I heard some mispronunciations while watching church services on the telly recently, and I would like to pass them on to you. Not only would I like to, I am going to whether you want me to or not.
I heard a preacher say "DeuterOMONY" instead of "DeuterONOMY". I thought, "What?"
I heard a different preacher say "VietMANese" instead of "VietNAMese". Ditto.
Such errors jar the ears of careful listeners, but I think the effect is worse when a preacher makes them, because it brings into question everything else of a spiritual nature that the preacher is trying to persuade his congregation to accept.
The mind, aided by the the seemingly ever-present enemy of the soul, immediately thinks, "Well, if he can't even get that right, can I trust him on the weightier matters, things of a spiritual nature?" At leas, that is where my mind goes. Confession is good for the soul, I've heard.
Maybe I'm being overly critical (ya think?). Maybe it's just another opportunity for EGR (where Extra Grace is Required).
Let us now pivot to another subject.
I used to think people who spoke in tongues were speaking gibberish. Then I learned of a musical group called Ladysmith Black Mombazo, who sang with Paul Simon on his Graceland album back in 1986. You may remember Paul Simon, the fellow who teamed up with Art Garfunkel -- Simon and Garfunkel -- on such hits as "The Sound Of Silence" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". The founder of Ladysmith Black Mombazo was Joseph Shabalala, and as recently as May 2026 the members of Ladysmith Black Mombazo, which is still going strong, include Mfanafuthi Dlamini, Thamsanqa Shabalala, Sibongiseni Shabalala, Sabelo Mthembu, Thulani Shabalala, Gagamela Shabalala, and Msizi Shabalala, according to Wikipedia.
When you say their names you are speaking in tongues and the language is Zulu. The point I'm trying to make is that if you should ever find yourself in a Pentecostal worship service and hear someone speak in a tongue that is filled with repetetive syllables, it is not necessarily an indication that the tongue is gibberish. Perhaps it is not even a human language but an angelic one, as Saint Paul told the Corinthians that there are such things, beginning Chapter 13 of his letter to them with the words, "Though I speak with the tongues of me and of angels and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal" (except that he wrote it in Greek, of course).
Or maybe their tangs are all tongueled up. Or maybe their tongues get in the way of their eye teeth and they can't see what they are saying.
Okay, I'm reaching now.
It must be time to close this post.
If you don't understand this post at all, why should this post be any different from all the others?
T.T.F.N.
P.S. - For a fascinating look at the languages of this world in a post from 2010, even though the figures on the number of people who speak them are now 16 years out of date, click here .
Showing posts with label speaking in tongues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speaking in tongues. Show all posts
Monday, June 22, 2026
Monday, October 18, 2010
Speaking of speaking in tongues...
Once again Mrs. RWP and I find ourselves in Alabamistan for a few days visiting our daughter’s family. So far we have found no BMDs (Banjos of Mass Destruction), but we are keeping our eyes open.
Natives here are divided into two colorful flocks with two distinct calls. One group say “Roll, Tide!” for no apparent reason and the other group say “War Eagle!” almost constantly.
Aside from those fascinating characteristics, Alabamian is not an easy language to understand at times. One must be alert always to the possibility that the natives are speaking in a secret code to mislead the outsider about the very real threat BMDs pose to our way of life.
Example 1: Ah had a raht nahss tahm last Frahdy naht.
Example 2: Chick at awl?**
Example 3: She kayn’t cookda save her lahf. Wah, she don't eebm know howda bawl wawda.
In this respect, Alabamians are similar to the inhabitants of Richmond, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, who go into raptures over "the buds that wobble in the sprang."
Travel is so broadening.
**Hint: Heard only at full-service gasoline stations.
Natives here are divided into two colorful flocks with two distinct calls. One group say “Roll, Tide!” for no apparent reason and the other group say “War Eagle!” almost constantly.
Aside from those fascinating characteristics, Alabamian is not an easy language to understand at times. One must be alert always to the possibility that the natives are speaking in a secret code to mislead the outsider about the very real threat BMDs pose to our way of life.
Example 1: Ah had a raht nahss tahm last Frahdy naht.
