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

Why Fighting Corruption Is Not Enough

By Walden Bello

After nine years of witnessing increasing poverty among the masses and spiraling corruption in high places, it is understandable that Filipinos see a strong correlation between corruption and poverty. And the judgment of many is probably correct that the candidates that are free of the taint of corruption stand the best chance of turning this country around. Moral leadership may not be a sufficient condition for successful leadership but it certainly has become a necessary condition in a country that has been so deprived of exemplary public figures like the Philippines.

Corruption, however, has become the explanation for all our ills, and this brings with it the danger that, after the elections, campaign rhetoric might substitute for hard analysis on the causes of poverty, leading to wrong, ineffectual prescriptions for dealing with the country’s number one problem.

Let me be more explicit: Corruption must be condemned and corrupt officials must be prosecuted because being a violation of public trust, corruption undermines faith in government and leads to an erosion of the moral bonds among citizens that serve as the foundation of good governance. Corruption, however, is unlikely to be the main cause of poverty. Wrongheaded policies are, and clean-cut technocrats have been responsible for more poverty than corrupt politicians.

The complex of policies that have pushed the Philippines into the economic quagmire over the last 30 years might be summed up in that formidable term: structural adjustment. Also known as neoliberal restructuring, it involved prioritization of debt repayment; conservative macroeconomic management that involving huge cutbacks in government spending; trade and financial liberalization; privatization and deregulation; and export-oriented production. Structural adjustment came to the Philippines courtesy of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, but it was internalized and disseminated as doctrine by local technocrats and economists.

Prioritizing Debt Repayment

Corazon Aquino was personally honest and her contribution to the reestablishment of democracy was indispensable, but her submitting to the International Monetary Fund’s demand to prioritize debt repayment over development brought about a decade of stagnation and continuing poverty. Interest payments as a percentage of total government expenditures went from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994. Capital expenditures, on the other hand, plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. Since government is the biggest investor in the Philippines—indeed in any economy—the radical stripping away of capital expenditures goes a long way toward explaining the stagnant one percent average yearly growth in gross domestic product in the 1980’s and the 2.3 per cent rate in the first half of the 1990’s.

In contrast, our Southeast Asian neighbors ignored the IMF’s prescriptions. They limited debt servicing while ramping up government capital expenditures in support of growth. Not surprisingly, they grew by 6 to 10 percent from 1985 to 1995, attracting massive Japanese investment while the Philippines barely grew and gained the reputation of a depressed market that repelled investors.

Trade and Financial Liberalization

When Fidel Ramos came to power in 1992, the main agenda of his technocrats was to bring down all tariffs to 0 to 5 percent and bring the Philippines into the World Trade Organization and the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), moves that were intended to make trade liberalization irreversible. A pick-up in the growth rate in the early years of Ramos sparked hope, but the green shoots were more apparent than real, and they were, at any rate, crushed as a result of another neoliberal policy: financial liberalization. The elimination of foreign exchange controls and restrictions of speculative investment attracted billions of dollars in the period 1993-1997. But this also meant that when panic hit the ranks of foreign investors in Asia in the summer of 1997, the same lack of capital controls facilitated the stampede of billions of dollars from the country in a few short weeks in mid-1997. This pushed the economy into recession and stagnation in the next few years.

The Estrada administration did not reverse course, and under the presidency of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, neoliberal policies continued to reign. New liberalization initiatives in the next few years were initiated on the trade front, with the government negotiating free trade agreements with Japan and China. These pacts were entered into despite clear evidence that trade liberalization was destroying the two pillars of the economy, industry and agriculture.

Radical unilateral trade liberalization severely destabilized our manufacturing sector, with textile and garments firms, for instance, being drastically reduced from 200 in 1970 to 10 in recent years. As one of Arroyo’s finance secretaries admitted, “there’s an uneven implementation of trade liberalization, which was to our disadvantage.” While he speculated that consumers might have benefited from the tariff liberalization, he acknowledged that “it has killed so many local industries.”

As for agriculture, the liberalization of our agricultural trade after we joined the World Trade Organization in 1995 transformed the Philippines from a net food exporting country and consolidated it into a net food importing country after the mid-1990’s. The year 2010 is the year that the China ASEAN Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiated by the Arroyo administration goes into effect, and the prospect of cheap Chinese produce flooding our markets has made our vegetable farmers fatalistic about their survival.

Depressive Fiscal Policy

What likewise became clear during the long Arroyo reign were the stifling effects of the debt repayment-oriented macroeconomic management policy that came with structural adjustment. With 20-25 percent of the national budget reserved for debt service payments owing to the draconian Automatic Appropriations Law, government finances were in a state of permanent and widening deficit, which the administration tried to solve by contracting more loans. Indeed, the Arroyo administration contracted more loans than the previous three administrations combined.

