Is plagiarism a crime?
By Isagani Cruz, The Philippine Star

MANILA, September 13, 2012—Much has been said recently about plagiarism. Everyone (even serial plagiarists) knows what it is. It is, simply put, stealing somebody’s idea and pretending that it is your own. It is intellectual theft. It breaks the commandment “Thou shalt not steal.”

It is definitely a sin, but is it a crime?

Let me refer to the law that governs intellectual property, namely, Republic Act No. 8293, known as the “Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines.” It was passed by the Tenth Congress, one of whose members was a certain Vicente Castelo Sotto III.

Chapter 10 of the law talks about the Moral Rights of an author. Section 193 talks of the Scope of Moral Rights, which includes the right “to require that the authorship of the works be attributed to him, in particular, the right that his name, as far as practicable, be indicated in a prominent way on the copies, and in connection with the public use of his work.”

The law clearly provides that the name of the author should be prominently mentioned when his or her work is used publicly. In other words, even if I made a blanket statement that everything I said in a particular work was taken from the work of others, that does not satisfy the requirement of the law. I have to mention the name of the author from which I took my words or ideas.

Section 198 further provides that “the rights of an author under this chapter (Chapter 10) shall last during the lifetime of the author and for fifty (50) years after his death and shall not be assignable or subject to license.” If the author is still alive, I have no choice but to mention his or her name when I take words or ideas from him.

Why ideas? Because plagiarism does not involve only words. It also involves ideas. If I added or altered a word here or there, or even if all my words were different from those of the original author, I would still be committing plagiarism if the idea is the same. This is the main difference between copyright and plagiarism. Copyright protects the expression of an idea or the exact words of the original author. The prohibition against plagiarism protects the idea itself, no matter how it is expressed.

Therefore, using different words or even a different language but expressing the same ideas is plagiarism.

Full story...

Something awry at the NCCA
By F. Sionil Jose, The Philippine Star

MANILA, September 3, 2012—People who aren’t familiar with the creative process are in command positions at the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (NCCA), people who have no track record as cultural workers.

They may have the best of intentions, but their myopia, alas, hobbles them. Their plan to have some of the works of our writers made into movies — if they had read these stories they should have excluded most in their filmable list — the narratives are simply dull and bereft of conflict or tension which is the most important element in film.

If I had my way, I would help instead our better directors and scriptwriters. The NCCA may also take a cue or two from South Korea whose government is actively supporting the country’s movie industry in producing those epic historical movies and the addictive telenovelas that have gained global currency.

In this regard, although so many hosannas had been written about Dolphy, let me add to them, recount a meeting with him. Dolphy used to frequent Za’s Café behind my bookshop. One of his children lived in an apartment above the coffee shop and he was often there, partaking of the café’s ensaymada which is the best in Manila.

I approached him once, introduced myself; he said he knew my bookshop. I asked if he ever saw Limelight, starring Charlie Chaplin and Claire Bloom — a moving story of a theater janitor who helps a young ballet dancer achieve her dream. It had such pathos and comedy as only Chaplin could make them. I asked Dolphy if he could do something similar, that I would help gratis with the script. He told me that, indeed, he admired Chaplin very much, and Cantinflas, the Mexican comedian. He studied so many of Chaplin’s films. He said he wanted to elevate his own movies from slapstick, but every time he did, the film did not do well. Is the masa hopeless? At least Dolphy tried. I think the majority of our mainline moviemakers never attempted to put quality plus in their work.

Full story...

The day my laptop died
By Randy David, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, August 19, 2012—As soon as I pressed the power button, the Windows logo appeared on the laptop’s screen with the familiar assurance: “Starting Windows.” But nothing else happened after that. For the first time in its brief mechanical life, my barely one-year-old computer failed to say hello. It was as if it found itself in a daze, desperately grappling with the sudden loss of its own memory. Finally, a blue sky with a little white bird and a twig approaching a faint light appeared on the screen. “Oh no,” I muttered in horror, almost certain that my poor machine had been attacked by a virus. The hard disk drive itself had crashed.

Frantic calls to my daughter Nad, who understands the quirky life of computers far better than I do, helped me boot the sleek black laptop on “safe mode.” She then came over to back up all my files on a USB flash disk. Aghast that I had not taken the precaution of creating a “recovery disk” for use in case of system failure, she promptly made one for me. You can always replace the hard disk, she said, but if you lose your files you may not be able to retrieve them.

In the next few hours, I coaxed my poor ailing laptop into performing a diagnosis of its own state of health. It offered to “defragment” bits of memory belonging to the same files or programs that appear to have been dispersed across different sectors. It checked the condition of the application programs, and, finally, it cued me to check the hard disk. With an air of certainty, it then announced that it had detected errors in its hard disk drive, and offered to repair them.

I was thoroughly impressed by this machine’s capacity for self-analysis and self-healing, and I quietly wished there was a way for the human brain to detect and repair its own occasional malfunctions. But, my hopes were quickly dashed. There is a limit to what even the most sophisticated computer can do once its hard disk is damaged. My computer appears to have reached that limit—it was unable to heal itself. The blue sky and the white bird reappeared, an image I took to mean as signifying that my laptop had passed on to the next world.

The operating system of a computer has been likened to a human being’s nervous system. It is lodged in the computer’s vast circuitry and hard disk, just as the nervous system is controlled from the brain…

Full story...

26 Filipino poets in English
By Alfred A. Yuson, The Philippine Star

MANILA, July 29, 2012—Giving the metaphorical digit to that cliché that says lists can only be odious, I join the welcome chorus in these pages for the 26th anniversary of this wonderful paper.

My honorable assignment is to laud the best of our poets — 26 to be exact, three more than that mystical number I share with Michael Jordan, David Beckham, Jim Carrey, and LeBron James before he turned miasmic.

But again, contrary to the Sufism that at any point in world history there can only be 64 good living poets (as there are squares in a chessboard), I contend that excellent Pinoy poets come close to a veritable hundred, at present. If you count ’em all, that is, those that truly matter. And I only speak of the living.

That’s because our poets write exceedingly well in more than just the adopted language and the mainstream native one of Filipino. We have poets excelling in verse in Cebuano, Bicolano, Iluko, Pangasinense, Hiligaynon, even in Zamboanga Chabacano.

Obviously, alas and alack, we can’t list them all down here. We have to exercise, if with a degree of arbitrariness and unilateral judgment, some measure of pruning, with the simple objective of coming up with this year’s hallowed number of 26!

And so we limit our list to Filipino poets writing in English, and who are living, and residing here. And who have produced at least one book that is a collection of her/his poetry.

How’s that? Unfair enough, you might say. Well, make your own list. This is mine, for the moment — in a bow to this momentous occasion for my privileged venue.

I’m also sure I will miss out on a few names — for which, forgive me, dearest. Deadlines and looming Alzheimer’s make for a deadly combo; together they play music that only manages to fry memory’s pancakes to a crisp.

And so, without much further ado, tan-ta-ra-ran, is my list! It runs alphabetically:

Gémino H. Abad, Merlie Alunan, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Juaniyo Arcellana, Cirilo F. Bautista, Conchitina Cruz, Simeon Dumdum Jr., Marjorie Evasco, J. Neil Garcia, Ramil Digal Gulle, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, Marne L. Kilates, Francis Macansantos, Edgardo B. Maranan, Virginia R. Moreno, DM Reyes, Victor Jose Peñaranda. Danton Remoto, Myrna Peña-Reyes, Ramon Sunico, Angelo Suarez, Anthony Tan, Joel Toledo, Ricardo M. de Ungria, Ruel S. de Vera, and Lourd de Veyra.

Full story...

Open a book—and get to know us
By Neni Sta. Romana Cruz, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, July 27, 2012—Anyone would have beamed with pride watching the Filipino talents in children’s literature in the limelight at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content held at the end of May in Singapore. This was organized and hosted by the National Book Development Council of Singapore headed by R. Ramachandran and the tireless Kenneth Quek. It was as counterpart and partner agency that the National Book Development Board was invited, with NBDB executive director Andrea Pasion Flores and myself in attendance.

Rama’s best credentials as festival director is not his marketing or organizational ability, though that was apparent, but his background as librarian. It is his association with and affinity for books that inspired him to develop this fairly young festival (two years old) from the Asian Children’s Writers & Illustrators Conference which ran for 10 years. Then, his brainchild to mount a 4-day conference—a day for teachers, a day for parents, and the weekend for writers and illustrators. For this, the second such conference, Rama wanted an Asean country in focus—and the Philippines emerged as its first focus because of the fairly impressive growth in publishing.

Taking center stage as representatives of the children’s book industry were Jomike Tejido, who had an enjoyable session with children and parents doing his own paper foldabots, and Russell Molina, who invited the audience who knew little of Philippine children’s books with this come-on: Open a children’s book and discover our thousands of islands, hundreds of stories, pieces of our culture. With that introduction (truly an advertising mind at work here), Molina also highlighted the harsh reality of childhood for many of our young, who turn “seasonal orphans” with their parents working abroad. Thus the prevalence of stories representing these issues. “We don’t live in castles” but we have such stories to tell, too.

Full story...

“I(’)mpossible”
By Rowena M. C. Cos, 2nd prize winner, UN Essay Writing Contest

The future that I want may well be impossible. The future I want may well be unreachable. To dream of it is the only thing I can do because the future I want is hard to get: the future where we all exist and matter in a world that exists and matters to us.

What of this future, this mythical experience where man and woman coexist with nature and life in peace and harmony? What of it is but impossible if today all around me there is anything but this? In a world where the greater many have next to nothing and the little few have the bounty, in a world where marital bonds are given little more importance and significance than a plastic cup acquired and disposed off after the beverage in it is consumed, in a world where the disposed cup travels byways and highways with no particular destination in mind for it, in a world where people grow thin and faint in lands rich and great as others exploit it for overflowing tables half of food on which goes untouched, in a world where melting poles offer potable water yet thousands die of thirst, in a world where material consumption rules and runs the lives of many with no thought for the before and after of the things that they consume, in a world where humans are the center and the core of everything else yet are unaware of anything but themselves, in a kind of world like this, what is there to expect and hope for?

Today, man is aware of everything but the world around him. Today, man is caring of everything but those completely detached from himself, but these things that he thinks are disconnected from him are really infinitely a part of him, even in the littlest and seemingly most insignificant of ways; but he doesn’t know it, or at least he doesn’t realize it. Today, this is man. Tomorrow, what will he be?

Tomorrow, man will wake up. He will rise and open his eyes and see. Not just look, he will see his surroundings. His eyes will open wide and take in everything there is: he is not alone…

Full story...

Starting from where the teachers are
By Ricardo Ma. Nolasco, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, July 13, 2012—At the recent Bridging Languages Workshop in Baguio City, I was deluged with requests from the participating teachers for a more rigorous Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) training regimen. The teachers were particularly concerned with practical issues like how to produce home-grown (and therefore contextually sensitive) teaching and reading materials, and how to actually develop greater fluency in their own languages. I surmise that their apprehension grew from the fact that teaching in a mother tongue-based program requires a vastly different set of skills, many of which they apparently do not have at the moment.

According to Dr. Dennis and Susan Malone, the leading MLE consultants from SIL International, a critical problem is that in most countries, there are too few certified teachers from local language communities who have the level of fluency needed to use both languages in the classroom. Without the advantage of MTBMLE, many of the students who do not speak the school language have done poorly in primary school and have not been able to progress through secondary school.

The Malones aver that effective and sustainable MTBMLE programs require teachers who are fluent in speaking, reading and writing both their students’ mother tongue and the official school language.

To help overcome this serious shortage, they propose these courses of action:

1. Incorporation of MTBMLE into regular 2-, 3-, or 4-year teacher certification programs. In this program, pre-service teacher trainees may focus on MTBMLE. Individuals learn how to read and write the local language fluently and how to teach their students to do the same. They learn effective second language acquisition (2LA) theories, how to apply the theories in the classroom, and how to use the local language effectively as the initial language of instruction. On completion of the program, these pre-service teachers will have achieved the same educational qualifications as mainstream teachers with the additional qualification for teaching in MTBMLE classrooms.

Full story...

