Lo, how the mighty are fallen, or I am not always right

First things first: On this day -- March 19, 2020 -- the vernal equinox will take place for most of the Americas. It will occur at 11:50 pm Eastern Daylight Time, ten minutes before tomorrow comes. The rest of the world will see its arrival in the early hours of March 20 because of a little thing called time zones. This year's vernal equinox happens to be the earliest it has occurred in 124 years.

My barber calls me a walking enyclopedia.

I hope people don't find me annoying. If I encountered me, I probably would be annoyed. I do know a lot of stuff, mostly trivia. I don't study it or learn it on purpose, it’s just that things I hear or read seem to get stuck in my memory banks. My theme song ought to be "You're Easy To Remember, But So Hard To Forget."

However, there are big gaps in my memory banks, subjects about which I know very little and subject about which I know absolutely nothing. I try to avoid those subjects as much as possible because I don't want my abysmal ignorance in certain areas to be on display.

One of my favorite television programs is Jeopardy! with Alex Trebek. I love to call out the answers and many times I am right, but many times I don't have a clue. Well, they give me a clue, but it doesn't help.

What stuns me are the times I know the answer or make an educated guess based on the clue and not one of the three Jeopardy! players presses a buzzer. In recent days I have found myself yelling "Haile Selassie!" and "Tweedledum and Tweedledee!" and "Singapore Sling!" at the screen, but the contestants never seem to hear me. By way of explanation, I am not a drinker, but I am, as I said, a reader and a listener. The category was Alliterative Two-Word Names Of Alcoholic Drinks and the clue, which was most helpful, mentioned the Malayan peninsula, so what else could it have been? One contestant guessed Rob Roy but the last time I looked, Scotland was not on the Malayan peninsula.

The Final Jeopardy question the other night was something about a movie studio's high water bill during filming of a movie in 1952. I said Singing In The Rain (one of those "What else could it be?" moments) and two people answered correctly, but one woman had written down The Wizard Of Oz. Everybody knows that The Wizard Of Oz was released in 1939, not 1952. Don't they? Apparently not.

This is long and meandering, but I'll get to the point eventually.

Yesterday our 23-year-old grandson drove us 20 miles to my monthly eye appointment so that I could have another injection in my right eye for macular degeneration. Normally I can do the driving, but this month I was scheduled to have my eyes dilated, and it would have been rather difficult to drive the 20 miles back home with my eyes dilated.

On the way I was telling him that last month I was examined by a new technician who told me his name was Mel. Tall, thin, and black, Mel spoke with an accent I couldn't identify. He told me without my even asking that Mel was short for Melchizedek. I recognized the name from the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, so I assumed he came from a Christian family. I asked him where he had come to the U.S. from and he said he had spent the last five years in the U.K., but that he was from Ghana originally.

At this point, my grandson said, "Oh, Ghana! That makes sense that he went to the U.K. because Ghana is part of the British Commonwealth of Nations."

I, the family walking encyclopedia/know-it-all, said, "No, I don't think Ghana is one of the British Commonwealth nations."

My grandson said he must be thinking of another country starting with G.

I knew it couldn't be Gibraltar because Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory, not a Commonwealth nation, so I, being my ever-clever self, said, "Gaustralia!". He laughed, and when I said "Ganada!" he laughed even more. My third possibility was G-New Zealand. "And it's still pronounced New Zealand," he said, "because the G is silent!"

We always laugh a lot when we're together.

Hours later, back home, in the evening, something made me google British Commonwealth of Nations. There it was, plain as day: Ghana.

I pulled out my smart phone and texted my grandson. "I'm only going to say this once. You were right and I was wrong! Ghana IS a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. I looked it up."

He replied, "Be still my beating heart! I never thought this day would come. HaHa".

My mother used to say, "Pride goeth before a fall" which is also from the Old Testament (Book of Proverbs). It's not an exact quotation. The full quote is "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."

My hope is that I am neither proud nor haughty even though others are always telling me how much I know. What I know is how much I don't know. No, that's wrong. I don't have a clue how much I don't know, but I'm sure it's voluminous.