Example 2: Chick at awl?**
Example 3: She kayn’t cookda save her lahf. Wah, she don't eebm know howda bawl wawda.
In this respect, Alabamians are similar to the inhabitants of Richmond, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina, who go into raptures over "the buds that wobble in the sprang."
Travel is so broadening.
**Hint: Heard only at full-service gasoline stations.
In which the author indulges his penchant for facts that others may find either extremely fascinating or boring beyond words.
This post is about speaking in tongues. Wait, it’s not what you think.
I found a list recently of the languages of the world ranked by number of native speakers. Other lists exist with other numbers, plus there is a lot of disputing about what a language is and what a dialect is, the numbers are all just estimates anyway, and I’m not at all sure that the figures are current, but let’s just keep it simple and go with this list. Here’s what I learned:
Nine languages have more than 100,000,000 native speakers each. The largest by far is Mandarin (845,000,000), followed by Spanish (329,000,000), English (328,000,000), Hindi/Urdu (242,000,000), Arabic (221,000,000), Bengali (181,000,000), Portuguese (178,000,000), Russian (144,000,000), and Japanese (122,000,000). If you’re keeping count, that accounts for 2,590,000,000 persons, or about one-third of Earth’s population.
If your favorite hasn’t shown up yet, keep reading.
Thirteen languages have between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 native speakers each. They are German (90,300,000), Javanese (84,600,000), Punjabi (78,300,000), Wu (77,200,000), Telugu (69,800,000), Marathi (68,100,000), Vietnamese (68,600,000), French (67,800,000), Korean (66,300,000), Tamil (65,700,000), Italian (61,700,000), Turkish (61,000,000), and Cantonese/Yue (55,500,000).
The world doesn’t seem quite so Eurocentric now, does it? Still looking for your favorite? Let us forge ahead.
Languages with between 25,000,000 and 50,000,000 native speakers each include Tagalog (including Filipino) (48,900,000), Gujarati (46,500,000), Min (46,200,000), Maithili (45,000,000), Polish (40,000,000), Ukrainian (39,400,000), Malay (39,100,000), Bhojpuri (38,500,000), Xiang (36,000,000), Malayalam (35,700,000), Kannada (35,400,000), Sunda (34,000,000), Burmese (32,300,000), Oriya (31,700,000), Persian (31,300,000), Berber (30,000,000), and Hakka (30,000,000).
I have never heard of some of these languages.
Languages with between 10,000,000 and 25,000,000 native speakers each are Hausa (24,200,000), Romanian (23,400,000), Bahasa Indonesian (23,200,000), Dutch (21,700,000), Azerbaijani (21,600,000), Gan (21,000,000), Thai (20,300,000), and on down the line through Yoruba, Sindhi, Uzbek, Igbo, Saraiki, Amharic, Nepali, Serbo-Croatian, Kurdish, Cebuano, Assamese, Malagasy, Hungarian, Zhuang, Madurese, Sinhalese, Greek, Fula/Fulfulde, Czech, Shona, and Oromo.
I’m exhausted, and we’ve named only 67 of the world’s languages.
Here’s a startling fact: Sixty-seven is approximately 1% of the number of languages spoken in the world (I found three figures, 6700, 6900, and a range of “from 6000 to 7000” languages). Two hundred to 250 languages have over a million speakers each. Ninety per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 100,000 speakers each.
“So what?” you ask. (I can hear you asking it.)
The United Nations was organized in 1945. Fifty-one countries were represented at the first general session in 1946. Today, 192 countries are members of the United Nations. Six “official” languages are used in the U.N.'s intergovernmental meetings and documents: Arabic, Chinese, English French, Russian, and Spanish. (Originally there were five. Arabic was added in 1973.)
One of the rules is that the Secretary-General of the U.N. cannot originate from one of the five “permanent” Security Council member states (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America). Since 1945, there have been eight Secretaries-General of the U.N.: Trygve Lie of Norway, Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden, U Thant of Burma (now Myanmar), Kurt Waldheim of Austria, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, Kofi Annan of Ghana, and the current Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea.
Not a Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, or Japanese speaker in the bunch.