The future I want
By Gerriane Faith B. Rizon, 1st Prize, UN Essay Writing Contest

There are stories everywhere we look. There are stories that we laugh over, stories that break our hearts and stories that make you long for things imagined. I, for one, love the stories my father tells. After dinner, when the dishes are all piled up waiting to be washed and we’re all sitting together stretching our legs, my sister and I beg him for a funny story from his childhood. He does so with gusto, reenacting certain parts and adding sound effects to make the story come alive. The setting for most of his stories centers around his childhood home. In his own words, it was situated beside a brook where his older sisters would wash their clothes. During his childhood their house was the only one for miles around and as night came on, the darkness crouching right outside their door would give him the creeps. In the safety of daylight, he and his friends would go fly kites in the field surrounding their house or borrow the family bike and explore the city. Can you imagine something so idyllic? How many times I’ve wished that I could have seen my father’s childhood home as it was before. Of course, the house still stands there with my aunts and uncles living nearby. But they are not the only ones living there anymore. A lot of people have moved in to the neighborhood, so there’s not much left of the grassy field. In fact, there’s not much space left, period. So many houses have been built around my father’s family house that winding alleyways are what you have to walk on to reach the main road. No fields are there for children to fly their home-made kites and more often than not, their kites end up hanging limp and entangled in the electric wires up above. There’s no clear garbage disposal system, so the brook has become a handy dump site. The waters that run through it now are dark and little more than a trickle during hot summer days. No one comes to splash around and cool themselves in the brook’s waters anymore. I laugh over my father’s stories but my heart breaks whenever I visit his childhood home and see how far it has fallen from being the clean, fresh place I have always imagined it to be…

Full story...

The fate of our mother languages
By Randy David, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, June 21, 2012—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…

Full story...

Filipinos top 2012 English index
By Queena Lee-Chua, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, May 27, 2012—While professors (including myself) decry the decline in English language skills of our students, Global English’s Business English Index 2012 begs to differ.

Global English, an English language instruction company in California with clients such as Cisco, General Motors and Procter and Gamble, tested 108,000 employees in 216 companies in 76 countries.  The tests, conducted in 2011, included comprehension of English, and its usage in various media such as e-mail, phone, presentations.

First, the bad news.  On a scale of one to 10—one, as the lowest, indicating the employee uses only basic English while 10, as the highest, means the employee communicates like a native English speaker—the average score was 4.15, down from 4.46 the year before.

Most global workers can deal with basic information, but cannot perform more complex tasks that require nuanced understanding of the language.

Now for the good news:  We are at the top!  The Philippines was the only country to score at the intermediate level (7.11), followed by Norway (6.54), Estonia (6.45), Serbia (6.38), Slovenia (6.19), Australia, Malaysia, India, Lithuania, Singapore and Canada.

Global English president Tom Kahl was quoted as saying, “Addressing English skills gaps and ensuring that employees can immediately perform at the necessary proficiency level should be viewed as a strategic imperative for multinational businesses as enterprise fluency, the ability to seamlessly communicate and collaborate within global organizations, can deliver significant financial upside.”

The worst performing countries were Armenia, Cote d’Ivoire, Taiwan, Honduras, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Brazil.

Full story...

Reading with ‘K’
By Roberto S. Salva, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, June 4, 2012—In K + 12, the new basic education program, the Department of Education is not introducing a formal science class until the third grade. It wants the children to focus on learning how to read first.

Filipinos in the science community are aghast. Children’s natural curiosity should be cultivated and molded, as early as possible, toward formal scientific investigations. On Facebook, a friend questioned the competence of those behind the design. “Don’t tell me they are still wasting children’s time with ba be bi bo bu, ka ke ki ko ku,” she wrote.

A Filipino scientist now teaching in Georgetown University also complained about the late introduction of formal science classes. He suggested that if the children are to be taught reading, they should be taught to read in English as materials in the language abound.

In his book, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read, Prof. Stanislas Dehaene reestablishes the best route to learn to read, and that is: learning first the sounds of each letter and combination of letters. Various studies had earlier proven this, but Dehaene, acknowledged as the leading authority in the neuroscience of language, uses his research into the brain to emphasize it.

We learn to read by first learning the “babebibobus” and “kakekikokus,” the connection between written letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes).

Full story...

Language of the spirit
By Jason Baguia, Cebu Daily News

CEBU CITY, June 3, 2012—Last Friday, before Mass ended at Basilica Minore del Santo Niño in downtown Cebu City, a lay minister announced that Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma has green-lighted the Catholic faithful’s gradual adoption of the new English translation of the words of Holy Mass starting today, the Solemnity of the Most Blessed Trinity.

I have been reading stories about this translation of the Mass from its original Latin text since early in the last decade, when the work began under our last pope, now Blessed John Paul II and ended towards the close of that decade under Pope Benedict XVI.

The translation process was meticulous, involving primarily the popes, bishops of the English-speaking Catholics, Vatican departments like the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Disicipline of the Sacraments, the church commission called International Committee for English in the Liturgy and lay liturgical experts.

In a nutshell, the members of the Catholic hierarchy saw the need for a new English translation of the Roman Missal because the one we have been using since soon after the Second Vatican Council are more translations of the thought behind rather than literal English renderings of the Latin texts.

This does not mean that the hierarchy is nitpicking, imposing on believers the use of an English version of a text in language considered dead. Rather it shows that our popes, the bishops and the rest of the hierarchy care to teach us to use words that elicit greater reverence for the Mass and highlight the content of our faith.

Further, in this era of what the pope calls the “dictatorship of relativism,” a translation of the words that we pray at Mass needs to be faithful to the original to be more effective in helping us elevate our lives to God.

Full story...

Filipinos: Best in business English
Editorial, The Manila Times
 
MANILA, April 28, 2012—Just as the heat wave has been making more and more Filipinos wish they were Germans, Canadians and Scandinavians, comes news to make us proud of ourselves, reminding us that we have many other things to be thankful to God for.

Our country tops the 2012 list of the world’s best in Business English proficiency.

Not only the best in the world. The Philippines is also the only country—out of 76 countries whose 108,000 workers in global companies were assessed through an online test by the GlobalEnglish Corporation—that scored above 7.0. Our score of 7.11 identifies our proficiency as that of a “BEI” or a Business English Intermediate level. GlobalEnglish says ours is a “BEI level within range of a high proficiency that indicates an ability to take an active role in business discussions and perform relatively complex tasks.”

The other countries in the top five and their scores in parenthesis are Norway (6.54), Estonia (6.45), Serbia (6.38) and Slovenia (6.19). None of them surpassed the 7.0 score to achieve the BEI level.

In the GlobalEnglish Corporation test and assessment a score between 4.0 and 7.0 indicates proficiency in Business English “below an intermediate level, indicating an inability to take an active role in business discussions or perform relatively complex tasks such as presentation development and customer or partner negotiations.”

Is this why the Philippines is supposed to have taken over India as the world’s primary hub for call centers and BPOs?

After the Philippines, Norway, Estonia, Serbia and Slovenia, the next high scorers are Australia, Malaysia, Indian. Lithuania. Singapore and Canada.

The 10 worst scorers are Armenia, the Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire), Taiwan, Honduras, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Brazil.

Full story...

Why knowing many languages is good for Filipinos
By Benjamin Pimentel, Inquirer.net

SAN FRANCISCO, California, May 4, 2012—I grew up learning Tagalog at home. And while I was exposed early to English because of television, it was not until I was around five that I had to use it.

And I still remember the dread I felt when I started going to school and had to communicate with my teachers and other school staff in English.

One incident I’ve never forgotten: I had to go to the school clinic and was worried sick about having to swallow some pill but could only express that concern by muttering incoherently: ‘Do I – ah –inom gamot?’

But with more TV and more exposure to books in school, I eventually grew more comfortable with English, just like many other middle class Filipino kids who grew up in Manila in the 1970s.

In Manila and other major city centers, at least, it’s rare to find a Filipino who speaks only one language. Most people are bilingual. Many are even fortunate to be multilingual.

My father speaks Bicolano, and my mother Ilocano, in addition to their knowledge of English and Tagalog. My wife has Waray for a third language.

I have at different points in my life tried to add a third tongue to my arsenal.

Full story...

After Noynoying…boboing
By Marlen V. Ronquillo, The Manila Times  

MANILA, April 1, 2012—A few years back, this was our standing in the global university rankings. UP and Ateneo had permanent slots. Not very high on the list but decent enough. La Salle and UST popped in and out of the list. Our universities were not exactly Todai [University of Tokyo-Ed], but some were good enough and competitive enough.

On business schools, the AIM was ranked top-tier. There was no year that it was out of the top-ranked MBA schools in the Asian region . It was not INSEAD but there was no question that it was one of Asia’s best. It attracted a lot of bright young men and women from around Asia who wanted to move ahead in their private or public careers.

How are we ranked now? We are not ranked anymore by some of the prestigious entities that rank universities across all continents. The Philippines does not have a single university in the WUR List of the Top 400 universities for the current school year and the list was only released recently. We had none last year in the WUR ranking either.

The AIM is no longer on the Top Ten list of great Asian MBA schools. After years of flying high, the AIM seems to no longer care on where it stands in the regional ranking of top MBA schools. The brand AIM is no longer the sought-after school of ambitious management and finance people in the region.

And what has been the reaction to this recent harvest of shame?

The big-name in the academic community said they did not submit the papers required by the rankers, meaning, they took the option of not getting ranked. That was odd and unexpected behavior, really. In this country, a university that gets three passers in the accounting board exams out of hundreds of examinees, buys newspaper ads to announce the “feat(?).”

Full story...

Filipino creative writing in English
By Elmer A. Ordoñez, The Manila Times

MANILA, March 31, 2012—In 18th century England, literature meant all forms of writing to include philosophy, history, verse, narrative, essay and drama appreciated by literate audiences in a society marked by commerce and growing industrialization. From the emergent middle classes, who were excluded from the court literature of the aristocracy, evolved the novel as their own form of entertainment and edification within their “castles.”

The antecedent of the novel as home reading may well be King James I Bible and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress which were the best sellers of the 17th century—now overtaken by the 18th century novel.

With the advent of the Romantic Period, poets like Coleridge upheld the primacy of the “imagination” in literature, hence, imaginative or creative writing as now taught in the academe in the genres of poetry, fiction, and drama. The essay which covers many forms then and now was not included in the literary canon except for the familiar essay such as Charles Lamb’s and the famous essays of Samuel Johnson and satires of Jonathan Swift. Unless imbued with the elusive quality of “literariness” the discursive essays found in the journals and newspapers belonged to another category – journalism. Now we have all kinds of terms used – mass media, for one, reflecting current technologies developed in print, broadcasting, and cyberspace .

I hazard these pompous remarks as preface to what I call the alienation of the Filipino writers in English, particularly, those who write fiction, poetry, and drama. Who reads them? Only the few, the teachers and students of literature in the universities and colleges, and perhaps some of their alumni who have established themselves in mass media, advertising, business, and politics. Now there is this new kid in the block – “creative non-fiction” which when you look at it closely could mean autobiography/biography/essay.

Creative writers use their talents in winning cash prizes in literary contests, writing copy for advertising or political propaganda, ghost writing for politicians, publishing, or even morphing into business executives or captains of industry…

Full story...

The return of the mother tongue
By Randy David, Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA,  March 15, 2012—Something is about to happen in Philippine education that may have a deep and enduring impact not only on the intellectual development of Filipino children but on their relationship with their communities as well. The Department of Education announced recently that from June this year, when the new school year opens, any of 12 major local languages spoken in different regions of the country will be taught as a subject and used as a medium of instruction from kindergarten to Grade 3. This crucial shift, known as “Mother Tongue-Based Multi-Lingual Education” (MTB-MLE), is part of the K+12 basic education reform program. The new scheme has yielded positive results in 921 schools across the country where it has been piloted.

The DepEd says: “Local and international studies have shown that using the language used at home (mother tongue) inside the classroom during the learners’ early years of schooling produces better and faster learners who can easily adapt to learn a second (Filipino) and third (English) language.” This is an insight that has long been documented by teachers at the University of the Philippines Integrated School. But it has taken a while for it to gain traction in an educational system that remains bonded to the English language.

