Our main focus since moving in has been culture and language
study. We spend a lot of time out with the people in the village, learning how
they live and interact. Our hope is that all the information we are gathering
will one day allow us to effectively communicate God’s truth in a way that they
can understand.
For language study, we can use the trade language that we
learned when we first arrived in PNG as a bridge to help
us gather nouns and common, useful phrases in Uriay. We are mostly learning
words right now, and later we will move to constructing sentences.
Uriay has a lot of words, but most of them are fairly easy
to obtain. They are based in what you can see around you. Many things that we
have in English don’t have names in Uriay because the people never use them,
such as computer, stove, sink, bath tub, etc. They could come up with a rough
translation, like “place for washing plates” or “place for cooking food”, but
it makes it a bit simpler for us to learn their language because they don’t
have as many nouns as we do.
The one thing that is a bit tricky with Uriay is that many
words sound and look alike, which can potentially be embarrassing depending on
your situation. For instance, “una” and “uma” are very similar, but the first
one means “sago palm” (which is a tree that provides a staple food in their
diet) and the second means “poop”. Don’t want to get those confused.
Overall, most of the words in Uriay look and sound nothing like English. It’s going to take a lot of time and hard work to learn this language. Our brains often feel like mush at the end of a day of studying. But we know all the work will be worth it!
