Worth a life
By John Nery, Philippine Daily Inquirer

A change of pace, from the political: Frank Kermode, the finest literary critic of our time, passed away last week, at the age of 90. I discovered him—that is to say, for myself—in the 1980s, when I was haunting the airy rooms of the British Council when it was still based in a converted house in New Manila. Finding him was a fruit of that habit that a reader who has no means of income quickly learns to make his own: inhabiting the spaces between bookshelves for hours on end. It was, in other words, pure accident, the result of one book, one author’s name, leading to another.

At least that is how I remember it, of how I came to fall under his spell. It seems a long way from the common rooms of Cambridge or the Isle of Man to the tragic-comic reality of Philippine politics and journalism, but I did learn at least two formative lessons from two decades of reading Kermode. (It should come as no surprise to his devoted readers that he wrote a charming piece on the very notion of “formation,” too.) Bear with me.

Something he wrote on the scholar Frances Yates, in the New Statesman in 1975, struck me deeply when I read it in anthology form in the early 1990s.

“It is not customary to say so, but there is something in common between the lifework of a scholar and that of a creative artist. We should not ordinarily devote to the scholar the peculiar attentions reserved by cultural convention for the oeuvre of a major artist—the passion for occult continuities discoverable under the surface, evidence for abrupt transitions and discrete ‘periods’—but from time to time we are confronted with a body of work in which we intuit precisely this kind of variety and homogeneity…”

Full story...

On the occasion of the centenary of the UP English Department
By Elmer A. Ordonez, The Manila Times

Diliman was sprawling countryside, with clumps of trees and bamboo and stretches of cogon and talahib. It must have once been covered with forest, hence, its name.

The campus just vacated by the US Army had two pre-war concrete buildings, what are now Benitez Hall and Malcolm Hall, and many quonset buildings, including a cavernous theater and a gym. The campus was divided into numbered areas where sawali huts were assigned to faculty members, employees, and their families. There were two swimming pools, a large hall with dance floor, bars and function rooms, called Gregory Terrace. This became the venue for monthly socials sponsored by Dean of Women Ursula Clemente for the purpose of teaching UP coeds the social graces. The girls were bused from the dormitories, while the boys came looking for dance partners.

This was the campus as we, the first batch of freshmen, found it in January 1949. From June to December 1948 we were studying in the rubbled Padre Faura campus where classrooms and laboratories leaked when it rained. My Freshman English class was under a Florencio Makalinao, a former GI from the Philippine regiment of the US Army. Other former-GI s included Professors.

Alfonso Santos, Satur-nino Cabanatan, and Pas-cual Capiz. While most male professors came in shirts or khaki, Macalinao always came to class in coat and tie but did not teach us much. UP High School graduates like myself felt we had an edge in UP ways over other freshmen who mostly came from public high schools—most of them valedic-torians and salutatorians with regional intonations. Those from Ateneo and De La Salle behaved like spoiled brats, with phony accents.

At the time I was a pre-law student but when my short story was published in the 1949-50 Literary Apprentice (edited by William Pomeroy, Silvino Epistola, and Ruben Canoy) I switched to AB English. I became a member of the UP Writers Club for my Apprentice story and being editor-in-chief of the Philippine Collegian.

My grades suffered in my third year because of pressure of Collegian work.

Full story...

How the “Cory Constitution” shaped the Filipino language
By John Iremil E. Teodoro, GMANews.TV

When we were under Spain for more than 300 years, the official language in the Philippines was Spanish. When the Katipuneros defeated the Spanish colonizers, the Americans took over and made English our official language.

Thus, it was no surprise that our leaders included the concept of a “national language" based on an existing indigenous language when they drafted the 1935 Constitution. Then-President Manuel L. Quezon also created the precursor of what is now the Institute of Filipino Language, which recommended Tagalog as the national language. The institute’s reasoning: Tagalog is the most widely spoken among the local languages, there are books and dictionaries in Tagalog, and it is easy to write in Tagalog because it is phonetic or “kung anong bigkas, siyang baybay.”