The 12 mother tongues that will soon be harnessed for classroom use are Tagalog, Kapampangan, Pangasinense, Iloko, Bikol, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Tausug, Maguindanaoan, Maranao, and Chabacano. The mother tongue of a given region will be employed in all learning areas, except in the teaching of Filipino and English subjects. Filipino will be introduced during the first semester of Grade 1 to develop oral fluency, while English will be offered as a subject in the second semester of Grade 1. I am not familiar with the specifics of the program, but I expect that provisions have been made for those schools in which most of the students come from migrant families whose mother tongue is different from that spoken in the region.

Full story...

Creative writing in academia
By Butch Dalisay, The Philippine Star

MANILA, March 19, 2012—Like I noted last week, I was in Chicago recently to give a report on creative writing programs in the Philippines, particularly in UP, before the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), the world’s oldest and largest such organization. The following figure boggles the mind, but more than 10,000 attendees — students, teachers, and professional and aspiring writers — signed up for this 20th annual conference, which tells you something about the enormous interest in creative writing within academia itself. I kept asking myself, where do all these people come from, and why do they all want to be writers? Of course, the same thing could have been asked of us, and I was there to provide some answers. Here’s part of what I said in our panel on “Internationalizing the MFA.”

As an academic discipline, creative writing is fairly new, compared to other branches of instruction in the arts, say painting or music, which have had a long and unquestioned tradition going back centuries. Schools of music and fine arts have proliferated around the world, the best of them attracting top-quality students in the same way that MBA programs have become de rigueur for talented and ambitious business professionals.

For writers, however, graduate programs and degrees have often been seen as a non-essential option, something that very good writers did not need to do, arising from the common impression that writing is largely self-taught, self-sustained, and does not need the supervision and guidance of a mentor. Even within departments of English and languages, where creative writing may have been taught as an elective subject and where CW programs remain subsumed, creative writing has suffered under the suspicion of being a frivolous, easier way to a diploma, in contrast to the presumably more honest labors of traditional research and criticism.

More recent theory and practice, however, have rescued creative writing from its seeming illegitimacy. Increasingly, universities have become aware of the value of artistic creativity, embodying creative writing into their offerings as a discipline on its own — in many cases, from the undergraduate to the doctoral level.

Full story...

Dimsum and the wisdom of the youth
By Ed Maranan, The Philippine Star

MANILA, March 19, 2012—For a Filipino teenager in the last year of high school or in any year of college, representing the country at the annual English-Speaking Union International Public Speaking Competition (IPSC) in London could be a life-changing opportunity.

In 2004, her winning the grand finals of the speechfest in the heartland of the English world, over a field of more than 60 articulate youngsters from as many countries, turned winsome, waif-like but debate-toughened Patricia Evangelista, all of 17, into an international celebrity—and a national idol—with her impressive speech entitled “Blonde and Blue-eyed,” a celebration of love of country with a novel twist. That must have been the most crucial five minutes (the time limit for the speeches) in her young life. The theme of the competition that year was “A Borderless World”.

Headed by Ambassador and Mrs. Edgardo Espiritu, our small Filipino delegation that accompanied Patricia to the grand finals was nearly just as nervous as the contestant, while the board of judges deliberated on what must be one of the toughest decisions to make in the world of competitions. The eight finalists represented different styles of delivery and creative approaches to the competition theme, all radiating confidence on the stage. But only one had to stand out. As the auditorium exploded in cheers and applause at the mention of Pat’s name as first-place winner and obvious audience favorite, the true-blue Filipino lass was tearfully calling her mom on her cell phone.

Our participation in the English-Speaking Union came quite late in our history as—I don’t know when this popular boast came to be born—“the third largest English-speaking country in the world,” so it was anomalous that until 2002, we were not a member of the English-Speaking Union headquartered in London. With a lot of help and spadework from our kababayan Loline Lualhati Reed, chairman for years of the prestige-laden Overseas Women’s Council in the UK and who held individual membership in the ESU, Ambassador Cesar Bautista initiated talks for our ESU membership. In no time at all, we produced a champion speaker.

Full story...

Pleasures of reading
By Ana Marie Pamintuan, The Philippine Star

MANILA, March 21, 2012—Many years ago, Yoly Crisanto bonded with her only son by reading books together. This was until the boy discovered online games, and Ragnarok triumphed over the printed word.

This was frustrating for Yoly, who told us yesterday that “reading books can help in our transformation.”

Yoly, Globe Telecom’s head of corporate communications, was therefore elated when she managed to revive her son’s interest in books in his teenage years. This was after a heart-to-heart talk, she told me, and, OK, perhaps it was forced by circumstances – certain books were required reading for her son in high school. Still, she was pleased to introduce her son to the works of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe.

Anyone reading books should also be good news for the founder of the country’s most successful bookstore chain. Socorro Ramos – “Nanay” to many – told me that last year, National Book Store started feeling the competition posed by e-books.

National still enjoys robust sales, with Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (Scholastic, 2008), a young adult novel about a post-apocalyptic world, selling 75,000 copies within just three weeks of its release in the Philippines. Ramos received a plaque of appreciation from the publisher after the Philippines recorded the highest sales of the novel in Southeast Asia.

Ramos herself has read the novel and is looking forward to reading the next two in the trilogy, Catching Fire (2009) and Mockingjay (2010). The two novels are among a stack of about 10 books, by both Filipino and foreign authors, that Ramos has lined up for her reading.

Full story...

Young Blood: Disconnection notice
By Gabriela Victoria A. Timbancaya, Philippine Daily Inquirer

March 24, 2012—Until very recently, I have lived under a metaphorical rock.

It is with shame that I admit that I have not watched the news, international or otherwise, in months. I hardly read the papers anymore, not even the comics page. In fact, the first time I saw Gloria Arroyo in a neck brace last year, which was actually the first time I heard that she was not quite well, was on my news feed. There was a photo that was edited to show the former President decked out in a Naruto costume with a Konoha headband on her forehead. Before that, I had no inkling of the political drama that was unfolding in the national media. I was unaware of anything of national concern, for that matter.

It is with shame that I admit all these things because it is not as if I do not have access to television or newspapers. I have all this and the Internet at my disposal. I should be able to keep up with what is happening to the world around me, but for some reason I find it so difficult. There must be something wrong when you are oblivious to current events but can log in to Facebook with your eyes closed.

I was not raised to be like this. At home, my parents would regularly read the newspaper delivered to us on a subscription every day. Our meals together were almost always spent with the table facing the TV set, which was always tuned to a news channel. In high school, we had assignments in which we would take a news article and react to it. Where I study now, rallies are commonplace and almost everyone has a firm stand on whatever issue is hot. Having said all this, I cannot justify my ignorance and indifference.

Full story...

Why learn another language when you already speak English?
By Phoebe Dodds, HuffingtonPost.com

LONDON, November 30, 2012—For many, being able to speak the world’s most widely spoken language means that they don’t see any point in learning another. It’s true that people in most countries in the world know how to speak and can understand English, but there are SO many reasons to learn how to speak a foreign language.

First, it’s actually way easier than you would think! Learning a language doesn’t have to be difficult, even if you’re not a natural linguist. The Internet has some great sites that can help, with “user-friendly” games for learning new vocab, and clearly explained grammar rules. YouTube also has some simple videos with step-by-step examples to help you learn a new language.

Second, if you travel to a foreign country and speak to people in their own language, you get RESPECT. Locals always love when tourists make an effort with getting to know their culture, and even something as simple as knowing/asking how to say thank you can make their day. Some simple vocab knowledge is also helpful should you find yourself lost in a foreign city, surrounded by locals who don't speak any English...

This might be nerdy, but whatever: Knowing a bit about another language can make you understand more about your own. Here's something I find super cool: The ancient Greeks gave what we now know as the giraffe the name “camel-leopard,” because to them, giraffes look like a cross between the two.

Full story...

Britishisms in American English? Brilliant!
By DD Guttenplan, Guardian.co.uk

September 28, 2012—The British are coming! The British are coming! For decades, you British have been kvetching (or as you might say, “whingeing”) about the way we Yanks have been spritzing our two cents plain (“sparkling water” to you) American argot into the limpid, lambent loveliness of the Queen’s English.

And though I generally try not to be “chippy” about the widely held view that my countrymen and women are bunch of rubes and yahoos – on display most recently in Downton Abbey, where Shirley MacLaine’s caricature of a rich American finally drove me out of the room with annoyance – whenever I am asked to assent to the proposition that American influence is driving the English language to hell in a handbasket, my response is: get over it!

Well, that’s the polite version. I mean first of all, when did the British need any help from anyone else with being vulgar? Ever heard of Geoffrey Chaucer? And second of all, just as I hope we are properly grateful for the immense linguistic riches bequeathed to us by Shakespeare and the committeemen who wrote the King James Bible (and no, I’m not being ironic. Americans don’t do irony – or so my children tell me), so you ought to thank us for the swell examples of colloquial communication found in Hollywood films like His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby. I mean what’s not to like?

But are you grateful? No way, Jose! There are exceptions, of course. James Joyce had Molly Bloom schlep around Dublin in 1922 – but Joyce was an Irishman, and without the Irish (and the Jews and African-Americans) the American slanguage would still be stuck on first base.

Full story...

English is dead, long live “glocalisation”
By Nathalie Nahai, BBC.co.uk

October 4, 2012—When the internet was first conceived, it was to English-speaking parents.

Its nascent language, HTML, was programmed by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and the first computers to be shipped across the world used the Roman alphabet.

It was a colonialism of sorts, albeit a predominantly benign one—an online reality to which we have since become unusually accustomed.

However, as is often the case, this kind of blanket adoption can lead to complacency. Until now it's been all too easy simply to launch a platform or website according to Western standards and hope for the best.

The fact that Google Translate is used hundreds of millions of times a week, in more than 52 different languages, is a great justification for the hordes of us hoping to reach global audiences by creating one-size-fits-all solutions.

It's become the get-out clause for those of us too lazy or cash-strapped to consider the end users' needs, whether they're accessing our site from the co-working space round the corner or from a start-up business on the other side of the world.

In recent years we’ve witnessed a loosening of this anglicised grip, with Mandarin and Spanish thrashing it out as linguistic heavyweights, fiercely contending for the top spot.

Although the picture is not entirely representative (many online users claim English as their second language), this shift from an English-speaking, Western monopoly hints at a future in which personalised online experiences will become increasingly tailored to cultural sensitivities.

Full story...

Don’t talk garbage! ...or why American words are mangling our English
By Christopher Stevens, DailyMail.co.uk
 
May 30, 2012—The most delicate tool ever invented is the English language. It is endlessly rich, subtle, mellifluous and diverse — a vast mechanism built from 220,000 words, perfectly formed components that work together like jewelled cogs.

To wreck that mechanism deliberately — and to teach our children to do the same — would be worse than obscene. But that is what is happening.

A survey of 74,000 short stories written by British children has revealed that Americanisms are destroying traditional British words.

Like the grey squirrels that were introduced into the UK from the U.S. 130 years ago — and have almost wiped out our indigenous (and much lovelier) red squirrels — American words are infectious, destructive and virulent. And they are taking over.

A recent survey into children’s literacy found that American phrases have made their way into the English language American words are designed to be easy to use. They are simple to say and spell. They combine nouns and verbs, labels and instructions, so that they are convenient to pick up and apply. A country of immigrants, speaking a dissonant babel of Yiddish, Italian, Gaelic, Dutch, Norwegian, German, Polish and Russian, needed a common tongue.

Take sidewalk, for instance: it refers to that part of a road (the side) reserved for pedestrians (who walk). Two simple words are compounded to replace a third, pavement.

Full story...

Native English, alas, is degenerating into a global dialect
By Mary Dejevsky, Independent.co.uk

May 30, 2012—It is easy to believe that, as native English speakers, we have a stupendous advantage over those who have to learn the lingua franca of our age. But there’s a price to be paid for speaking the world’s most widely spoken language from birth, and it is that you are vastly outnumbered by those who speak it as a second (third, fourth or fifth) language. And while they bawl out their Eurovision songs, present their learned papers, or chatter away in their multi-national groups, you – the native speaker – are the odd one out. You can – mostly – understand them, but unless you adopt a measure of English bilingualism, they can find it nigh impossible to understand you.

