{"id":3724,"date":"2007-02-19T03:38:23","date_gmt":"2007-02-19T07:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=3724"},"modified":"2007-02-19T03:38:23","modified_gmt":"2007-02-19T07:38:23","slug":"linguistic-answers-to-theological-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2007\/02\/linguistic-answers-to-theological-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Linguistic answers to theological questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The southern German and Austrian greeting <em>Gr\u00c3\u00bc\u00c3\u0178 Gott!<\/em> &#8216;may God greet [you]&#8217; is perceived by many local members and American missionaries as a too-frequent or otherwise inappropriate use of a divine title.<!--more--> While the theological reasoning is opaque to some, the linguistic context seems quite clear. <em>Gr\u00c3\u00bc\u00c3\u0178 Gott<\/em> requires American missionaries to pronounce the German uvular tap, trill, or fricative pre-vocalic \/r\/, one of the most difficult phonemes for Americans to produce correctly (although eased somewhat because it follows uvular \/g\/). This is immediately followed by a long rounded high front vowel \/y:\/ (round your lips to say <em>oooo<\/em>, but say <em>eeee <\/em>instead), another sound missing from the phonemic inventory of English and consequently produced badly by most Americans. For a phrase with only two vowels, the second of the two is equally problematic for Mormon missionaries, predominately from the American West, as the short open \/o\/ is missing from their dialect of American English as well. If <em>cot<\/em> and <em>caught<\/em> sound exactly alike to you&#8211;and don&#8217;t kid yourself; unless you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re from the right parts of the Eastern US or the Commonwealth, they do&#8211;you will have a hard time hearing the distinction in a foreign language, let alone producing it yourself. In other words, the taboo on <em>Gr\u00c3\u00bc\u00c3\u0178 Gott<\/em> may include both theological concern and linguistic anxiety.<\/p>\n<p>Are there other key phrases in foreign languages that are difficult for Americans to pronounce? Is there a chance of declaring them blasphemous? It&#8217;s a coping strategy worth some consideration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The southern German and Austrian greeting Gr\u00c3\u00bc\u00c3\u0178 Gott! &#8216;may God greet [you]&#8217; is perceived by many local members and American missionaries as a too-frequent or otherwise inappropriate use of a divine title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}