In the Beginning was Information

actual lingual proficiencies. They are characterised by pleasant melodioussounds, an imaginative art of expression, fine nuances and descriptions,and methodical constructions... although they lack words forabstract concepts like truth, love, soul, or spirit. William Penn, thefounder of Pennsylvania (= Penn’s rural forestland), who lived in aneighbourly accord with the Delawares, described their way of reasoningin the following words: ‘I know no European language which containsmore words depicting friendliness and generosity in the colourfulnessof their sounds and intonation than their language’.”In many languages the nouns are classified according to grammatical gender.In the Latin languages the nouns are either masculine or feminine,and in German, Greek and the Slavic languages there is a third gender, theneuter. There is no satisfactory explanation for this arbitrary classificationof objects and concepts in different genders. It is for example difficult tounderstand why the German words ”Mädchen” (girl) and “Weib” (wife orwoman) are regarded as belonging to the neuter gender. Mark Twain(1835 – 1910) commented as follows: “In German a young lady has nogender, while parsnips are feminine.” In Hebrew, gender plays an evenmore important part than in most European languages. Not only nouns,pronouns, and adjectives are distinguished according to gender, but verbsalso. The simple sentence “I love you”, can be expressed in six differentways. It is different when it is said by a man or by a woman, or directed ata man or a woman, or directed at a group of men or a group of women.The best known “genderless” language is Chinese, which has only oneword for the pronouns “he”, “she” and “it”.Most noteworthy is the peculiarities of languages as far as semantic categorieslike parts of speech and idiomatic expressions are concerned. Inmany cases special structures are required to express gradual differences.In the Igbira language of Nigeria the sentence, “He has said that he wouldcome tomorrow”, for example, is regarded as an uncertainty rather than apromise. The Wycliffe Bible translators battled with this problem whenthey had to translate biblical promises into this language [H3]. The assertionin Mark 14:49 “But the Scriptures must be fulfilled”, describes acompletely open event in this form. To make a statement definite, theIgbira language employs a double negative. The above-mentioned sentencethus had to be translated as follows: “It is not possible that God’sBook would not become true.”Peter Dommel, one of the Wycliffe missionaries, reported that the Kaurehtribe in Irian Jaya uses only three different numerals, namely one, two,and many. To express “three”, they say “one and two”, and in the sameway “four” is “two and two”. Only in recent years have numerals, borrowedfrom Indonesian, been introduced to indicate “large” numbers.211