Every Language . . .

It's not all fun and games here at POC. On Monday in our Tok Pisin class our teacher told us a short story in Tok Pisin. We all recorded the story and have the assignment to transcribe (write down) the story in Tok Pisin and then analyze the story. The analysis for "support workers," folks that will be working as teachers, radio people, Computer support, airplane mechanics, etc., consists of a word by word "English Gloss" (i.e. English translation) and a "Free Translation" which takes a thought or sentence and puts it into the way that we would talk in English. The "language workers," of which I am one, have the aditional analysis of a "Morpheme Gloss" in which we try to describe in more grammatical terms the function of each word, or if the word is made up of two parts we describe each part. (For example: in English we would take a work like "sleeping" and separate "sleep" from "-ing" and note "sleep" as the verb, and "-ing" as the suffix. Here is sample sentence from my story: Tok Pisin Nau olsem-pela bik-pela dok, ol i slip. English Gloss now all big dogs they -- sleep Morpheme Gloss now all-MSS big-MSS dog 3PL PM sleep Free Translation Now, all the big dogs were sleeping. You may notice that many of the Tok Pisin words are similar to English, although some are pronounced a bit differently. There is also a bit of different grammar structure in Tok Pisin, and some times you have to say a few more words to discribe something. For instance, when talking about my "nephew" I have to say, "pikinini man bilong susa bilong me" (male child belonging to sister belonging to me).