Category: language

The fate of our mother languages

By Randy David

This school year, when public school teachers begin using 12 of the country’s mother tongues as languages of instruction in the first three years of grade school, they may find that employing the local language for writing and reading won’t be as easy as speaking it. They have to persist and not give up easily.

Our languages have suffered immensely from our failure to regularly use them for written communication. One can imagine how difficult it must have been for the Department of Education to produce mother tongue-based teaching materials overnight for the new K+12 basic education program. This is not the fault of our languages. It is, rather, the result of the confused language policy of a political system torn between two social tasks—the building of a national community and rapid economic development. Except for the rare writers and culture-bearers who continued to express themselves in their mother tongues, hardly any educated Filipino today uses the local languages in their written form.

Tagalog has survived as a written language mainly because it had been mandated to be the base of Filipino, the national language. Even so, it can hardly be regarded as the principal language of the literate Filipino. That place belongs to English. Proof of this is the almost total absence of foreign books translated into Filipino. It is bad enough that only a few literary and scholarly works are published in Filipino or in any other Filipino language. Worse, not one of our local languages is used as a medium for transmitting the knowledge and literature of other cultures.

Compare this with the situation in other countries. While English has become the world’s most widely spoken second language, everywhere in Europe, people prefer to read English and American works in their French or German or Italian or Dutch translations. In bookstores in Germany or France, newly released novels originally written in English exist side by side their translations in German or French, but the market clearly favors the translations. The logical explanation for this is that, while they speak good English, Europeans also think they don’t know it well enough to grasp its idioms and nuances.

In an essay in the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks offers a different explanation for the preference for translations. He says that “in most translations there will usually be some memory or trace of the original language, which, for those who are familiar with it, will reinforce their sense of knowing that other world…. But rather than feeling persuaded as a result to give up on translations and tackle the novels in their original language, they seemed to take pleasure in criticizing the translator for having allowed this to happen…. Again, the reading experience reinforces self-regard.”

We find this, by the way, not only in Europe but also in Southeast Asia, where one would stumble upon translations of, for example, Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” or Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in Bahasa or in Thai. Again, this is hardly surprising in countries where home-grown academics and writers themselves regularly publish their works in the local languages rather than in English.

It is typical for educated Filipinos to take pride in their command of both spoken and written English. This, no doubt, has come about largely because English is the only language they learn to read and write. But one must wonder whether this is necessarily a good thing. “When you learn a language,” says Parks in the NYRB article, “you don’t just pick up a means of communication, you buy into a culture, you get interested.” For many English-speaking Filipinos, who have lost their mother tongues, there is no other world against which they can compare the one they read about in English. This could partly explain the great cultural gap that divides educated Filipinos from the rest of the Filipino nation.

But, as significantly, the great haste with which we embraced English as our lifeline to the modern world made us throw away our own languages. Many of these languages had already acquired formal structures when the Americans came at the turn of the 20th century—thanks to the Spanish friars who, rather than teach Spanish, had taken pains to prepare vernacular dictionaries and grammar books in aid of religious instruction. It may be true that the persistence of this Babel of languages made it difficult for the Filipinos to unite against their Spanish oppressors. But then, the resistance against the American colonial power fared no better after America made English the language of instruction in the public schools.

Today, in the age of globalization, the Babel of local languages, or what remains of them, might be the last refuge of the ethical. This is a point made by the renowned scholar of postcolonialism, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her most recent work, “An aesthetic education in the era of globalization.” She writes: “Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge. The tower of Babel is our refuge.” Much of the ethical component of a language is what usually gets lost or distorted in translation—“as the unaccountable ethical structure of feeling is transcoded into the calculus of accountability. The idiom is singular to the tongue.”

In a previous column, I have written that perhaps of the various components of the K+12 program, it is the use of the mother tongues for the early learning years that may yet prove to be the most important. I have a strong hunch that the recovery of what is ethical in our culture begins from this.

