Posted by:
focidave
(
)
Date: April 02, 2017 10:24AM
Is it just me, or have the talks at GC so far been really generic and forgettable? Maybe it's because I'm just reading the talk summaries on lds.org and not actually listening (which I can't bring myself to do), but it doesn't seem like there's any major policy change or any major shaming (like we could always count on Boyd K Packer to do). Other than that incredibly awkward misuse of a Star Wars quote, it doesn't seem like there's much there even for TBMs to talk about.
With that said, the talk that has bothered me the most so far has been Valeri V. Cordon's "The Language of the Gospel," where he tries to compare language preservation to preserving the Gospel. Since my background is in linguistics, it somewhat intrigued me, but since his background clearly isn't, I feel like he really missed the mark. He made the observation that it's not enough to merely speak the language in the home, but it must explicitly be taught. The thing with first language acquisition is, however, that speaking the language is actually all that matters. In fact, you can't really explicitly teach the language to child. For example, children acquire grammatical elements in a language in a fixed, universal order. No matter how much you try and teach a child to say "went" instead of "goed," if they are not at that stage in their acquisition, they will not make the change.
My guess would be though that he had the mostly unrelatable experience of moving away from Guatemala with his family to another country where they speak English and then struggling to have his kids still speak Spanish. The closest parallels I can think of would be Native American languages, or perhaps Irish. In this metaphor, these languages are the church and English is the "world." I know in Ireland that they force everyone to learn Irish in school, but for the most part very few people come out actually speaking the language when they graduate. Teaching is not enough; you learn a language when it actually has a use in your life. I think there is actually a nice parallel there of parents who love TSCC struggling to get their kids to care. That should have been the question he addressed: how do we get the next generation to care about the church? It's a much harder question to answer. Instead he went off on making sure families keep the Sabbath and avoid pornography, you know, forcing church upon families. But that doesn't lead to full-tithe payers with unwavering belief any more than forcing people to learn a language they don't care about leads to fluent speakers.
TSCC has very few helpful answers to the problems people face (Health problems? Live the Word of Wisdom! Financial problems? Give us 10% of your money!). It seems like they don't have any real answers to their own problems either (Can't get young people to care about the church? Force it on them!).