One Little Vowel – Weekly Inspiring Image
Two women cross the road in the town of Maroua, Cameroon. Nearby, a Wycliffe translation advisor working with the Hdi language noticed that all verbs end in either i, a or u, which changes the meaning, but the word for love, ‘dv-‘, didn’t have a version ending in ‘u’. He asked the Hdi translation team about it. “Could you ‘dvu’ your wife?” Everyone laughed. “Of course not! If you said that, you would have to love your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water, never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would be compelled to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say ‘dvu’ about anything. It just doesn’t exist.” He sat quietly for a while and then asked, “Could God ‘dvu’ people?” There was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of these elderly men. Finally they responded. “Do you know what this would mean?! This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, millennia after millennia, while all that time we rejected His great love.” Read the full story on wycliffe.net Photo: Zeke Du Plessis. Access this image on Skip. |
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