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james soriano, wikang pambansa 101

tugon ito kay james soriano, who provoked with Language, learning, identity, privilege, and then responded to the brickbats in Wika bilang gunita.  a 4th year college student of ateneo, soriano has in essence come to realize the value of filipino/tagalog…

It was really only in university that I began to grasp Filipino in terms of language and not just dialect. Filipino was not merely a peculiar variety of language, derived and continuously borrowing from the English and Spanish alphabets; it was its own system, with its own grammar, semantics, sounds, even symbols.

But more significantly, it was its own way of reading, writing, and thinking. There are ideas and concepts unique to Filipino that can never be translated into another. Try translating bayanihan, tagay, kilig or diskarte.

Only recently have I begun to grasp Filipino as the language of identity: the language of emotion, experience, and even of learning.

but he is only too glad that his mother language is english.  because english is the language of the classroom and the laboratory, the boardroom, the court room, the operating room, the language of privilege.

in brief, okay ang wikang pambansa pero hindi mo ikaaasenso.

totoo naman (maliban kung isa kang almario?).  but in his tagalog essay, soriano reveals a sophomoric take on why filipino/tagalog has not truly taken off as a national language.

Mapapansin sa mga bumabatikos sa akin ang sumusunod na argumento: dapat itaguyod ang wikang Filipino sapagkat isa kang Filipino. Dito, makikita nating nakatali ang ideya ng pagiging Filipino sa paggamit ng wikang Filipino. Kung gayon, ibig sabihin bang ang mga hindi marunong — o tahasang hindi gumagamit — ng wikang Filipino ay hindi na Filipino?

Ang punto ko rito ay dapat din natin pansinin na sa ibang rehiyon, ibang wika ang nangingibabaw. Ang wikang Filipino ay nakabase sa wikang Tagalog, na isa lamang sa napakaraming wikang basehan ng indibidwal na identidad.

Dahil dito, hindi ito tinatanggap ng lahat; may narinig na rin akong kuwento ng kaibigang nag-taxi, na hindi pinansin ng tsuper sapagkat kinausap niya si manong sa wikang Filipino.

indeed, filipinos who do not speak the pambansang wika are filipinos no less than those who do.  but it is seriously arguable that the wikang pambansa is not widely spoken except by native tagalogs.  soriano would have better served the cause of the national language by doing some research instead of making a sweeping generalization based on one friend said to have been ignored by a taxi driver because he spoke to the manong in filipino.

read Jessie Grace U. Rubrico’s The Metamorphosis of Filipino as National Language 1998

and from google books, read preview of  Bro. Andrew Gonzales FSC’s Cebuano and Tagalog:Ethnic Rivalry Redidivus 1991

read preview of Bro. Andrew’s From Pilipino to Filipino1, to Filipino 2: unmaking and remaking a National Language 1997

read preview of Caroline S. Hau’s and Victoria L. Tinio’s Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in the Philippines 2003

i can’t find more recent surveys of how widespread the use of filipino/tagalog is these days, but i have no doubt that it has increased over the last decade and is spoken more widely than ever in in the regional centers of the visayas and mindanao, thanks to print and radio, television and film.  as long ago as the 1990s, it was said, filipino/tagalog had become the predominant language in most media:

In recent years, mass media, particularly broadcasting, have shifted to Filipino. The two biggest networks in the Philippines hav almost entirely Filipino programming. National broadsheets are still predominantly in English, while national tabloids are mostly in Filipino. Community newspapers generally use the regional language in combination with English, except in Mindanao, where most are in English. The most popular comics and weekly magazines are in Filipino, although vernacular magazines are also widely read. Radio programming is usually bilingual, with Filipino becing more dominant except in some Cebuano- and Hiligaynon/Ilonggo-speaking areas and in metropolitan Manila, where English is preferred.

the problem is not that filipino is based on tagalog, the problem is cebuano opposition that seems to be concentrated lang naman daw among politicians who do not necessarily represent the majority view.  politicians who like fueling ethnic rivalries when it suits their purposes, who would even want us to start from scratch with cebuano as the basis for a wikang pambansa.  how helpful is that to the cause of a national language that would foster unity and understanding across all tribes.

