1955, Mendi
‘Beyond linguistics, beyond personality, we are sure that the Holy Spirit shares this task of language analysis, and teaches us. We acknowledge that it is by prayer and faith, our own and that of friends who uphold us, that we shall comprehend the things we seek to know. How else, than by His enabling, shall we reveal to these people the spiritual truths we have come to teach them?’
Elsie Wilson 1955
One very important challenge for all the work of the Methodist mission in Mendi was the language. The Mendi people and the missionaries did not understand each other. At that time, very few people in Mendi spoke Tok Pisin. People who came from the New Guinea Islands area did speak Tok Pisin and people from the Papua side used Police Motu as a trade language. Some people did not want to learn or use Tok Pisin because they thought that it was not a real language, but in 1955 some scholars said that Tok Pisin ‘has become a real and living spoken language with spelling, grammar and vocabulary of its own … it is known and used by the majority of native people across New Guinea.’ The Australian staff in Mendi struggled to learn the local language, Angal Eneng, but it was very difficult and they often made mistakes.
It was a problem for the medical work when people could not explain what was wrong, or understand the advice of the nurse. It was a problem for the teachers and the agriculturalist. It was a serious problem for the pastors and missionaries who tried to preach about the gospel of Jesus Christ. People would come and listen to a preacher but often they had no idea what he was saying.
Miss Elsie Wilson, the teacher in Mendi, was the one who did a lot of the work in trying to understand the Mendi language. She listened to the people carefully and asked many questions. She was the first one to make a list of Mendi Angal words.
Elsie Wilson wrote to an Australian audience:
“Would you be a Christian if the Gospel had been preached to you in Spanish? To be effective missionaries, we must speak their languages. Until we have won their confidence by our grasp and fluent use of their vernaculars, we cannot make the best use of modern educational devices, we cannot convince them of the efficacy of medicine in Christian hospitals as opposed to their sacrifices, we cannot translate the Word of God for them. … How shall we obtain [ grammatical concepts] if the languages to which we come have never been written? We must analyse the languages, and write our own grammars.“
Elsie Wilson was a fine teacher. She was also a good linguist and studied the science of linguistics with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in Melbourne. She understood that every language had a special structure and shape and followed clear rules. As she listened carefully to Mendi speakers, she began to understand that the verbs in Angal Eneng were very rich and complex, carrying a lot of information. She wrote ‘In Highland languages, prefixes and suffixes are very significant. Verbs have more than 60 suffixes, for tense, person and number, as well as some prefixes. All are meaningful.’ Elsie also found out that there were many sounds in the language and she wanted to work out how to spell them, so that people could read; this was a problem that was very difficult and was still a problem many years later. She was very thankful when good linguists from Unevangelized Fields Mission (UFM), Murray and Joan Rule, came to work with her and the other mission staff for some weeks to help them with their language work. David Johnston and Elizabeth Priest also did their best to study and learn the local language.
Elsie Wilson wrote:
“The personality of the language learner is a vital factor. An eloquent speaker, or one who can be hail-fellow-well-met in his own language is likely to be so in another. But there must be patience as well as natural facility. Sometimes the patient plodder gets there first. One needs a sense of humour. In the approach to a new language, we sometimes have an intermediate language or lingua franca.
In some parts of New Guinea, Pidgin English is used in this way. But here we had to use the direct or monolingual approach, because Pidgin was not known to the Highlands people. Mistakes are inevitable in such a difficult situation. There is a word which means “you (or he) did not give me any’. We took it to mean “No’, and used it in every instance when we wanted to say, “No*. The people ridiculed us, and “talked down’ to us. We thought we should never learn to speak correctly, but because we could laugh with them about our mistakes, they have become more patient and helpful.“
Because of her good work with education and with language, Elsie Wilson was appointed by the Administrator as a member of a Committee on Languages for the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. In 1955. Their work was to advise on the language of instruction for schools, the formation of a basic orthography for PNG languages as well as language issues related to education.
Sources:
Elsie Wilson, The Missionary Review—August, 1955—Page 2-3
The Missionary Review, May 1955
The Missionary Review, April 1955
Margaret Reeson 