However, these are also characteristics of other regional languages such as Sebuwano and Hiligaynon, and so the Cebuanos and Ilonggos did not take the decision sitting down and questioned the choice in court. Back then, it seemed the most crucial reason for the institute’s recommendation was that Tagalog is the language of Metro Manila, which is the economic and political center of the country. President Quezon was a Tagalog speaker himself, coming from Tayabas which is now Quezon Province.

In 1949, the Department of Education changed the name of the national language into “Pilipino” but this did nothing to appease the critics of Tagalog, as the change was only in the name and not in the substance of the language. Until today, the Cebuanos are still hostile to the Tagalog-based Filipino, preferring to speak in English and, at one point, even singing the national anthem using the Sebuwano translation.

Full story...

Books dancing between words and design
By Neni Sta. Romana Cruz, Philippine Daily Inquirer

A market day tale, a science book on possible life on Mars, a story of a boy who puts off taking a bath, a biography of a dedicated doctor, a counting book that starts backwards from ten, Saturday as a special father-son day. These six children’s books have been recently selected as the Best Reads for 2010 from 131 titles published in 2008 and 2009.

A major highlight of the National Children’s Book Day festivities last month, a yearly initiative of the Philippine Board on Books for Young People (PBBY), was the first-ever National Children’s Book Awards (NCBA). A dream come true for lovers of children’s literature in the country, this was the offspring of a working relationship between the National Book Development Board (NBDB) and the PBBY. Both felt that the genre would be best served and promoted not by another contest with tiered winners but by a recommended reading list from a panel of respected professionals who themselves are avid readers and know what qualities engage readers to read on.

The judges were Dr. Lina Diaz de Rivera, a former reading professor from the University of the Philippines; Karen Ocampo Flores, visual artist, curator, writer and recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award from the CCP; Ana Maria Rodriguez, a former elementary school teacher at International School Manila; Maria Elena Locsin, an author and teacher of language arts with a master’s degree in education from Harvard University Graduate School of Education; and Tarie Sabido, a blogger of children’s and young adult books now pursuing an MA in English Studies at UP.

Full story...

Two more years in school?
By Rene Espina, The Manila Bulletin

The controversy regarding the addition of another two years to the basic ten-year course which is currently in place – six years in the primary/elementary school and four years in the high school – should be thoroughly studied and debated. I understand from some educators that in fact it is 13 years to include kindergarten.

Let me share my ideas with my readers. In 1941-42, I was in the sixth grade in elementary school when WWII began. After the Pearl Harbor attack on December 8, 1941, our teachers announced the suspension of classes and sent us all home. The closure lasted until sometime in 1945, if memory serves, when I enrolled at the Cebu Provincial High School where I was accepted as a first year student. Around the middle part of the school year, all of us with a minimum grade of 85 percent were accelerated to the second year. However, because of the complaints of parents, the grade was lowered to 78 percent.

Mind you, after the war, we did not have any benches or desks, no blackboards, no books, and other paraphernalia which is standard in today’s classrooms. The only thing we had were notebooks and I do remember bringing with me my chair which was a wooden box of pine wood which had earlier contained evaporated milk cans. Ah! But we had good teachers who were experts in the subjects that they were teaching to about five sections of classes every day…

Full story...

New words added to dictionary supports slang in the English language
By Sammy Brown, News.Gather.com

This year, the Oxford Dictionary of English has announced that it is adding around 2,000 new words to the dictionary, reflecting the changing tide of the English language.

Among the words added this year are many that would not have been well known until recently, such as a “staycation,” which is a play off the word “vacation” except that you stay at home in order to save money rather than going on a trip.

Some other words include “defriend,” meaning to remove someone from a contact list on a social networking site, “bargainous,” meaning costing less than usual or on sale.

