months gone by

09.11.06

Summer of linguistics

Nine weeks of my summer went to the study of Phoentics, Phonology, Grammatical Analysis and Sociolinguistics. The classes were quite fun, with ample time learning how to make peculiar noises, and weekends of racking one’s brain (think “word puzzles on steroids”).

Two weeks before that began I attended an orientation course for Wycliffe. All this took place in beautiful Langley, B.C. I stayed in the dorm rooms, and enjoyed the company of a few fine people, and semi-regular “common meals” (just because we could).

On the downside, I experienced a light case of Job, as I found I couldn’t rely on my material possessions. Most significantly, my laptop failed, proving that I can live without my own computer for a several months (pen & paper, yah!). On the upside, my 12” Powerbook was replaced with a shiny new 15” MacBook Pro just prior to my return home.

It was cool for live outside the identity of “a computer guy,” and see that I could do other things if desired. It seems like a big commitment to get a degree now, but I found encouragement when reading about Daniel being educated in literature and language for three years, after which he was to enter into the king’s personal service.¹

Have you noticed that in those times, the decrees that went out were in every language and tongue? Today there are upwards of 2,400 languages that Bible translation hasn’t even begun for. That makes we wonder if “every” was actually just known languages, or if there were less languages back then. If “every” is every, I wonder if the forgotten people groups of today had at one time heard of the God of Israel.

I haven’t decided to continue in the linguistics training as of yet, and since I only took the summer classes, I only learned the basics of “how languages work” and didn’t take on any specific language.

Wycliffe Bible Translators

After school I spent two months volunteering at the Wycliffe Canada office in Calgary, Alberta. I went back to computer stuff, learning Python and the Django framework to develop some small internal applications.

I stayed with Derryl Friessen and family, and worked directly with him on a plan to develop a community website for Café Wycliffe. In the end, I felt the project required a longer term commitment than my volunteer time would allow. So I finished up a few things and came home.

While working with Wycliffe, I was able to attend the IGNITE conference for the Student Volunteer Movement and also meet a group with Venture Teams. Overall, it was a great experience, and I got to meet a lot of nice people both inside and out of Wycliffe.

I have gone through most of the application process to join Wycliffe as a full member, but right now I haven’t committed myself to completing it and doing all the fundraising and such necessary to work with them.

Web site updates

I’ve been sneaking articles up to the developer section, detailing the web development frameworks I’ve worked on this year, including Ruby on Rails, Django under Python, Zend Framework, and a BIY project in ColdFusion.

Today I’ve also published the ten remaining weekly essays I wrote while in Austria last year. They were written over my 12 weeks in Bible school and cover a variety of topics from Genesis through Ezra. The scribe section also includes my statement of beliefs, which I began writing last November.

Right now I’m visiting with family and investigating various employment opportunities, as well as working on some projects of my own. One such project is cftextmate, which provides ColdFusion language support for popular Macintosh programmers’ editor TextMate.