through by looking at the context in which the word has
been used. The Italian word piano is an example. English has borrowed piano
as a label for the instrument that Italians call pianoforte. That instrument is not
what piano means in Italian. In Italian, piano can mean “soft volume” or “slowly,”
or it can mean the “floor of a building” (such as first floor or second floor).
Which meaning is being used can only be determined from the context in
which the word appears. To translate piano into English, one has to know
which meaning is being used since no single English word carries all three of
the meanings of the one Italian word.
A third thing that makes language learning so challenging is that grammar
and syntax structures vary greatly from one language to another. Some languages
use verb tenses or moods for which other languages have no exact counterparts.
Greek, for example, has an aorist tense that Bible translators struggle
to render into languages like English. Word order within sentences also varies
greatly from one language to another. In English, adjectives usually go before
the noun they modify. Romance languages do it differently, putting most adjectives
after the noun. Verbs have complex conjugations in languages like Por-