nor is english per se the problem.  english is a historical and cultural given.  i am happy to speak (and write and read) in both english and filipino/tagalog, and i don’t feel split by the bilingualism. what splits up the country is the way the quality of both the english and the filipino/tagalog taught in schools has so deteriorated. good english has become exclusive to a privileged minority, while filipino/tagalog that is good and easy (on the eyes and ears) and inclusive not only of english but of bisaya and ilocano atbp. remains a distant dream.

in Our language predicament, writtten some 13 years ago in response to Bro. Andrew Gonzalez, then secretary of education, saying that some 20 percent of the high school population were deficient in the use of english, i said it seemed more like only 20 percent were still speaking good english, and i traced the downslide not just of english but of filipino/tagalog to the bilingual policy of education. Excerpts (slightly edited):

Time was when Filipinos were famous for being the only English-speaking people in Asia. From the American occupation until the ’60s, it didn’t matter if you were rich or poor. As long as you went to school (public or private), you learned to speak English, it being the official medium of instruction. I remember picking it up more quickly than most; I supposed it was because I got a lot of practice both in school and at home. In school it was all we were allowed to speak except in Sariling Wika class. At home it was the second language; I was always trying out my English on my mother who would always correct my mistakes, and my father was always asking me to read out loud the daily columns of Teodoro Valencia and Joe Guevara.

It was in the ’70s (if memory serves) when Marcos decreed a bilingual policy for education: English would still be taught and used in teaching math and the sciences but other subjects would be taught in the mutant Filipino, the Tagalog-based national language enriched with words from other dialects and languages that defy translation or require none because they’ve become part of the mainstream. At the time, it seemed like a victory for nationalists who had long been advocating such a policy in the interest of developing a truly national language that would allow full expression of the native psyche and intelligence and which would bind all Filipinos.

In the long run, however, the bilingual policy hasn’t worked. We failed to guard against problems we should have anticipated.

I submit that we took our English-speaking skills for granted. We didn’t realize what it took to speak good English and what it would take to sustain it in a bilingual environment. Perhaps we thought that we had our English too down pat to ever lose it. Maybe we thought it was so ingrained, it would get passed on through our genes. No such luck. Without sufficient practice in speaking, reading and writing, we’re losing it instead, and it’s beginning to show. Even on TV newscasts, the English is becoming sloppy, with newscasters breezing through wrong prepositions and mixing up idiomatic expressions.

Students are said to be doing better in classes conducted in Filipino than in English, but it could just be the natural advantage of a native language. It doesn’t mean that the bilingual policy has been good for the Filipino language. In fact, it has failed to evolve into a truly national language, what with the Cebuanos still fighting it and the authorities still insisting on what a writer friend calls ”laboratory Pilipino” na ang hirap namang basahin at intindihin, at napaka-pormal ng dating. It is so stilted, so different from the lingua franca, or the Filipino spoken at home, in the streets, and in media, that it confounds and bewilders rather than grabs, excites or inspires.

I can understand the reigning authorities’ desire to preserve the old forms and expressions, but it will have to wait until we get the hang of Tagalog again. Most of us Tagalogs who became fluent in English lost a lot of our Tagalog along the way. In the early ’80s, when I started writing in and translating into Tagalog, my vocabulary was terrible. A script that was a breeze to do in English was always a struggle to do in Tagalog, lalo na in laboratory Pilipino.

Even with help from dictionaries, I found that to render many English ideas or concepts in a Tagalog that is easy to read and comprehend, I needed to do more than translate. The writer-translator has to rethink the sentence structure, rethink the idea in terms of Filipino experience, and express it using a vocabulary that gets the message across in one reading. And I found that there’s no dropping English altogether because in many instances the English words (and English spellings) are already more widely used and understood than the Tagalog. In the end, I settled into a kind of Filipino that is more Tagalog than English but more Taglish than purist.

