Language Lisps

The head guy for our organization here in Mongolia has a great saying about life. He says that there are things that you don't even know you didn't know. That may sound confusing, but it makes a lot of sense when you step into a completely different culture. There are a lot of things about life that we didn't even know we didn't know until we got here, including the sounds a human mouth can make. It is very unfortunate for us that there are letters and sounds in the Mongolian alphabet that have no counterpart in the English alphabet. In fact, some of them sound right down impossible to make. Even worse is when multiple of said letters come in the same word. For example, the Mongolian word for lion has a rolling R followed by an IS sound followed by an L made by putting the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth and blowing air out the sides, and that is only part of the word. Now if that doesn't sound painful enough for you, try putting all of those sounds together and making them understandable. Also, there are seven basic vowels and six auxiliary vowels. This means there are 13 vowels in Mongolian, and many of them sound so similar that our ears cannot identify the difference. While we may struggle with such sounds, we are amazed by the sounds that can be made. Learning a new language is a very humbling experience.