Some more words that are being added to the list that you might have heard of are:

Bromance: a close but non-sexual relationship between two men
Buzzkill: a person or thing that has a depressing or dispiriting effect
Cheeseball: lacking taste, style or originality
Chillax: calm down and relax
Frenemy: a person with whom one is friendly despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry

Full story...

The extent of language abuse
By Susan Schwartz, The Gazette

I love to be proven right. Who doesn’t? It’s deliciously satisfying, for one—a grown-up’s way of saying “Told you so!” to whoever was wrong.

But to be validated, to have others support the truth of what you believe, is better. In validation lies the deeper satisfaction of feeling understood, of fellowship.

And validated was how I felt when dozens of readers took the time to e-mail me in response to a recent column, a lament about how people abuse English, either because they don’t know not to or they don’t care that they do. I worry, I wrote, that words are misused so consistently and proper grammar is so often flouted that a time will come when few even know English as it should be spoken or written.

Clearly, I’m not alone: more readers wrote to me than ever had about a single column. They wrote in empathy, and they wrote to share particularly egregious examples of declining standards.

Retired teacher Judy Evans described how a student teacher giving a class to her pupils had complimented them by saying “You did good.”

In giving the young teacher feedback, Evans commented on this. “We had the discussion about adjectives and adverbs but she maintained that the two words were interchangeable—and could prove it,” she wrote. “The sad realization is that she is not alone as an educator with poor language skills.”

Full story...

In India, it pays — literally — to speak English
By Venkatesan Vembu, DNAIndia.com

Language chauvinism is rampant in Indian political circles — be it Hindi, Marathi or Tamil — and some politicians have even called for a ban on the use of English on the ground that it is “elitist”. However, a path-breaking research study by a team of developmental economists has established that English-language proficiency among Indian workers leads to higher hourly wage earnings.

The research conducted by Dr Nishith Prakash, post-doctoral research associate at the Charles H Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University and research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labour in Bonn; Dr Mehtabul Azam at the World Bank; and Dr Aimee Chin at the University of Houston, quantifies for the first time in an Indian context, the returns to English-language skills.

The findings have implications for language policy in a linguistically diverse country like India, says Dr Prakash. In an interview to DNA, he points out that knowing the returns to English would help individuals and policy makers make decisions about how much to invest in English skills. Excerpts:

Our study established that English-language proficiency leads to higher earnings. Men who speak fluent English earn, on average, 34% higher hourly wages than those who speak no English; even workers who speak a little English earn 13% higher hourly wages.

Full story...

Protecting Goa and the Goan identity
The Times of India

Every Goa-loving Goan is disgusted by the way Goa is being “developed.” Every Goan politician who is involved in this “development” has lost the respect of the people. This is because people today have come to know how in the guise of “development” Goa’s forests, hills, fields and ecology are being destroyed by the so-called “developers.”

Hence, there is a hue and cry throughout the length and breadth of Goa to save Goa and to protect it from destruction. The most important question that thus comes to my mind is what is the exact interpretation of “Save Goa”? The thrust of the “Save Goa” agitation, it appears, is to resist the cutting of hills and destruction of greenery, to oppose mega projects in villages because such mega projects, besides adversely affecting the locals due to pressure on infrastructure like roads, water, electricity, etc also changes the demography of Goa. Let us consider for the sake of argument that the “Save Goa” agitation has ended successfully.

All the selfish, greedy and corrupt politicians are defeated in the election and sincere, dedicated, honest and upright Goans are elected to run the state of Goa. Because of this, cutting of hills and destruction of greenery have been stopped totally…

Full story...

Internet dragging Britain away from Europe and towards the Anglosphere
By Daniel Hannan, The Telegraph.co.uk  

The EU is being made redundant by technological change. In the 1950s, a regional trade association arguably made sense. But in a world where capital surges around the globe at the touch of a button, physical proximity becomes irrelevant. When deciding whether to invest in a country, corporations will consider many factors – tax rates, regulation, language, corruptibility of public officials – before they worry about geography.