Now I should start by apologising to all those who find that my efforts to communicate in a foreign tongue grate on their ear – at least I try. But I’m starting to find the ubiquity of a lowest-common denominator English a bit tiresome. A few years ago, one strain of it was branded Globish (English in 1,500 words), and – of course – it’s the possibility of reducing English to such basics that has made it so adept a means of communication. Increasingly, though, I find myself hankering for the sort of English which, say, makes the sequence of events clear by recognising a pluperfect tense, expresses diffidence or conditionality with the subjunctive, and inserts the correct tense after “since”.

Many professional linguists would doubtless say that there is no such thing as correct usage, only custom and practice, and they would add – with a gentle rap on my knuckles – that language changes, as all living things are wont to do. But it would just be so, well, relaxing to be able to include the occasional subordinate clause and use idiom and irony in public discourse from time to time without the risk of being misunderstood.

Full story...

Technology can sometimes be wasted on English language teaching
By Nik Peachey, Guardian Weekly

May 15, 2012—We are now 12 years into the new millennium and technology has become a prime element of almost all English language teaching (ELT) conferences and journals around the world. Yet, when we look for real improvements in student performance and effective use of technology by teachers, I think that the results are pretty disappointing.

I have spent the past 10 years doing technology-focused training work, materials writing and conference presentations and it still saddens me to see how much resistance and cynicism exists among teachers to the introduction of technology. But is it their fault? I don’t think so. Even as an enthusiastic and experienced trainer, I can see that once technology gets into schools, things start to go wrong.

Investment in technology has often been equated with investment in hardware. In many ways this is the easy fix: throw money at the challenges that technology integration poses. For example, education ministries around the world have been willing to invest in expensive interactive whiteboard (IWB) technology without really considering the benefits inside classrooms. Having made the investment, teachers are often left to sort out how to use IWBs in a pedagogically effective way, often with very little training or support. Meanwhile managers can wash their hands of the problem and report back that they have done their part in integrating technology.

The willingness of many schools to invest heavily in this hardware is rarely matched by a similar, and comparably smaller, financial commitment to provide adequate broadband connectivity to classrooms…

Full story...

Huh? US and British English to collide at Olympics
By Stephen Wilson, Sports Illustrated

LONDON, April 6, 2012 (AP)—The lorry driver taking kit to the football pitch was so knackered he pulled into the lay-by near the petrol station for a quick kip.

Huh?

For American readers, that translates as: The truck driver delivering uniforms to the soccer field was so tired he pulled into the rest area near the gas station for a nap.

As George Bernard Shaw once observed, England and America are two countries divided by a common language. That trans-Atlantic linguistic divide will be magnified by Olympic proportions this summer when an estimated 250,000 Americans come to town for the London Games.

Yes, the Internet, television, movies, global travel and business have blurred language differences, and many people in the U.S. and U.K. are familiar with those bizarre figures of speech from both sides of the pond.

Yet important differences remain, prompting this rough guide to just a few of the potential colloquial conundrums that await baffled American visitors to the old country. (A caveat: This is not a definitive, all-inclusive list and doesn't take into account different spelling, accents, Cockney rhyming slang or expletives!)

Full story...

The history of 7 bizarre English words
By David Crystal, HuffingtonPost.com

March 27, 2012—If you can tell the history of the world in 100 objects, as the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor did in 2010, then it ought to be possible to tell the history of a language in a similar number. But, as with objects, it isn’t enough for each word to be interesting in its own right. It has to tell a story. And each of these individual stories should add up to the history of the English language as a whole.

I needed principles on which to base my selection. The obvious one is chronological. The history of English is traditionally divided into periods: Old English, from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in 449 AD until the 11th century; Middle English from then until the 15th century; Early Modern English from then until the 18th century; and Modern English thereafter. It’s important to choose words that show the passage of time in this way, and give us a real insight into social history.

But, at any one time, English is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres, and dialects. In particular, the words we use when we speak aren’t the same as those we use when we write. Far more people speak a nonstandard variety of English than speak standard English, and their story must be told too. Nor must we neglect the commonest everyday words, such as slang, cant, and taboo words. There can’t be any pussy-footing, if you’re a serious linguist. The rude words are just as much a part of our linguistic history.

Professional words, such as those associated with the law, medicine, religion, and academia, provide another historical strand. Of the million+ words in English, three-quarters belong to the various domains of science and technology. And the global spread of English has to be represented. Around a third of the world’s population use English now, and one of the consequences has been the emergence of international dialects, each with its own local vocabulary. The process started when British and American English diverged, but it has continued since with many “new Englishes” in Australasia, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Full story...

Let creativity into the language class
By Chaz Pugliese, Guardian Weekly

March 13, 2012—Creativity is not an optional extra for a language teacher, something off the wall to do on a Friday afternoon perhaps. Rather, creativity should be the teacher's best friend.

For too long English language teachers have worried about finding the best method, the quickest, most efficient way to teach languages. But this quest for a pedagogic holy grail, however noble, is destined to fail, and for many reasons, not least because there are far too many variables flying around.

There’s simply no best method. There can't be any top-down, one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach that does justice to the complexity of learning a language. I would like to suggest that far from being panacea, principled, creative methodology can go a long way towards making the practice of teaching a second language more effective, and certainly much more enjoyable for both learners and teachers.

So what do we mean by “creativity”? It is best defined as a cluster of skills to fashion a product or idea that is original and is culturally valued. In other words, according to researchers, for an idea or product to be considered "creative" it should be new and useful.

But say the word “creativity” and inevitably a few imposing figures come to mind: Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Einstein, to name but three. These extraordinary individuals would certainly encompass the notion of creativity. However, the creativity I am referring to is the so-called c-type creativity, also known as the everyday type, as opposed to the C-type creativity of the geniuses mentioned above. The bad news is that this latter type cannot be learned. The good news is that the everyday type can be.

So why is creativity a necessity in the classroom? First off, because creativity is valued and appreciated by our students…

Full story...

Why is “literally” such a troublesome word?
By Vanessa Barford, BBC News Magazine

March 12, 2012—Nick Clegg says people who pay incredibly low rates of tax are “literally in a different galaxy,” highlighting what is arguably one of the most commonly misused words in the English language. But why is the word so troublesome?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in its strictest sense, literally means in a literal, exact, or actual sense.

Yet nowadays the idea of an album “literally flying off the shelves” and recipes “literally taking no time at all” barely raises an eyebrow in some quarters.

So is using “literally” in this manner wrong—or can one word be used in contradictory ways?

English language specialist Prof Clive Upton, from the University of Leeds, says the most “strait-laced” take on the word is its original sense, which is first recorded in 1429 in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But he says the colloquial use of word—which is used to indicate that some metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense—is well established.

“If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary, literally was first used in this sense in 1769. There are lots of examples since then, for instance Mark Twain used it in the Adventures Tom Sawyer in 1876 when he wrote ‘Tom was literally rolling in wealth’.”

Full story...

Room for Debate: Which language rules to flout. or flaunt?
The New York Times

September 27, 2012—Here’s a chilling thought: What if our English teachers were wrong? Maybe not about everything, but about a few memorable lessons. So many millions of writers have needlessly contorted their prose to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. So many well-intentioned editors have fought to change “a historic” to “an historic.” If it turns out that the guidelines we cling to (“to which we cling”?) are nonsense, maybe the texters have the right idea when they throw out the old rules and start fresh.

But if you aren’t ready to give up — if the “flaunt” in that headline raised your blood pressure — then how can you tell the difference between a sound rule of English and a made-up shibboleth? Where do good rules come from, and how do bad ones catch on?

Room for Debate invited two authors to answer and argue: the journalist Robert Lane Greene and the usage expert Bryan A. Garner. (Their responses, conforming to “The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage,” may not represent their positions on style issues like hyphenation and serial commas.)

DEBATERS

BRYAN A. GARNER
Bryan A. Garner, the founder of LawProse, is the author of “Garner’s Modern American Usage” and the editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary.

ROBERT LANE GREENE
Robert Lane Greene, an international correspondent for The Economist, is the author of “You Are What You Speak.”

Full story...

Are Some Languages “Faster” Than Others?
By Mike Vuolo, Lexicon Valley

WASHINGTON D.C., October 2, 2012—We’ve all known people who are deliberate, even plodding, talkers, taking their time with seemingly every word. And then there are those who spit out their sentences with barely a breath in between. Such variation among individuals is understandable (and at times even cultural), but what about among languages themselves? In other words, is Spanish in general spoken faster than English? Is English faster than Chinese? And how do we measure the speed of speech anyway? Listen as Bob Garfield and I talk about the common perception that foreign languages are spoken more rapidly than one’s own.

BOB: From Washington D.C. this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Vuolo and today: Episode No. 18, titled The Rate of Exchange, wherein we discuss the difficulty of measuring the speed at which we speak. Hey Mike.

MIKE: Hey Bob. How you doin'?

BOB: Splendid, thank you. Yourself?

MIKE: I'm good. I'm good. It's a beautiful day and I'm in a windowless studio, so what could be better?

BOB: Can't think of a thing.

MIKE: I wanna read first a recent review on iTunes from DrewInTN. He wrote, “I've enjoyed this podcast since it started, but only now am I leaving an iTunes review. Does that make me an asshole? Perhaps, but prior to 1970 or so I would have been a phony.” So I want to urge listeners of this podcast to heed Drew's advice. Don't be an asshole. Subscribe to our feed in iTunes and while there leave a rating and a review.

BOB: I think Mike you really need to add, so this doesn't seem like a complete non sequitur and an insulting one, that that's a reference to our last show about Geoff Nunberg's book Ascent of the A-word, which is about the word asshole.

MIKE: Right, and I wanna say one more thing about that show. If you remember, Nunberg pointed out that “asshole” is used far more commonly in judging the behavior of a man than that of a woman. And he suggested that there's an inherent sexism responsible for the discrepancy, that when a woman is acting entitled and obtuse we attribute her behavior to some particularly feminine quality. Right, does that sound familiar?

Full story...

The idea that diversity strengthens America “never been backed up by logic”

WASHINGTON, August 2, 2012—Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Thursday that diversity has never been America’s strong suit, so lawmakers should pass his bill to make English the official U.S. language in the name of unifying the nation.

“One of the great things about America is we’ve been unified by a common language. That common language, of course, is English,” King said during a press conference on his bill. “Our language is getting subdivided by some forces of the federal government. It is time to speak with a common voice.”

King talked to reporters just after the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on his measure, which would require all federal government communications, including voter and ballot materials, to be conducted in English. His proposal would also nullify a Clinton-era requirement that federal agencies provide interpreters for non-English speakers for certain activities.

The bill has no chance of becoming law, but it has come under fire from immigration activists who say it would isolate immigrant populations. Others have charged that groups pushing for the bill are racist.

King pushed back on both charges and said his bill is aimed at bringing the country together. After all, he said, diversity has never been America’s strong point.

“The argument that diversity is our strength has really never been backed up by logic,” King told The Huffington Post. “It’s unity is where our strength is. Our Founding Fathers understood that. Modern-day multiculturalists are defying that.”

Full story...

Woes of modern-day language
By James Granleese, HuffingtonPost.com

August 29, 2012—We use language a lot. It’s something that we’ve had since the Stone Age and will probably have for a good while longer. But we humans didn’t just accept the spoken word when it was given to us by our ancestors, Oh no! We added to it and made it this never-ending thing that will probably continue to grow and evolve for as long as we humans do.

Some people even took this form of communication and changed it completely, resulting in 600 different languages the world over. In my mind, this always happened like a game of “Chinese Whispers” played by schoolchildren the world over. For those of you who didn’t attend primary school education, the rules are simple. One child would whisper a sentence to another, who would then repeat whatever he or she heard to another person and so on until the whole class had heard it. Then the final person would announce what they heard, which would traditionally be nothing close to what the original sentence was. I feel that’s what happened to language. A simple message would travel over thousands of miles and even more ears until the original structure had been lost and there was nothing left but meaningless gibberish. I believe that this is how French was invented.