fast forward to 2011.  laboratory filipino-ists continue to insist on re-spelling english words the tagalog way.  keyk for cake, tsok for chalk, salbeyds for salvage, notbuk for notebook…  i don’t get it.  it doesn’t help make the reading easy, as in, nakakatisod: ano daw?  worse, ang sakit sa mata.  salbeyds.  saan ka nakakita ng ganyang kombinasyon ng letra – walang kataga na beyds ke sa english ke sa tagalog o cebuano o ilokano atbp., so how does that help?

even worse, walang nakikialam sa filipino/tagalog na gamit ng media.  here’s some of lem garcellano’s rant on facebook a year ago:

Leche-flan *@#%$. Nakaka PKon! mula news readers reporters ng GMA at ABS-CBN hanggang kay PNoy: RESOLBA RESOLBA RESPONDE RESPONDE! Mga ungas, may salita naman sa tagalog LUTAS LUTAS O LUNAS, DUMALO o PAGDALO! Nagtagalog nga, tinagalog naman ang ingles! … pati mga makabayang orgs gamit din resolba! resolbahin! ano ba!

Eto pa, “yapak” daw ang sinabi ukol sa ingles na “steps” pero ang pagkakabigkas ang ibig sabihin sa ingles “unshod”. Bwiiiiiseeeeeet! Nagtagalog nga mali naman! Kaya yung mga nanood lalo na ang mga bata akala iyon na nga ang kataga para sa kahulugan sa gawang iyon! Panginoon! Sa Visayas, ganundin ang sinasabi nila, responde. Sagipin mo kami sa mga mamamatay-wika! Yan bang mga GMA at AS-CBN, sa laki ng kinikita nila, e, wala silang taong magsasala ng ng mga salita sa kanilang ulat?

Sana may batas na nagpapataw ng kamatayan sa lahat ng pumapatay sa wikang Pilipino.

Sabagay, nang mapakinggan ko si Pnoy kagabi, magaling siyang magsalita sa Tagalog. Pag tagalog, tagalog siya talaga. Pag Ingles, ingles… lamang, natisod sa resolba at responde. Sinundan kasi ang sinabi ni Mel Tiangco at Ted.

eto pa: eksperiyensiya for experience, when there’s karanasan.  competenisya for competition, di ba kompetisyon?  and speaking of ted failon, isa lang siya sa maraming newsreader na mali ang bigkas sa “taya” (ng panahon), malumay, eh tulad lang naman iyan ng taya sa sugal, maragsa.

at tama rin, sa pananaw ko, si lem na tagalog ang dapat itawag sa wikang pambansa.  huwag na tayong magpanggap.

Ano kayang pagkakaiba ng “Filipino” sa Tagalog? Ano kaya yung “superiority” na iyon? Pag pinagsalita mo naman ng “Filipino”, ang salita naman ay Tagalog! Kung ibig talaga natin na magkaroon ng pambansang wika na ang tawag ay “Filipino” at hindi Tagalog e di ituro sa mga Pilipino sa pagkabata pa lang ang tatlong pinakamalawak na wika sa bansa: Tagalog, Ilukano at Bisaya. Tiyak, sa loob ng dalawang daang taon, may isang wika na ang Pilipinas-pinaghalong wika ng mga Pilipino. Pero kung ibig nating malutas (maresolba sa “Filipino”?) ang usapin sa wika, tigilan na yan pagtawag sa wika na Pilipino, lunukin na lang ang yabang ng mga Pilipino at tawagin itong Tagalog.

imagine if we were truly united by a national language.  then we would all be in a better position to fight for deepseated change.  recently i posted in facebook a letter to the inquirer editor, Helicopter probe deal flying nowhere about president aquino

…reducing the country’s problems to a single cause—the previous administration’s corruption. But he really shares the same policies with Gloria, committing the economy to unbridled privatization, deregulation and liberalization that serve elite interests.

which led to this exchange with steve salonga:

Steve:  the author should realize that those elitist economic policies were set in place over a 100 years, and that it will take a deliberate act of a majority of citizens to begin the process of redirecting them. It begins with a President but it finishes much later when the people have acted accordingly by continuing to elect representatives who are against such exclusionary economic policies.

me:  true, steve. this is where a national language and a crusading media are indispensable