When the deficit reached gargantuan proportions, the government refused to take the necessary steps to contain the key factor acting as the main drain on expenditures; that is, it refused to declare a debt moratorium or at least renegotiate the terms of debt repayment to make them less punitive. At the same time, the administration did not have the political will to force the rich to take the brunt of bridging the deficit by increasing taxes on their income and improving their collection. Under pressure from the IMF, the government levied this burden on the poor and the middle class via the adoption of the expanded value added tax (EVAT) of 12 percent on purchases. The tax was passed on to poor and middle class consumers by commercial establishments, forcing them to cut back on consumption, which then boomeranged back on small merchants and entrepreneurs in the form of reduced profits, forcing many out of business.

Facing the Policy Challenge

The straitjacket of conservative macroeconomic management, trade and financial liberalization, and a subservient debt policy kept the economy from expanding significantly, resulting in the percentage of the population living in poverty, according to the World Bank, increasing from 30 to 33 percent between 2003 and 2006. By 2006, there were more poor people in the Philippines than at any other time in the country’s history.

The country’s plight under the lash of wrong policies over the last four administrations becomes even clearer in a comparative perspective. According to the United Nations Development Program Human Development Report, the Philippines registered the second lowest average yearly growth rate, 1.6 percent, in Southeast Asia in the period 1990 to 2005 —lower than that of Vietnam (5.9 percent), Cambodia (5.5 percent), and Burma (6.6 percent). The only country registering average growth below that of the Philippines was Brunei, which, being an oil-rich high-income country, could afford not to grow.

So yes, we must wage an unrelenting campaign against corruption because it destroys faith in government and weakens the moral fiber of the country. And yes, let us by all means punish corrupt officials and elect morally unquestionable people to power. But let us not mistake corruption as the principal cause of poverty and believe that anti-corruption crusades provide the main response to the country’s economic ills. The main source of our lack of economic dynamism is a wrong policy paradigm that we have allowed ourselves to be straitjacketed into.

It is disturbing that the policy errors that have led to our present state are hardly mentioned in the presidential debates. It is unfortunate that we are not taking advantage of the current international economic crisis that has dragged down our local economy to debate the wisdom of the policies of globalization and liberalization that have brought us to this impasse. Yes, the issues of corruption, management experience, and bureaucratic reform that dominate these debates are vital, but unless the winning team has the courage to reverse 30 years of failed neoliberal economic policies, the country will remain in the economic doldrums, unable to take off, with poverty possibly rising to the point of no return.

america’s boy 2010

na-confuse naman ako kay carmen pedrosa, kolumnista ng philippine star na panahon pa ni fvr ay kilala nang chacha-federalism advocate.   inaamin niya na she has been / is critical of noynoy aquino’s candidacy, allegedly because he is the candidate of a “former colonial power” that’s against constitutional reform, i.e., chacha.

A number of readers have asked me why I am zeroing in on Noynoy. Why don’t I criticize MannyVillar or Gibo Teodoro or Dick Gordon? I could, but that would not help in exposing what I consider the most important aspect of this election: the intervention by a former colonial power.

The main objective of this intervention was to frustrate constitutional reform and to make sure that a candidate of their choosing should be elected. That candidate was Noynoy.

but really?   america is against charter change?   is not the opposite true?   i was thinking more along the lines of lila shahani sounding off on filipino voices against anti-pinoy anti-noynoy bloggers who are pro-american and pro-chacha.

Ben’s a half-White guy trying to hustle a business who has a vested interest in endorsing Gordon: they’re related. Bong’s busy opening websites in Arizona, etc. His Dad hobnobs with US officials. They’re both neo-cons who r very pro-American and I suspect want charter change so foreigners can have 100% ownership of Philippine companies. There is a Gordon/Mindanao link because the US, among others, wants its hands on Mindanao’s endless resources. Note that Davao contributed a lot to the Red Cross during Gordon’s time.

They hate Noynoy because he won’t touch his Mom’s constitution. Their dislike of Noynoy is distinct from those of others here who simply prefer Gibo or Villar, etc, which is certainly not a problem. Noynoy has been their agenda from the get-go: 90% of the posts on Get Real r about Noynoy. Why? Because they stand to lose a lot if Noynoy wins. So it’s a concentrated campaign to demonize a candidate and his supporters. But the point is that Gordon is willing to sign off far more to the US than most Filipino patriots r willing to accept.

I, for one, am not against constitutional change as such, but think there should be a plebiscite and it should be discussed nationally outside the context of a presidential election. It should most certainly not be enacted simply to extend GMA’s stay in power. After all this noise that Bong and Ben have been making, I have started to wonder MORE about Gordon’s motivations, despite his flamboyant statements about Bangit and Villar. Like Enrile, I wonder if these hits r hard enough, or if they r simply for show to placate the general public. I find it odd to routinely see people in Makati sporting the green AND red bracelets on their wrists at the same time: what does that mean? I’m surprised they don’t even bother to be more subtle.