But what has our generation given to it so far?

Now, we haven’t been around for that long. But even in this short time, we’ve seemed to given our own unique twist to language. Or at least to the English language, anyway. But is our contribution the best thing to happen to the English language? For that we have to look back and see what all other generations have had to offer.

Full story...

US “plain English” activists combat “gobbledygook”
By Fabienne Faur, Agence France Presse 

WASHINGTON—Why not say “change” rather than “effect modifications”, or “publish” rather than “promulgate”, or “pay” instead of “remunerate”? So say plain speaking advocates fighting to end “gobbledygook”.

Winning such a battle “would benefit everyone,” said those gathered in Washington last week for a three-day conference aimed at banishing jargon from laws, application forms, public notices, and even user manuals for television sets.

The event was organized in the US capital by “Clarity”, a worldwide group of lawyers, top managers and heads of government services who argue for the use of plain language in place of legalese.

And it drew people from 20 countries, including Australia, France, Qatar, Estonia, and the Scandinavian nations.

“How can you have a democracy when the citizen does not understand what the government is saying,” said Annetta Cheek, board chair of the Center for Plain Language, at the event.
“It’s becoming a more and more common perception in all sectors, that they have to be more inclusive in their communication.”

The United States in 2010 adopted a law encouraging the simplification of administrative language.

The Swedish government, meanwhile, employs five lawyers to write its laws in simple language, and Portugal has introduced similar measures.

Full story...

Press 1 for English: Will America become a multilingual nation?
By Michael Snyder, RightSideNews.com 

May 27, 2012—The quickest way to divide people is to have them speak different languages.  America has always been a nation of immigrants, but one of the things that has always united us as a nation has been the English language.  In the past, it was always understood that if you wanted to thrive in the “land of opportunity” that you had better learn English and learn it well. 

Unfortunately, times have changed. Today, many radical activist groups are actually referring to the English language as a “tool of oppression” and are demanding that special accommodations be made for those that do not wish to learn the English language.  But what languages are we supposed to accommodate?  Overall, there are 325 different languages spoken at home in the United States today.  So which of those languages should receive special treatment?  How far are we really going to take all of this? 

Someday, instead of your telephone telling you to “press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish,” it may tell you to “press 323 for Italian, 324 for Arabic or 325 for English.” Yes, that is kind of a ridiculous example, but we really should examine where all of this is headed.  Is America destined to become a multilingual nation where we all struggle to understand one another?

This debate can become very heated.  The first thing that both sides should acknowledge is that everyone deserves to be loved and respected no matter where they are from and no matter what the color of their skin is.  If someone speaks English that does not make that person better than someone who speaks Spanish and vice versa.  Every single person on this planet is extremely valuable no matter where they come from and no matter what language they speak.

Full story...

Why the government can’t write in plain English
By Leon Neyfakh, BostonGlobe.com    

April 15, 2012—Over the past several days, Americans have been concluding a painful spring ritual, checking their math, signing their checks, and putting the finishing touches on their tax forms. Some of us will have spent weeks wincing at all the schedules and mysterious numbers, and doing our best to follow along as the instructions commanded us to “enter code type ‘7,’” “check box 32b,” and “see Form 6198,” like some kind of nightmarish choose-your-own-adventure.

Tax forms might be the most confusing documents some Americans have to face all year. But they’re bracingly simple compared to what lies behind them: the baroque federal regulations that describe how US tax code is supposed to work. Like so many of the innumerable “regs” enforced by our federal government — concerning everything from fuel efficiency standards to chicken farming to the number of hours an airline pilot is allowed to spend in the air — the IRS rules are a monument of bureaucratic language and jargon, virtually inaccessible to anyone without a law degree and vast stretches of time.

When we hear about federal regulation these days, it’s typically in the context of a partisan debate over whether there is too much of it or not enough. But to the side of this age-old shouting match is a group of people who believe that the most important question regarding the American regulatory system is not about quantity, but quality.

For them, regulations are the real voice of government, the way it most directly affects the lives of Americans. And so it matters how clearly these rules are written, they argue: When the IRS, the EPA, the FDA, and the CDC speak in incomprehensible gobbledygook, it amounts to a genuine threat to democracy. If it’s impossible for voters to understand what the government expects of them, how can they make informed decisions, let alone make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to do?

These haters of bureaucratic jargon march under the banner of the plain language movement, and since the 1970s, they have been working to convince the government to embrace the virtue of clarity.

Full story...

Language Wars: AP Accepts Modern Usage of “Hopefully”
By 500words’s Blog, Salon.com

April 18, 2012—I’ve long been a language descriptivist. I love the fluidity of the English language, how, like a river, it cuts its path around obstacles, sometimes doubles back on itself, occasionally floods over its banks (in literary terms, this would be the writing of Faulkner), and occasionally recedes down to a trickle (Hemingway or your average 15-year-old texter) and gets its strength from tributaries of other languages, like French and Latin. Living in a city with a large Spanish-as-a-first–language population, I know English to be constantly moving and changing and evolving at the behest of its speakers.

So I was pleased to read today that the modern usage of “hopefully” has been accepted by the AP Stylebook. I was even more delighted that, after telling the American Copy Editors Society (pausing to note that ACES does not close up copy editor, although I do: copyeditor), it released the news on Twitter. I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter.  People who complain that Twitter is nothing but meaningless drivel and inconsequential musings by the morally and intellectually shallow are not following the right Tweeters.  (In addition to following the AP Stylebook (@apstylebook), I also follow Fake AP Stylebook (@FakeAPStylebook)—so I get the facts and the fun.)

“Hopefully,” the AP Stylebook tweet reads, “you will appreciate this style update announced at #aces2012. We now support the modern usage of hopefully: it’s hoped, we hope.”

“AP Stylebook seeks to destroy American way of life by accepting ‘hopefully,’” trumpets a blog headline at MNDaily.com.

The linguistic wars are alive and well among language nerds. Those like me, who are more relaxed about the way the language is changing, vs. those who prefer a solid foundation of rules that they can use to verbally smack children and tiresome dinner partners.  The exhilaration of the brawl reminds me of an old English-major joke:

Full story...

Learn a language for business or pleasure
By Manya Chylinski, Boston.com (Blog)

If you grew up speaking English, chances are you’re not fluent in a second language, especially if you grew up in the United States. To experience more of the world—for business or pleasure—a second language really comes in handy. The best way to learn a language is to start speaking it right away, no matter how little of it you know.

The world around us does not all speak English. There are over 170 languages in the world with more than 3 million first-language speakers. If you like to travel or want to conduct business in the non-English speaking world (even right here in Boston), now is the time to get started.
It isn’t as hard to become fluent as memories of high school French or Spanish homework would have you believe. There are many people (including Benny the Irish Polyglot whose philosophy I am following) who believe that the best way to become fluent is to immerse yourself in and start speaking the language immediately. That’s how I’m learning Polish. (Full disclosure: I’ve been studying Polish about two months and am not yet fluent.)

For my purposes, fluency is the ability to give a presentation or hold a conversation about a topic that interests you in your target language, and understand the other participants when they speak to you or ask questions. This is not fluency designed to help pass an exam or meet other specific requirements, though it could lead to that.

Immersion is the key to learning a language rapidly. Think about it. If you did not know a single word of Chinese, but suddenly found yourself spending several months in a small city in China with no English speakers, you would learn to speak Chinese.

Immersion is how children learn their first language. But adults have an advantage over children: experience in the world, which puts words and their meaning in context. So, shopping for food in that city in China isn’t all that different from shopping for food here.

Full story...

The Stone Forum: Arguing About Language
By Gary Gutting, The New York Times (Blogs)

April 15, 2012—Today I’m going to hopefully beg a question which will incentivize the reader to share their views.  Yes, I’m writing about English grammar and usage.

Debates about linguistic norms typically set traditionalists against revisionists. The two sides are particularly entrenched because each is rooted in a fundamental truth: the traditionalists are right that the rules are the rules (for instance, pronouns do need to agree in number with their referents), and the revisionists are right that language does change over time (nouns can come to be used as verbs).

There will always be a tension between sticking to and violating linguistic rules.
The two fundamental truths are reconcilable because language is both our creation and our master.   We humans invented and continue to reinvent our language to meet various needs, but language can serve these needs only if, at any given time, we conform to most of what has been already devised.  Therefore, although we as an evolving species make language, it is also imposed on each of us individually.  There’s a sense in which we speak language and a sense in which, in Mallarmé’s famous phrase, “language itself speaks.”

As a result, there will always be a tension between sticking to and violating linguistic rules.  We can, however, often fruitfully discuss emerging linguistic innovations if we keep in mind three main goals of language use: effective communication, pleasing expression and moral solidarity.

Language is, first of all, a tool for saying as well as possible what we intend to say.  For this purpose, it makes sense to avail ourselves of all the resources offered by our language at a given time.  Traditionalists are on their strongest ground when they are defending against changes that deprive us of useful linguistic tools… 

Full story...

Life-long love affair with English language begins
By Mary Cook, EMC Lifestyle
 
April 12, 2012—Mother said it was a day to remember. Father said it was a day Mother took leave of her senses, and he threw in “a fool and her money are soon parted” as well. It was a phrase he used often. Like the day Mother spent a whole quarter on a long distance phone call to her friend in New York, when a three cent stamp would have done just as well!

The excitement started long before that special day, however. It all began when Mother decided what our family needed was a big dictionary. Just like the one that sat on the corner of Miss Crosby’s desk with the bible.

Mother had a continuing love affair with the English language, and she thought every new word we could learn would be like as she called it “a jewel in our crown.” I was never able to figure that one out. Even my older sister Audrey wasn’t sure exactly what Mother meant either, although she was reasonably sure every new word would have a lot to do with whatever success we would reach when we were all grown up.

At any rate Mother decided what our family needed was a big black Webster Dictionary. There was an ad in the Philadelphia Enquirer, and it would cost next to nothing, and be shipped free any place in the world. And so it was up to every one of us, she said, to get the money. Father said we weren’t to count on him. What earthly good was a dictionary when your main concern was getting the wheat planted, the cows fed, the milking done, and any other number of farm chores?

His argument was lost on Mother and we five kids. That night there was no sitting around the kitchen table leafing through Eaton's catalogue. The boys whittling would have to wait. The job that night was to see how much money we could all come up with.

Full story...

The pros and cons of cyber-English
By David Gelernter, The Wall Street Journal

March 25, 2012—Social networking, texting, email and digital messages have borrowed the keys to the English language and are joy-riding all over the landscape, smashing body panels and junking up the fancy interior. Many thoughtful people are worried. But it’s good for English to get shaken up occasionally—by people who are using it in new ways, not by academics ordaining from on high.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, email saved the personal letter from extinction by moving it online. Email-writers have leaned heavily for decades on abbreviations, which suit this quick-and-casual medium. Thus the celebrated “lol,” “laughing out loud,” and many others.

When the young members of Generation-i use their phones to send text messages, the small keyboards make typing awkward and abbreviations even more important: “b4n” (bye for now), “cu” (see you). Texters, social-network posters and emailers are all prone to write (as their messages go zipping and hurtling back and forth) in sharp-edged shards and slivers of language.

Abbreviations and fragments are a language’s normal response to stress. Medieval language is dense with abbreviations, because writing material was expensive and books could be published only by copying. Today the stresses are different but the response is familiar.

When you are forced to compress your message into fewer words, each word works harder, carries more meaning on its shoulders and, accordingly, becomes more important and interesting. Digital English is no good for poetry or novels, but on balance it’s refreshing.

Smiley-faces are another story. Painfully cute hieroglyphics (happy-face, sad-face) have littered email for years; they are the empty beer bottles in the literary flower garden…

Full story...

Online jargon doesn’t harm the English language
The Utah Statesman

March 26, 2012—We’ve created a new language through social media. Language used when sending instantaneous messages and posts on Pinterest or Twitter shouldn’t need to read the same way an essay does. However, for those who are adamantly against shortened words and sentences without periods, we respect your need to be grammatically correct at all times.
This idea was brought to our attention by an Idaho professor who visited campus last week and said social media are ruining the English language, but what is the English language? Since its beginning, the English language has been transforming constantly — new words are added and new rules developed to contain the chaos that is English. Too many objects and ideas needed names, and it seems the word-inventors ran out of ideas, which is why we have words like “to” and “too.” But why did we need the word “too” in the first place when the word “also” exists? Beats us.