Steve:  tagalog would be the more “inclusive” language and should be used for maintaining a national dialogue on issues. You wonder how the government and business elite would fare under such conditions!

the bottom line is, we can have both english and tagalog but only if we work at it.  schools should bring back drills, big time, and everyone should be encouraged to practice by reading aloud, with or without an audience.  media, especially television, should help out by making space and time for language progams that will teach children and adults good tagalog and good english.  and it would help greatly if the language minorities would bow to tagalog and give the nation a break, for the common good and for democracy’s sake.

rizal, tagalog, nation

it’s really too bad that we haven’t tried hard enough as a people to develop tagalog into a national language.   then maybe we would have a better sense of national interests as opposed to foreign interests, and we could be making decisions among ourselves first before outsiders with vested interests start weighing in.

read Rizal’s open secrets by john nery.   rizal and del pilar in their correspondence 1889 to 1890 turned from spanish to tagalog for a “layer of privacy”, “to wrap something in (or bind themselves to) secrecy”, and “to forge a unity of purpose” at a time when “the question of language was becoming more and more central to their attempt to found a nation.”

read too dr. pablo s. trillana III‘s Rizal and leadership.

Tagalog, language, deconstructed

Who would have thought that Tagalog could be de-constructed and that a mathematical order found in our use of verb phrases?

Who would have thought that there would be a discrete number of key verbs expressing, covering, every human experience, thought, action, possibility?

Who would have thought that different languages could be working from the same set of verbs, all perfectly lined up in a mathematical grid?

Who would have thought we could get to the bottom of language?

But this is exactly what Luis Umali Stuart, my mathematician-turned-lexicographer-turned-discoverer brother, sets out to demonstrate in his ebook The Secret Grid of Language.  There is a foreword by Nicole Revel, an expert in Anthropological Linguistics and Semantics, and Director of Research since 1988 in the Section 34 (Languages, Representations and Communication) of the French CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research, the largest basic science agency in Europe if not the world).   In Nicole’s words:

Luis approaches the morphosemantic problems of Tagalog in a totally different way: his is a rigorous mathematical intuition and mastery at the service of an extremely difficult empirical database and an observation of the perceptions of motion from the perspective of the speakers themselves.

My contribution to his work was to follow his thought without destroying his vision, while helping him to present his formal analysis in a way acceptable to linguists.  It required (from) me a constant readjustment in order to free myself from classic linguistic references and to enter into another way of perceiving and ordering facts, a formal concrete-abstract way of apprehending an enormous number of roots and their semantic modulations–the subtle onmipresent interplay of affixes in spoken Tagalog–and accessing to the structure underlying them in an explicit manner.

This is a work in Cognitive Semantics but it avoids a complex metalanguage. Its very economy and minimal formulation should be a source of enlightenmentto linguists and neurophysiologists.  I am sure it cannot but please the mathematicians.  I can only hope it will also be of interest to philosophers, for it points to our embodied condition.

Louie had many eureka! moments over the 20 years of his study of Tagalog and fleshing out of the grid, some shared with me on occasional one-on-ones over shots of lambanog, even if I could always only intuitively grasp the significances (not being as cerebral as he).  Here’s our latest exchange via email, on the occasion of The Secret Grid:

A:  Before the grid, my impression was that language was an inchoate, forever-evolving thing, with new words and expressions always coming in and old ones being thrown out, and even, rules changing, the unacceptable becoming acceptable.  Not really pala.

L:  A language, Tagalog, learns new words and expressions all the time but the grammar stays relatively constant.  It is what turns Tagalog into Taglish.  Nag-apply ako, iprinocess kami, na-hire siya sa call-center.  The grammar is still Tagalog but the vocabulary is bi-lingual, or international even.  Na-coup-d’etat siya noong mag-perestroika.  Vernacular Tagalog is riddled with Spanish and English loanwords from our past history, not to speak of Sanskrit and Malay and, of course, Chinese.  We are adding to this vocabulary constantly.  But the grammar is no different from Balagtas or the Pasion.

A:  What are dominant / current theories of language that the grid disproves / confirms / puts into question?