I for one am not willing to sign off this country to GMA and to greater foreign interests, which is why I am not for charter change right now. I believe the Filipino middle class desperately needs to grow, and needs to be given a chance away from the stranglehold of monopolies and foreign corporate interests. I think the Philippines should primarily be owned by Filipinos.

seems to me that america is pro-charter change (think mindanao) and probably supporting the likes of villar, gibo, and gordon even if these candidates swear they’re not raring to chacha, haha, who do they think they’re kidding.

edsa Q & A

@ manuel buencamino

I was away from the country from ’82 to ’95. A few things I’m not too clear about:

actually we were all in the same boat, those who were away and those who were around.   my folks and i weren’t any clearer about what was going on all the way up to EDSA, even if we were part of the xerox journalism circuit.   and long after EDSA we were told only as much as enrile and gringo and ramos and cory and cardinal sin thought we should know.   the liberated media were happy with what crumbs wereoffered.

1. The plot to kill the Marcoses turned out to be true. Who ordered the killing, Gringo?

the plot was hatched by the core group of RAM which was led by gringo.   the brains were red kapunan (like gringo, an enrile boy) and vic batac (a ramos boy, his intelligence chief).

2. What was Enrile to RAM, did he have a role in the plot to kill Marcos?

the founders, the leaders of RAM, were enrile’s security forceas minister of national defense.   naging close, as in bff, sila through the years. i suppose the soldiers developed a loyalty to enrile who treated them very well.   he was the godfather, probably paying for the uzis and galils and the training of RAM with british mercenaries in 83, by which time they were set to battle it out with ver so that enrile (and not imelda) could replace the ailing marcos in malacanang when the time came.

The RAM plot was busted and is that what forced Enrile to act?

aha, good question.   let me go back some.   the aborted feb 23 coup plot was the 2nd for RAM.   the first was planned in august 85 and set for december 26, 85, but was put on hold because marcos called snap elections dec nov 3.   RAM was convinced that there was no way cory could win over marcos, and during the campaign, when they provided security services for cory, they tried to persuade her to be part of their coup plans and and of a ruling junta; cory of course declined.   fast forward to the crony boycott, feb 16, which turned out to be a huge success.   my theory is, nataranta na ang cronies including enrile because cory’s campaign was certainly picking up steam, baka maunahan sila sa malacanang?   which would explain why on feb 20, day 5 of the boycott, they plotted and set a coup for feb 23.   talo-talo na.

but the coup plot was busted.   and even if the RAM may have wanted to crawl back into the woodwork until better times,  my theory is, the cronies wouldn’t let them.   the cronies (who were losing millions of bucks everyday) must have known about the sunday coup and when it was called off dahil ver was ready for them, these cronies (kasali kaya si danding?) must have asked, urged enrile and RAM to move anyway, negotiate with cory somehow, stop the boycott somehow.   and so they made up that story about the arrest orders — there were no arrest orders issued that day; ver was expecting to wipe them out the next morning — and stop the boycott they did; i suppose cory agreed in exchange for their allegiance.

3. What was the connection of FVR to Enrile and RAM and the plot to kill Marcos that he decided to bolt when he did?

fvr was in on the RAM plots from the beginning.  sonny razon, his chief of security in the INP, was a RAM member, his intelligence chief was core group.

4. What was FVR’s beef with Marcos, was it the same as JPE’s and Ram’s?

in mid-81 fvr was next in line for the afp chief of staff post but marcos bypassed him and appointed ver instead.   in mid-85 marcos removed the integrated national police, of which ramos was chief, from enrile’s ministry of national defense and put it directly under presidential control.   and of course ramos also had issues about professionalism, or lack of it,  in the afp, etc.

5. I gather that the mutiny and Cory’s movement were independent of each other and did not share the same goals since Cory wanted a return to democracy and civilian supremacy while the RAM/JPE/FVR group wanted a military junta and never had any philosohical problems with martial rule. Was this the cause of tensions during Cory’s administration?

yes, cory and RAM/jpe/fvr were on parallel tracks, quite independent of each other.   cory wanted democracy and civilian supremacy and RAM/jpe/fvr wanted a military-civilian junta/ruling council that could include cory and cardinal sin atbp.   cory got her way but people power forced her to work with enrile (ninoy’s jailer), if only a while (9 months to be exact).

and yes, it would seem that the RAM/jpe/fvr group had no philosophical problems with martial rule, specially the policy towards the left.   they were very unhappy about the release of political detainees (a campaign promise of cory) and the leftists/human rights lawyers advising her in the palace (joker, saguisag, bobbit sanchez atbp), thus the many coup attempts.