At what point does a language become ruined? We believe that many elderly people would agree the English language was ruined with the invention of rap music. It’s all relative, really. A problem does exist when a social media user fails to capitalize sentences in employment cover letters due to poor tweeting habits. People can’t be that daft, can they? We prefer to think optimistically about our generation.

The English language is not a part of our culture capable of being ruined — it’s been around for centuries and will be here for centuries to come. Anyone who cares enough to be an educated member of society will be forced into English classes in high school and college. Hopefully, they will listen during these classes and realize that being able to use proper English, and explain one’s ideas and feelings with these skills, is the only road to take if you want anyone to take you seriously.

Full story...

English not just for those whom use it right
By Bart Mills, LimaOhio.com

LIMA, Ohio, March 22, 2012—As a semiprofessional slinger of syllables, it is sometimes assumed that I possess some level of expertise in English language usage. Such assumptions are typically made by persons unfamiliar with this writer. However, one could say said persons are correct in their assumptions.

That last bunch of sentences (or “paragraph”) was a perfect example of the sort of high-falutin’ English using I’m capable of. The bit with the “said persons” and using “one” instead of “you” is right out of the textbooks. And the stuff where I refer to myself as “this writer,” that's just classic.

Lest you (or, “one”) assume I am tossing all this fancy usage stuff around just to show off, assume again. While one might hope that such exemplar usage would serve to improve one’s standing among the occasionally antagonistic retired teacher set — or, as I like to refer to them, Whom-Mongers — it is by no means my primary purpose. My goal is merely to illustrate my capacity for fancy language stuff so as to better make my case against said fancy language.

Or, in English, I know the rules so I can darn well break them if I choose.

If this little tirade sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve written similar tirades before. I figure about once every three or four years, some retired English teacher will ring me up, driven mad by my colloquial abuse of the prepositional noun or the like, and I'll feel the need to publicly defend my own, unique use (or abuse) of style.

Not that all Whom-Mongers are retired teachers. There are also Whom-Monger lawyers, doctors and video store clerks. Generally, Whom-Mongers are a loosely knit group bound by their reverence for the language, their insistence on fitting the word “whom” into polite conversation and, more often then not, unused undergraduate degrees in English Lit.

Full story...

Hey, it’s your language
By John E. McIntyre, The Baltimore Sun 

BALTIMORE, March 21, 2012—Janet Byron Anderson (@janetbyronander) tweeted this morning, “Tell someone you’re a linguist and they say, ‘Oops! Better watch my language’. Please don’t watch it. We value your syllables.” English majors and copy editors, when they are incautious enough to identify themselves in public, get the same half-embarrassed, half-defiant response.

Really, you should talk as you like. That’s your right. Sweet land of liberty.

No effort to establish an English Academy has ever gotten anywhere, and all such efforts amount to nothing more than magnets for cranks. There are various pieces of legislation, enacted and proposed, to make English the official language of some jurisdiction or another, but they do not and cannot specify what kind of English is acceptable, and would be unenforceable if they attempted to.

The peevers who write about language operate under an assumption that written English is superior to spoken English, is more correct than spoken English, and that the dialect called standard written English should be the way people both write and speak. Codswallop.*

Nothing is more democratic than English. It is what its speakers and writers collectively make of it over time, and that includes you.

Now, as with the exercise of any liberty, there are social constraints, as there are, say, with dress. A woman who chooses to wear those low-riding jeans that display buttock cleavage may have some difficulty being treated as a professional in the workplace, as might man with a mullet. In school or on the job or in social circumstances, you will encounter conventions that you will be expected to observe.

And in writing, of course, you will be expected to observe whatever conventions are appropriate for audience, occasion, and publication. 

Full story...

Making fun of English
By Rrishi Raote, Business-Standard.com

NEW DELHI, July 28, 2012—Will you believe me if I say that I watch Nigella Lawson’s TV cookery programmes for the language content rather than the hostess’s admirable chest and habit of licking her fingers? Or that I watch BBC’s Top Gear for its hosts’ English rather than the expensive cars and tire smoke?

No? I didn’t think so. Well, both statements are at least partly true. Because I have also paid attention to the important things, I can tell you the ingredients of most of Nigella’s dishes. They are: butter, flour, cheese, chocolate, sugar, cream, biscuit crumbs, chorizo sausage, sherry and... things like that. I have also paid attention to the cars on Top Gear: for instance, the Bentley with an engine taken from a Second World War Spitfire fighter plane, and any number of Aston Martins, Bugattis, Lamborghinis, Ferraris and other powerful creations.

But I’d venture a guess and say that nobody would have paid either of these shows as much attention if they didn’t also offer some entertainment to the language centres of the human brain. Sure, both shows are good to look at, and neither is apologetic about its appreciation for things fattening or bad for the environment. Along with these lowbrow reasons, however, is the fact that hearing language used in new ways in otherwise familiar settings (kitchens, cars) produces a good feeling, a feeling that here is something that I didn’t know, that I can use. Perhaps you are in the habit of inventing apparently silly new phrases to express your state of mind, like “I feel coffee-esque, let’s go have a cup” — well, thanks to these Englishmen and women on TV you will learn that this can be a legitimate and even respectable use of language. Then you can set off to explore this new aesthetic…

Full story...

Miscommunication will end when English and other languages coalesce
India Times.com

July 27, 2012—Circa 2512 will there still be as many major languages and countless smaller ones or will everyone communicate and converse—not always synonymous activities—in a blended, universal lingua franca?

If the latter is what we are headed for, Indians should not be disheartened by this week’s revelation that over half of 55,000 engineers tested for proficiency in English, currently regarded as the language of science and commerce, are not conversant with common words used in the workplace and 25% did not even have school-level fluency.

Our engineers, after all, should not be the only ones named and shamed for their inarticulation; there is plenty of evidence that scarcely a category or profession in India does not fall short of its presumed fluency in English.

In their defence, however, it could be said that as long as they continue to understand each other in English dialects such as Officialish, Bizlish, Techlish, Legalish, Medlish, Socialish and Journolish, not to mention Hinglish, Benglish, Punjlish, Tamlish and more, it does not really matter what the purists think.

It does take a while for speakers of one dialect to talk to those using others, but they manage to do so eventually. At least they are better off talking in variants of English than if they had to parley in, say, Mandarin.

Full story...

Language exodus reshapes India’s schools
By Maseeh Rahman, Guardian Weekly

NEW DELHI, May 15, 2012—Dinesh Mandal, an illiterate villager from Bihar, came to India's capital city nearly three decades ago with a dream – to make sure that, unlike him, his son Umesh would get a proper education.

To make that possible, Mandal took up work in a home in the heart of Delhi, in an area built by the colonial British and popularly known after its chief planner and architect Edwin Lutyens. Lutyens’s Delhi not only has extensive quarters for household staff attached to its sprawling government bungalows; it also provides schools where the families of the poor working for top politicians and officials can get their children educated.

But Mandal’s dream has remained unfulfilled. His son Umesh failed to graduate from his local school, where he was taught in Hindi, one of India’s official languages. Though he finds work intermittently, he is at present unemployed. As a result, he has moved to a satellite settlement 50km away.

Mandal, though, hasn’t given up on wanting to educate his progeny – only the language has changed. He has kept back his three grandchildren – a boy and two girls – with him in his one-room tenement, and is now convinced that educating them in a school with English as the medium of instruction will emancipate his family.

“If my son Umesh had studied in an English-medium school, our life would’ve been different today,” said Mandal. “Now my grandson is doing that, and I’m doing all I can to ensure my two granddaughters also get admitted to an English-medium school.”

Full story...

Vietnamese would certainly be more at ease learning English from Indians
IndiaTimes.com

April 3, 2012—India’s handling of the language bequeathed by its former colonial master has been remarkably carefree. Far from being in awe of its supposed superiority and international appeal, we Indians have moulded it to our own needs, and often our grammar and pronunciation too. It has served us well.

Indeed, it could be why Vietnam has asked us to help teach them English instead of, say, people from a certain western nation that also has its own distinct version of the language.

While English is given an exalted status reluctantly by our political class no matter how much the average Indian covets fluency in it, the former French colony’s admiration for English is apparent, often amusingly so.

The latest child celebrity in Vietnam is not a singing star or mathematical genius or even the inventor of a circular chessboard for six players like Jaipur’s nine-year-old Hridayeshwar Bhati but Do Nhat Nam, who at 11 is basking in the glory of his bilingual autobiographical bestseller, How Did I Learn English?

Judging from average usage and articulation, very few Indians of similar age or at least of recent vintage would be able to assert a similar degree of absolute proficiency in English, particularly after just three years of instruction in the language like the Vietnamese boy.

Full story...

English learners punching under their weight
By Mike Guest, The Daily Yomiuri

I don’t pretend to know much about judo, but I am certainly aware of the importance of the sport to the Japanese psyche and why it is always front and center for Japanese sports fans at the Olympics. That also explains why I understand the national hand-wringing that went on when Japanese male judoka failed to take home any gold medals for the first time ever and several of the female judoka also performed below expectations.

Reasons for this were analyzed in an Aug. 5 (Page 3) article in The Daily Yomiuri entitled, “Sun sets on Japanese dominance in judo.” Traditional Japanese reliance on an “ippon” or “beautiful throw” for victory and a resultant inability to deal with an allegedly international tactic of grappling in such a way that one’s opponent is penalized, and thereby loses on points, were mentioned. But what stood out for me in the article was the commentators’ references to power: “Japanese athletes overcome by the physical power of opponents” and “...judoka of other countries with stronger muscle power than Japanese.”

Here, it seems to me, lies the root of the problem. Forget about “beautiful” tactics. If the Japanese judoka were assumed to be physically weaker than their foreign opponents, then surely the major cause of the Japanese performance was simply a lack of power. Their opponents must have trained harder or better in order to be stronger. After all, judo is not American football--where we might well expect a group of 150-kilogram U.S. linemen to physically outmatch Japanese opponents from the outset. Judo is categorized by weight. So, why should a 52-kilogram judoka from Cuba, China or the Netherlands automatically be more powerful than a 52-kilogram Japanese fighter? If a sport is weight-categorized, being weaker is due to poorer training or effort. Period.

So what is the relationship between this analysis of judo and English learning? Well, I can’t help but wonder if the same “foreigners have a natural advantage” motif is in effect when it comes to Japanese performance in English. Of course, no one expects a Japanese to have the same idiomatic sense for the language as a native English speaker…

Full story...

Rakuten’s English drive
Editorial, Japan Times

July 8, 2012—E-commerce giant Rakuten kicked its English policy into high gear last week, as English became the official language for the Japan-based company. Founder, chairman and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has promoted, or rather “forced,” English to become the company’s official language.

Though Rakuten is already the largest e-commerce site in Japan and among the world’s top 10 Internet companies, Mr. Mikitani knows that English is an essential component of the company’s future. To expand overseas with acquisitions, joint ventures and multilingual sales, Mr. Mikitani has pushed what the company calls “Englishnization,” a policy designed not only to make the company more smoothly operational in the global marketplace, but also to encourage employees to think within an international framework.

No matter that “Englishnization” is not a real word; the idea is a good one. Whatever changes a company doing business internationally will go through in the future, employees will need to work in more than one language.

Rakuten has invested in English lessons, time off to study and a system of both rewards and demotions to push its English policy. That tough approach to learning will be helpful in the real world of international business, where, to be competitive, employees need to be able to work directly in English — not rely on translators, dictionaries or a few English-speaking specialists.

A proactive English policy is a clearsighted and practical step toward a better workforce. Forcing employees to be competent in English means that employees can communicate comfortably and fulfill all their work requirements in English. Japan needs more employees who can engage in productive activity without hesitation or nervousness because of weak English-communication skills.

Full story...