L:  Hmm.  The two biggest puzzles in Linguistics are the “origin of language” and the “deep structure of language”.  In other words, what are the key elements and molecules of language?  And is there a common structure to all the languages of Man, a universal grammar?  The former is still up for grabs but in the latter, the dominant thinking is from Chomsky of MIT although many linguists in Europe still prefer the structuralist approach of Levi-Strauss.  Neither has been able to get to the bottom of the two puzzles, and the general mood is that they are unsolveable; thus we are unable to teach computers to converse.  The grid offers a new approach and likely solution to the problem.

A:  This whole project started out with Pinoy Translator, when you started listing Tagalog words, yes?  When and what made you focus on verbs in particular?

L:  At the end of Pinoy Translator I attempted a closing section “Elements of Tagalog Grammar” for the beginning non-Tagalog student.  In the effort, it was soon obvious that the complexity of Tagalog, the difficulty in teaching and learning it, was all in the verbs.  The rules for nouns and pronouns and adjectives, even sentences, were simple enough to set up, but the verbs and adverbs were very unwieldy.  When to use what affix was the biggest problem; there was simply nothing for it, until the first signs of a grid appeared in my verb lists.  Brain scientists have long suspected that verbs are at the core of the neural structuring of language.

A:  How did Nicole enter the picture?  The foreword gives no indication that she speaks Tagalog rather well.  What got her interested in the grid?

L:  As far as I can tell she came in the late 60s to join the team of Robert Fox at Tabon Cave.  She stayed around and did her doctoral on Palawan languages, in particular the epic songs of the Palawan tribal shamans.  She joined the CNRS in 1972 as a researcher in Linguistics, and visits the Philippines almost yearly for teaching and continuing research.  She has an outpost on an island fronting Tabon cave but has been discouraged from travelling there by her embassy since the Dos Palmas crisis.  Since 1990 she has been building an Epic Poetry Archive at Ateneo.  My translation of the Pasion Henesis was part of this.  The archive has recently been digitalized and will be available on the net sometime this year if it isn’t yet.

She is structuralist in her linguistics and locked into my work because it was obviously structuralist as opposed to all the Chomskian work going on in current Philippine linguistics.

A:  Could all languages really be griddable?

L:  As I’ve often said, it is not reasonable that Tagalog alone should have this mathematical arrangement; I am convinced it represents a neural structure in Homo sapiens sapiens.  In the book, I actually demonstrate how the grid would work for the English language, and the result serves as my evidence.

The accomplished work still only accounts for 1/16th of the grid.  Mapping out the entire Tagalog grid is the next challenge.  In the short term, workers in language who are fluent speakers of both Tagalog and English have their work cut out for them.  Once done, all other languages will only need to mimic the results.

A:  Nakaka-excite nga the implications for language translation.  What are your great hopes for the grid in this age of the computer and the internet?

L:  Because it is a mathematical solution it interfaces perfectly with the problem in artificial intelligence of how to teach computers to comprehend and speak languages, and finally pass the Turing test.  Geeks in natural language processing (NLP) will see that the grid is actually a binary system that provides the perfect algorithm for the definition of knowledge sets and, from there, the perfect translation of any language to another.

A:  Do you have any thoughts on how the grid system could help improve the teaching of Tagalog/Filipino and English here, given how terrible the quality of Tagalog and English of students and teachers in public and private schools alike these days?

L:  The long-term theory, when the grid of language by way of Tagalog and English is all-mapped out and the downstream technologies are perfected is that we won’t need to learn languages anymore, in the same way that calculators have taken over arithmetic.  You say something in one language and a translator phone dishes it out in the other.

In my lectures, the most excited reactions always come from the language educators and child psychologists, perhaps because the grid amounts to a natural program of learning, from four elementary ideas, to sixteen, to sixty-four and so on, from the most general to the most specific, simultaneously building up the language and worldview of the learning brain.

Fascinating stuff.  Check it out.  If you’re not into language or education yourself, share the link with those you know who are. http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-secret-grid-of-language/8537171