{"id":296,"date":"2004-08-10T14:06:11","date_gmt":"2004-08-10T21:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/balafon.net\/?p=296"},"modified":"2004-08-10T14:06:11","modified_gmt":"2004-08-10T21:06:11","slug":"language-ability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/?p=296","title":{"rendered":"Language Ability"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/001320.html\">Language Log<\/a> comes the whimsical <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/features\/feature.php?wfId=3814207\">story<\/a> of an NPR correspondent, who, travelling through China, came across a church where the congregation was waiting for their itinerant pastor.  When the preacher didn&#8217;t show, the foreign guest &mdash; all foreigners must be Christians, after all &mdash; was invited to preach the sermon.<\/p>\n<p>As Geoffrey Pullum says, this is pretty much the ultimate test of foreign language ability.  Could you speak for several minutes in a foreign language in the non-trivial domain of religion?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Language Log comes the whimsical story of an NPR correspondent, who, travelling through China, came across a church where the congregation was waiting for their itinerant pastor. When the preacher didn&#8217;t show, the foreign guest &mdash; all foreigners must be Christians, after all &mdash; was invited to preach the sermon. As Geoffrey Pullum says, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/balafon.net\/?p=296\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Language Ability&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}