English fluency and alligator pits
By AMY CHAVEZ, Japan Times

May 5, 2012—When I used to teach English at university, I was sure to leave an impression on my students on their first day of class. I’d tell them that as Japanese speakers, they could only speak with a mere 130 million people. But if they could learn English, they would be able to communicate with 500 million to 1 billion people. This is why you need to learn English, I told them. Heads invariably nodded, and students turned to each other and exclaimed “naruhodo!” (Indeed!). I had caught their attention.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The average person could never communicate with 130 million people, let alone 1 billion. Most people have meaningful interaction with only a few hundred. Perhaps thousands in an entire lifetime. You may reach millions via media such as TV or Twitter, but if one-way communication is all you’re after, you could get a translator to do that for you. Even Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara had people translating their message throughout the world via the media.

But one thing I learned as a teacher was that students were only as good as I expected them to be. If I expected them to do nothing, they would do nothing. Expect them to scale Mount Everest, however, and they would try, even with no specialized climbing skills. And they would get frostbite trying.

So it’s no surprise that I wake up sweating some nights. The nightmare is always the same: an irate student, forcing her twisted frostbitten fingers into a fist, and holding it to my face while screaming, “You promised me a bright future if I learned English! You said learning English would help my employability and that I'd gain an international perspective! You and your haughty institution lured me to your school with glossy brochures showing Japanese students sharing conversations with beautiful blue-eyed foreigners, suggesting that their beauty and worldliness would rub off on me, or that at least I'd get a date with one of them…”

Full story...

Speaking English: What’s to be afraid of?
By Mike Guest, The Daily Yomiuri

March 26, 2012—It’s the mid-1990s. I am relatively new to Japan, sitting next to Yukari on the train. Yukari is a colleague and friend but we fall silent, tired at the end of the work day. Other passengers don’t know that we are acquaintances. The seat on the other side of me remains conspicuously empty, even as the carriage begins to fill up elsewhere.

I decide to pop the question when we alight. “So why doesn’t anyone want to sit next to me?” I ask her. I can understand that passengers might be hesitant to sit next to someone who looks threatening, unstable or slovenly, but I am well-groomed and wearing my teacher clothes. I hardly look menacing, nor am I prone to big, bold, extroverted gestures. I look as mild as any passenger on the train. I’m not sweaty nor do I have gyoza breath.

“They’re probably afraid that you’re going to ask them something in English,” comes Yukari’s response. “And they don’t have confidence in their English.” This really baffles me. Why assume that I will ask them something? If I was staring at a map and looking around inquisitively that assumption might be warranted but I was being as self-absorbed as any local.

Anyway, why assume that if I did ask something, I would do so in English? This was the outskirts of Kansai, not Roppongi or Ginza. And even if I did ask in English, so what? If the local couldn’t help me all that would be needed would be to say, “Sorry, I can’t speak English,” even if rendered in Japanese. Not sitting next to me to avoid improbable scenarios of no real consequence seemed like an overreaction.

Full story...

Why those French vs. English gang fights faded away
By Robert Schryer, Montreal Gazette

MONTREAL, August 2, 2012—Of all the anecdotes my father recounted to me about his upbringing in Hull, one lingers most in my memory. It had to do with the gangs that clustered in parts of his hometown, where neighbourhoods defined allegiances. This was in the ’50s, when groups of kids armed with baseball bats and bicycle chains, or just their knuckles, would confront each other to prove their mettle and assert their turf.

Criminal enterprise wasn’t the impetus for such groupings; language was. Gangs were built on the linguistic rift between cultures, the clash between the French and the English.

Of course, linguistic hostilities weren’t confined to Hull; they spanned the province, festering mostly in Montreal, where English was more prevalent than in other regions, creating more opportunities for friction.

As a francophone teenage Quebecer, my father naturally belonged to the French camp, fists at the ready to stand up to the English when duty called for it. Confrontations ended mostly at stare-downs and tough talk, but occasionally devolved into physical altercations serious enough to warrant medical attention.

The thought of my father trading punches with anglophones struck me as unnervingly ironic considering that he and my English-speaking mother raised me as a bilingual anglophone. It meant that, in his day, he and I might have been enemies, hatefully eyeballing each other for no other reason than that we spoke different languages.

My father said it was different then — that the vast majority of people spoke only their mother tongue. For most, knowing both official languages wasn’t seen — as it is now — as particularly advantageous, or even desirable. Language was a distinguishing birthright, a matter of being true to one’s identity and culture. Learning the other language was akin to sleeping with the enemy.

But things began to change as people’s values evolved. Bilingualism grew, and as it did physical warfare between linguistic factions declined. People learned to speak the other’s language and see things from their perspective. A certain respect, tentative though it might have been, encouraged mingling. Instead of warring gangs, relationships formed — in business, friendship, even love.

Full story...

Why the Japanese Are Bad at Foreign Languages (Part 2)

Aug 28, 2012—Many Japanese people lament their inability to carry out a proper conversation in English despite studying it for 10 years in junior high, high school and university.

Some people blame the education system, some people blame the lack of transparency between Japanese and other languages; but there just seems to be something about Japanese people that makes them terrible with foreign languages.

Continuing from yesterday’s post, we’d like to share the last part of Japanese columnist Ryuuji Haneishi’s discussion of why he believes they are.

2. Japanese people are scared of making mistakes

The Japanese are probably the most reserved and modest people in the world. They hate offending and troubling others and do whatever they can to avoid doing so.

The same goes for when speaking in a foreign language: Japanese people worry that making a mistake may offend the other party and so, unless they are confident they can express themselves perfectly, they refrain from speaking at all. And thus begins a vicious cycle: if you never practice speaking, your spoken English never improves – but if your spoken English never improves, you’re never able to build up enough confidence to speak…

This is exactly why Japanese tourists abroad are seen as “easy targets” by local businesses: you can rip them off and they’ll never complain…

Full story...

There are deeper issues beneath Canada’s language flare-ups
By Celine Cooper, The Montreal Gazette

MONTREAL, July 24, 2012—Language has always played a central role in the organization of Canadian society. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Montreal, a city where historical battles for territory and resources between two competing colonial powers – English and French – continue to dominate our public debate on a daily basis. This is why the ongoing conversation about language and the Société de transport de Montréal is such an interesting one.

As we go about our everyday lives in the city, we do all kinds of mundane things. Ordering a cup of coffee, making a doctor’s appointment, sending an email at work, speaking to a salesperson at a retail store or buying a subway ticket probably don’t seem all that consequential at the moment we do them. But daily life is made up of small moments like these, and knitting them together helps us to understand how language helps construct the social relations that shape how lives are lived in Montreal.

Two recent events have sparked debate in the pages of The Gazette. Vaudreuil-Dorion resident Michael Dunning was alleged to have been mocked as a “maudit anglais” and told by two STM ticket agents at the Atwater station that “we don’t serve English people.” A few weeks earlier, Montreal Impact soccer player Miguel Montano claimed that he had been refused service at an STM ticket counter for not speaking French. He sent out a tweet in Spanish that translated to “They are so racist in Montreal.” (Perhaps not insignificantly, the Impact has lent Montano to a Colombian club until the end of 2012, as The Gazette’s Max Harrold reported last week. I have no idea if there is any link between Montano’s run-in with the STM and the Impact’s decision to send him out of Montreal, but these things are always worth asking questions about.)

Why does it matter so much, and to whom, whether the exchange in which one buys a subway ticket in Montreal is carried out in French or English?

Full story...

Montreal English: Borrowings, but not a dialect
By Peggy Curran, The Gazette

MONTREAL, July 20, 2012—A funny thing happened when Shana Poplack decided to count the number of French words native English-speakers in Montreal and Quebec City used in ordinary conversations about their lives in la belle province.

Even among the 10 per cent of young people most likely to toss French words into the mix, non-standard English accounted for 0.23 per cent of the words in their interviews.

It was, ironically, a story on language published in The Gazette that got Poplack, a sociolinguist at the University of Ottawa, wondering whether Montreal anglophones really did speak “an English like no other.”

In 1999, Alex Norris, a Gazette reporter who would grow up to become a city councillor with Project Montreal, wrote an award-winning series looking at the new Quebec anglo, those children of Bill 101. In one of his pieces, Norris suggested that contact between the city’s majority and minority languages was transforming Montreal English into a new dialect.

Poplack, who had spent time analyzing the impact of English on the French spoken on the Ottawa-Hull region, decided to see whether those claims stood up to scientific scrutiny. “It is much easier to say something based on perceptions than it is to do the hard, scientific legwork to prove or disprove it,” she said. “The only way to do it is by analyzing all the foreign words and all the other words that were used.”

Full story...

Furor over ‘hi’ describes another low point in Quebec’s language wars
By Don Macpherson, Postmedia News

June 4, 2012—The language critic of the Parti Quebecois is “very worried” about the latest sign that Montreal is being overrun by English.

The head of the government’s language watchdog agency, the Office Quebecois de la langue française, sees it as at least a possible “irritant.”

And the minister of culture in the Liberal government is “concerned.”

So what is the problem against which these people have united?

“Hi.”

That’s it. That’s the problem — that informal little English word “Hi,” when it’s used to greet customers in downtown Montreal businesses.

And not even when it’s used instead of “Bonjour.”

No, the people who are in charge of Quebec’s language policy, or might soon be, are concerned even when it’s used in addition to “Bonjour,” as in “Bonjour/hi.”

That’s the greeting that, in Montreal’s unique linguistic etiquette, is intended to let the customer know that he or she can be served in either French or English.

Full story...

Furor over ‘hi’ describes another low point in Quebec’s language wars
By Don Macpherson, Postmedia News

June 4, 2012—The language critic of the Parti Quebecois is “very worried” about the latest sign that Montreal is being overrun by English.

The head of the government’s language watchdog agency, the Office Quebecois de la langue française, sees it as at least a possible “irritant.”

And the minister of culture in the Liberal government is “concerned.”

So what is the problem against which these people have united?

“Hi.”

That’s it. That’s the problem — that informal little English word “Hi,” when it’s used to greet customers in downtown Montreal businesses.

And not even when it’s used instead of “Bonjour.”

No, the people who are in charge of Quebec’s language policy, or might soon be, are concerned even when it’s used in addition to “Bonjour,” as in “Bonjour/hi.”

That’s the greeting that, in Montreal’s unique linguistic etiquette, is intended to let the customer know that he or she can be served in either French or English.

Full story...

Let’s make better use of the English language
By David Bly, Times Colonist
 
MARCH 25, 2012—In his recent exhortation to University of Victoria students, suppose Justin Trudeau had shouted, “For Mohammed’s sake, vote!”

Or, “For Ganesh’s sake—” or “For Buddha’s sake—”

That would likely have created an uproar in multicultural Canada, and rightly so, for we believe in tolerance and respect for all cultures and beliefs, and such remarks would be considered bigoted and insensitive.

Trudeau himself would likely condemn such behaviour.

Yet his remark, “For Christ’s sake, vote,” is offensive to many people for whom Jesus Christ is the centre of their faith. He meant no offence, and that it wasn’t offensive to his audience is quite clear - his remark was greeted with applause and laughter, but some who read about it were offended.

Profanity creates a dilemma for newspapers - do you include cuss words in a quote or do you leave them out? Newspapers in this country generally follow Canadian Press style in that regard, and it suggests a careful approach, advising the printing of potentially offensive words only if they are deemed an essential part of the story. Sometimes, a questionable word is replaced with its first letter and dashes.

In coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in Duncan, one participant’s presentation was reported this way:

“This is my statement to Canada. Saying they didn’t know is a bunch of bull—.”

Full story...

A survey that sets up Quebec anglos to fail the integration test
By Jack Jedwab, The Montreal Gazzette
 
QUEBEC, March 23, 2012—One might have hoped that the considerable rise in knowledge and use of the French language among a generation of Quebec anglophones would have reduced insecurities about the French language.

Not so. In effect, the language laws failed to make anglophones sufficiently sympathetic to the plight of French and to get them to help make it the province’s common public language – or at least that appears to be the verdict of L’Actualité columnist Jean-François Lisée in his cover story for the current edition of the magazine (April 15, 2012), entitled “Ici, on parle English: Quel avenir pour le français a Montréal?”