So here’s what: A lot of people must feel under-represented at best and ignored at worst. In other words, a lot of people are far worse off than you, in ways I have not enumerated and that many of us cannot begin to understand.
Now for the speaking in tongues part:
Kwitcherbellyachin.
I found a list recently of the languages of the world ranked by number of native speakers. Other lists exist with other numbers, plus there is a lot of disputing about what a language is and what a dialect is, the numbers are all just estimates anyway, and I’m not at all sure that the figures are current, but let’s just keep it simple and go with this list. Here’s what I learned:
Nine languages have more than 100,000,000 native speakers each. The largest by far is Mandarin (845,000,000), followed by Spanish (329,000,000), English (328,000,000), Hindi/Urdu (242,000,000), Arabic (221,000,000), Bengali (181,000,000), Portuguese (178,000,000), Russian (144,000,000), and Japanese (122,000,000). If you’re keeping count, that accounts for 2,590,000,000 persons, or about one-third of Earth’s population.
If your favorite hasn’t shown up yet, keep reading.
Thirteen languages have between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000 native speakers each. They are German (90,300,000), Javanese (84,600,000), Punjabi (78,300,000), Wu (77,200,000), Telugu (69,800,000), Marathi (68,100,000), Vietnamese (68,600,000), French (67,800,000), Korean (66,300,000), Tamil (65,700,000), Italian (61,700,000), Turkish (61,000,000), and Cantonese/Yue (55,500,000).
The world doesn’t seem quite so Eurocentric now, does it? Still looking for your favorite? Let us forge ahead.
Languages with between 25,000,000 and 50,000,000 native speakers each include Tagalog (including Filipino) (48,900,000), Gujarati (46,500,000), Min (46,200,000), Maithili (45,000,000), Polish (40,000,000), Ukrainian (39,400,000), Malay (39,100,000), Bhojpuri (38,500,000), Xiang (36,000,000), Malayalam (35,700,000), Kannada (35,400,000), Sunda (34,000,000), Burmese (32,300,000), Oriya (31,700,000), Persian (31,300,000), Berber (30,000,000), and Hakka (30,000,000).
I have never heard of some of these languages.
Languages with between 10,000,000 and 25,000,000 native speakers each are Hausa (24,200,000), Romanian (23,400,000), Bahasa Indonesian (23,200,000), Dutch (21,700,000), Azerbaijani (21,600,000), Gan (21,000,000), Thai (20,300,000), and on down the line through Yoruba, Sindhi, Uzbek, Igbo, Saraiki, Amharic, Nepali, Serbo-Croatian, Kurdish, Cebuano, Assamese, Malagasy, Hungarian, Zhuang, Madurese, Sinhalese, Greek, Fula/Fulfulde, Czech, Shona, and Oromo.
I’m exhausted, and we’ve named only 67 of the world’s languages.
Here’s a startling fact: Sixty-seven is approximately 1% of the number of languages spoken in the world (I found three figures, 6700, 6900, and a range of “from 6000 to 7000” languages). Two hundred to 250 languages have over a million speakers each. Ninety per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 100,000 speakers each.
“So what?” you ask. (I can hear you asking it.)
The United Nations was organized in 1945. Fifty-one countries were represented at the first general session in 1946. Today, 192 countries are members of the United Nations. Six “official” languages are used in the U.N.'s intergovernmental meetings and documents: Arabic, Chinese, English French, Russian, and Spanish. (Originally there were five. Arabic was added in 1973.)
One of the rules is that the Secretary-General of the U.N. cannot originate from one of the five “permanent” Security Council member states (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America). Since 1945, there have been eight Secretaries-General of the U.N.: Trygve Lie of Norway, Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden, U Thant of Burma (now Myanmar), Kurt Waldheim of Austria, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, Kofi Annan of Ghana, and the current Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea.
Not a Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, or Japanese speaker in the bunch.
So here’s what: A lot of people must feel under-represented at best and ignored at worst. In other words, a lot of people are far worse off than you, in ways I have not enumerated and that many of us cannot begin to understand.
Now for the speaking in tongues part:
Kwitcherbellyachin.
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