If you catch me getting proud or haughty, you have my permission to sneak up on me and kick me in the behind.

Five, er, Twelve Golden Rings

Because I am interested in where the people who visit my blog are from, I installed that Feedjit thingy over there in the left sidebar to record your visits. When I see a country that has not visited before, I save its flag on my hard drive. Currently I have 97 different flags saved on my hard drive. The most recent addition, just yesterday, was Ghana.

Ghana (not to be confused with Guinea or Guyana) is located in West Africa. Specifically, it is bordered on the west by Côte d’Ivoire (formerly Ivory Coast), on the east by Togo (formerly French Togoland), on the north by Burkino Faso (formerly the Republic of Upper Volta), and on the south by the Gulf of Guinea (formerly part of the Atlantic Ocean -- oops, I mean, part of the Atlantic Ocean).


Ghana made me sit up and take notice because some friends of ours, Andy and Kate Ring, have lived in Ghana for most of the past thirty years. There must be something in Ghanaian water, because they eventually had ten children: Thad, Isaac, Toby, Ben, Hiram, Seth, Ethan, John, Alisha, and Mary. (To be fair, several of the children were born before the Rings went to Ghana.) One time I said to Andy, “I know what you’re trying to do, Andy. You’re trying singlehandedly to bring baseball to West Africa.” The Rings lived in northern Ghana, in Tamale (TOM-uh-lee, not tuh-MAH-lee as in Spanish):


When we met them in 1975, Andy was completing an MA in Structural Linguistics at Florida Atlantic University. Andy now holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University, and Kate holds an MA in Social Sciences from Azusa Pacific University. A few months after we met them, the Rings joined Wycliffe Bible Translators. After attending Wycliffe’s Jungle Camp in Mexico for several months, they eventually moved to Ghana in 1979. They started translation work among the Lelemi-speaking people in 1981. In 1995, the Ring family and a team of Ghanaian co-workers brought the Lelemi New Testament to completion. More recently, Andy (I should call him Dr. Ring) has been a pioneer in combining computers and teams of native translators from different language groups who met together regularly in what was called the Volta Region Multi-Project (VRMP). As a result, and much faster than previously, they recently completed four New Testaments in Selee (seh-LAY), Sekpele (SEK-peh-leh), Tuwuli (TOO-willy), and Siwu (SEE-woo). I'm sure I'm showing you only the tip of the iceberg about the work Andy Ring has done involving linguistics.

Apart from their translation work, the Rings have led survey teams in Ghana to identify languages still needing translation. According to Wikipedia, the 2009 edition of the Ethnologue contains statistics for 7,358 languages in the world (not all scholars share the same set of criteria for what constitutes a ‘language’ and what features define a ‘dialect’) and 580 of these are in Ghana (but see the Update at the end of this post. --RWP). Officially, the language of Ghana is English, but there are nine other government-sponsored languages recognized by Ghana's Bureau of Ghana Languages: Akan, Dagaare/Wale, Dagbane, Dangme, Ewe, Ga, Gonja, Kasem, and Nzema. In addition, Twi and Fante (two dialects of Akan), although not government-sponsored, are widely-spoken in Ghana, and Hausa is widely used by Muslims in Ghana.

And you thought learning Spanish was hard.

On April 18, 2009, the Sekpele New Testament was dedicated in Likpe-Maate. Mr. George Maalug Kombian, the acting director of GILLBT (Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy, and Bible Translation), said that the New Testament has now been translated into 20 Ghanaian languages and the entire Holy Bible (Old and New Testaments) has been translated into 3 languages by GILLBT.

Here are recent photos of Kate (with Mary) and Andy (with one of his paintings):


(Photos © Andy & Kate Ring)

I almost forgot. The flag of Ghana looks like this:


[Update. I have received an e-mail from Andy Ring saying he believes the reference in Wikipedia to 580 languages in Ghana is incorrect. He thinks 580 is the correct figure for the number of languages in Nigeria. Andy also included a link to this page in the current Ethnologue that puts the number of languages in Ghana at 79. I apologize for the incorrect figure in my original post. -- RWP, Oct. 20, 2009]