Lisée implies that to be integrated into Quebec society it is not enough to respect the Charter of the French Language; one also has to promote its objectives.

To do so, he argues, anglophones must acknowledge the purportedly dire situation of the French language on the island of Montreal – to which, by the way, their use of English contributes.

A survey in January of 750 Quebec anglophones by the polling firm CROP for L’Actualité provides support for the notion of anglophones’ lack of concern about the health of French.

The survey found that 54 per cent of anglophones agreed with the statement that “given the power of globalization and of the English language, it is only a question of time before most work in Montreal will be done in English.” But the answer appears to have been built into the question.

Paradoxically, in another survey question, 65 per cent of anglophones disagreed with the statement “I hope that French remains the primary language in Quebec, but I think it’s a losing battle.”

Full story...

English proficiency needed in the globalizing world
By Kim Seong-kon, The Korea Herald

July 10, 2012—In Korea many people tend to mistake English professors for language and grammar instructors. That is why whenever people discover I am an English professor, they begin to ask many questions about what they can do to study and learn English. It never occurs to them that I am a scholar of English literature, not an English teacher. Even if they knew however, they would think, “English literature is written in the English language, so what difference does it make?”

One of the questions people ask me most frequently is, “How can I master English?” or “What’s the shortcut to learning English?” But as an English literature scholar, I am unsure of what to tell them. Though I am inclined to respond, “To be honest, I don’t know,” I do not want to disappoint them, especially after seeing their faces full of expectation. So I always try to conjure up something to satisfy their curiosity.

Most of the time, I tell those people, “There’s no shortcut to mastering English. I can only give you a piece of advice out of my own experience.” Then I provide them with three answers, which I believe are the most effective ways to learn a foreign language: enjoyment, motivation and immersion.

The importance of enjoyment in language acquisition cannot be stressed enough. You should learn English with pleasure, not pain. If you are a movie buff, for example, watching movies and television dramas is an excellent way to learn English. If you like music, listening to pop songs is another effective way to improve your English. If computer games are your thing, you can also learn English by playing games. I learned English by watching movies and listening to pop songs, both of which were my personal favorite pastimes.

Since then, 50 years have passed and now my own daughter speaks fluent Japanese thanks to her indulgence in Japanese games, animations and comics. Although no one forced her to study Japanese, she naturally acquired the foreign language while joyfully playing games, watching animations and reading comic books.

Full story...

Advice to foreign tourists: Don’t expect English-language service
By Olena Goncharova, Kyiv Post

Foreigners coming for the Euro 2012 football championships had better make room in their suitcases for a Ukrainian or Russian language guidebook. They’re going to need it, judging from this Ukrainian’s attempt to get around the city with a friend, both of us pretending to know only English. We visited theaters and cinemas, bookstores and cafes in order to find out who could communicate with us, and ranked the experience. In general, it was a disappointing one.

Although English is widely taught in schools from early childhood, the world’s most widely spoken language still hasn’t sunk in enough for many Ukrainians to be able to have even an elementary conversation.

So if you can read this, thank a teacher.

First we went to Taras Shevchenko National Opera House, a logical stop for a foreign tourist, and bought a ticket. After 10 minutes of queuing, one man tried to cut in front of us. He made the booking clerk nervous. The man’s mood brightened considerably after he heard us speaking English, and he began to smile.

“Hello! Do you speak English? We would like to buy two tickets for Iolanta on April 11,” I asked the clerk.

“On the 11th?” he asked in response.

Then he turned to the woman standing behind him. They started to point at the poster and asked us whether we want a ticket for April 11. We assured him that was the case and asked about the prices in the third row.

Full story...

Lessons in a common language
By Alicia Clegg, Financial Times
 
April 18, 2012—It is hard to imagine Gina Qiao, Lenovo’s talkative head of human resources, at a loss for words. But when her employer announced, following its acquisition of IBM’s personal computer division in 2005, that it was adopting English as the company language in place of Mandarin, she was speechless.

“It was the toughest time of my whole life,” she recalls in rapid accented English, punctuated by the occasional malapropism and mixed-up tense. “I couldn’t communicate. I couldn’t express my ideas. Because I couldn’t say anything, I just felt maybe I am not so smart.”

The feelings of frustration and loss of confidence that threw Ms Qiao off her stride are an increasingly unfortunate feature of a global marketplace that has elected English as the de facto language of international exchange. As managers create teams that straddle national borders, knit together companies that are merging and look for ways to speed up the sharing of knowhow, their attempts to impose a common language on a multilingual workforce can create winners and losers.

During a language transition, bilinguals are often called on to act as intermediaries linking headquarters and local operations, which puts them in a privileged position and can lead to job offers. But for those forced to master a whole new vocabulary and grammar just to hold down the job that they were already doing, a language change can feel like a professional step backwards from which it is hard to imagine ever recovering.

“(Companies) very much underestimate the psychological stress that a language change can cause,” says Rebecca Piekkari, professor of international business at Finland’s Aalto University.
In some cases this may be because the cosmopolitan elites that run them speak several languages already and mistakenly assume that their subordinates do too…

Full story...

Learning English language in Thailand: Hype or necessity?
By Kuldeep Nagi, NationMultimedia.com

April 2, 2012—Lately there has been increasing debate about the status of English language in Thai society. Many arguments are made for and against the relevance of English language and its usefulness. Arguments made by Thai politicians take us back and forth about the role of English language and distracts us away from the realities of this new century. This nationalistic faction believes that imposing English language on Thai people is against their culture, heritage and their unique identity. The same group also argues that Thailand was never colonized so why bother to learn English. For them English is the language of the British colonies. It has no place in Thai society. Some others with a myopic vision believe that Thai peoples hould not be made to feel insecure and inferior because of all the hype about importance of learning English.

It is an historical fact that in the 17th century the British did not go around the world to impose their language; they went places with an intention to do trade. Later, they forcibly occupied many countries in Africa and Asia. And of course they occupied North America and USA as well. In their more than 300 years of history in Africa and Asia they conquered many countries. It was followed by the creation of their own system of education, transport, communication and governance…

Full story...

Why we need to learn more languages
By Amy Roil, Stuff.co.nz

October 2, 2012—If you’re like me and can speak only English, travelling around Europe makes you feel pretty dumb. I reckon almost every person on that continent is fluent in at least two languages. I suppose it's mandatory when so many different countries, each with its own tongue, have to interact so closely with one another. 

But the level of linguistic ability here still astounds me. A shopkeeper in Venice the other day was talking to me in English, while simultaneously conversing in French and Italian with two other customers. I was awestruck. “How many languages do you speak?” I asked. She thought a bit, “Italian, English, Japanese, French, Spanish and German. But I don't speak English well,” she replied. Yeah right.

That’s why I feel stupid. Because it seems a bit rich to waltz into someone else’s country, offer up a couple of pathetic attempts at the local lingo (and, if you’re like me, butcher the pronunciation while you’re at it) and from then on expect everyone to speak to you in your mother tongue. 

I cringed in Barcelona, when a Portuguese waiter moaned to us about the arrogance of the Spanish (I don’t need to keep reiterating that all my convos are in English, do I?) who, according to him, don’t bother to learn Portuguese before they pop over the border, but expect their western neighbours to be fluent Spanish speakers. Ahem. That doesn’t sound like me at all.

Big ups to Ted, who speaks passable Spanish (through osmosis I feel good about that too). But how annoying is it when you think you're smashing it and the locals cut you off with their impeccable English and a “nice try” grin? Burn.

Ted’s much braver than I am at giving new languages a go (if I internally squirm at my pitiful pronunciation, I hate to think how the locals are reacting). And when all else fails, he rolls with either Spanish (it doesn’t matter which country we're in—Italian, Spanish, they’re practically the same, right?) or English with a different accent…

Full story...

China’s heavy investment in English-language media isn’t going too well
By Naomi Rovnick, QZ.com
 
November 29, 2012—Earlier this week, a number of Chinese state-run newspapers mistook satirical website The Onion for a real news outlet and reprinted its spoof story that pint-sized North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was voted the “sexiest man alive for 2012” as fact. The state run People’s Daily, which has now removed (Chinese) its version of the story, ran a 55-photo slideshow of Kim looking, in its opinion, smolderingly sexy.

This is worrying, because at the same time as its state-run media are failing to realize The Onion is satire, China is pouring money into an English-language media project designed to win hearts and minds in the West. The Beijing government is investing $8.9 billion on “external publicity work,” according to The New York Times. This includes an ever growing stable of state-controlled English language newspapers and television channels.

The project is part of a push to counter what Beijing sees as Western news outlets’ China-bashing tendencies. But to gain a share of voice in America or Europe, the Chinese administration’s media needs to build credibility with a Western audience. Its naive follow up on The Onion’s story this week is proof of how difficult that will be.

Unsurprisingly, Beijing’s state-run English-language media have content challenges. Chinese newspapers tend to involve a lot of tub-thumping propaganda, and the English-language offerings run along the same rails. Take “CNC World,” an English television channel launched in 2010…

Full story...

Strong necessity for “affordable” English language education
By Violetta Yau, ChinaDaily.com

HONG KONG, September 29, 2012—Many expatriate and local parents have always believed they could cling to the English Schools Foundation (ESF) for affordable English-language education. The bombshell recently dropped by the city's only-subsidized international school institution, however, brought them back to their senses, when the announcement of a new debenture scheme certainly dashed their illusions.

The bad news is the recent announcement by ESF of a staggering HK$500,000 non-refundable debenture, offering priority admission to the children of donors, at its 10-odd primary and secondary schools. The schools will make available 150 places out of more than 1,000 every year from 2013 onwards, under the new ESF Nomination Rights Scheme. The new program replaces the previous Corporate Surety Scheme that required corporate applicants to pay six months’ school fees in advance.

The foundation has of course a pretty good reason for imposing this blood-sucking scheme - it badly needs cash to upgrade its aging school buildings without further subsidies from the government. The foundation's HK$283-million annual subvention has been frozen for more than a decade, after a damning audit report on its management in 2004, which showed teachers' salaries were the highest of all international schools at that time.

The new scheme certainly has provoked the anger of expatriates as well as local parents who wish to put their children into ESF because of its “affordable” English-language education. The word “affordable” has a significant meaning to those who aspire to English-language education, given the notoriously-high fees that private international schools charge and the acute shortage of international school places.

As a government-funded educational institution, the new debenture scheme has virtually raised ESF to the ranks of profit-oriented private international schools, defeating its purpose of providing affordable English-language education to expatriates' children. There is no doubt that parents would deem this new policy as something skewing towards wealthy families while shunning the poor.

Full story...

One language, many dialects
By Amy Remeikis, BrisbaneTimes.com.au

September 29, 2012—You can whinge.

Or even whine if you prefer.

But English is American is British is Australian in today’s global language village.

Confused?

A recent BBC News Magazine article detailed the slow but steady drip of Britishisms into American English.

Terms like “ginger,” “twee, “toff,” and “spot” have apparently set the American vernacular on fire while at the same time, probably caused at least some of the guardians of the Queen’s tongue to feel a little smug at the reverse influence.

But both Americanisms and Britishisms pervade Australian English, creating an English language fusion which, for all intents and purposes, appears to be the new normal.

Any journalist who has ever typed “dove” instead of dived or “sidewalk” instead of footpath has felt the wrath of the bastions of English as it is spoken in Australia, complete with offers of English lessons, dictionary links and usually a letter filled with such scathing rebukes, the only recourse is to pass it around the newsroom in wonder.

But Roly Sussex, an Emeritus Professor of Applied Language Studies at the University of Queensland, says while Australian English in its purest form has become “very self confident and creative,” it still borrows from its more influential counterparts.

“There are a lot of British people who continue to visit and leave the language behind and even more so, Australians are major tourists to Britain every year and bring things back with them,” Professor Sussex said, naming naff off and cheers as examples.

“The other one (influence) is American and there are thousands of Americanisms around us, some of them are spelling, some are grammar. For example, there is a health and fitness centre on the way to Cleveland bay which is spelt c-e-n-t-e-r and of course, the Australian Labor Party has been L-a-b-o-r ... and that was because they were talking to the Americans at the time and copied the spelling.”

Full story...