The Internet makes it as easy for my constituents to do business with a company in New Zealand as with a company in Belgium. Easier, indeed, because the Kiwi company shares our common law, accountancy practices, commercial traditions and language.
This point last was more or less conceded by Martin Kettle in this morning’s Guardian. Kettle regrets the phenomenon, and complains that the Internet has left us “trapped in the Anglosphere”:

The online information age, which should, in theory, have been expected to facilitate greater mental and cultural pluralism and thus, among other things, greater familiarity with European languages and cultures, has, in practice, had the reverse effect. The power of the English language, at once our global gift and our great curse, discourages us from engaging with those outside the all-conquering online Anglosphere.

Full story...

Extract from Simon Heffer’s Strictly English
The Telegraph.co.uk

When he was a boy, Simon Heffer became fascinated by grammar. As he grew up language became an obsession. Here, he cautions against ambiguity and explains how happiness can be achieved through the avoidance of doubt.

For the last couple of years I have sent a round-robin email to my colleagues on the Telegraph every two or three weeks pointing out to them mistakes that we make in our use of the English language. Happily, these are reasonably rare.

The emails have been circulated on the Internet – and are now available on the Telegraph website – and one of them ended up in the inbox of a publisher at Random House about this time last year. He asked me whether I would write a book not just on what constituted correct English, but also why it matters. The former is relatively easy to do, once one has armed oneself with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and some reputable grammar books by way of research materials. The latter, being a matter for debate, is less straightforward.

I suppose my own interest in language started at school. Having studied French, Latin and Greek, I saw clearly how those languages had exported words into our own. When I studied German later on, I could see even more clearly why it was the sister tongue and what an enormous impact it had had on English. I saw that words had specific meanings and that, for the avoidance of doubt, it was best to use them in the correct way. Most of all, I became fascinated by grammar, and especially by the logic that drove it and that was common to all the other languages I knew. I did not intend in those days to earn a living by writing; but I was keen to ensure that my use of English was, as far as possible, correct.

Full story...

A glossary of Iraq-isms
The GlobeandMail.com

The seven-year war left its mark on the English language. Here are just a few examples.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Iraqis never called them that – they were always “Mass Destruction Weapons.” Before the war, journalists followed the UN inspectors around on their search for elusive WMD. It was a cross between a NASCAR race and an Easter-egg hunt. Obviously, none turned up. But the propaganda game was intense and convoluted. Saddam needed the world to think he didn’t have them, while pretending to his people that he did, since in his mind his people were the bigger threat. And the Americans needed their people to think Saddam had them while betting he didn’t, or wouldn't use them if they attacked. Then it turns out the real military threat was from explosive devices made by insurgents out of old Russian artillery shells. No wonder Hollywood has trouble making movies about this war.

A few days after the Americans came into Baghdad, I broke into a house along the Tigris River belonging to the mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret service. In a room full of scientific equipment, I saw “anthrax” written in marker on a board. For a few thrilling hours, I thought I had found those elusive WMD, the MacGuffin of the war. But it was just a lab to test the meals eaten by Saddam's family. Interesting but mostly to The Food Channel.

Shock ‘n Awe

The first big attack was a really crazy show, a kind of Woodstock for TV, designed to impress Americans as much as Iraqis. The Iraqis took it in stride far more than the foreign press corps, who felt very pleased with themselves for being close up…

Full story...

Arabic is raising its voice above the media hubbub
By Faisal al Yafai, The National UAE

Judging by the minimal pronouncements of Kim Jong Hun, the World Cup team coach, and the rare public appearances of Kim Jong-il, officials of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – also known as North Korea – are an enigmatic, taciturn bunch.

But all that is about to change. North Korea has joined celebrities, statesmen and businesses – along with a large swath of the public – on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Nearly five thousand followers of @uriminzok (Our Nation), from Canada to the Philippines, can now follow the pronouncements of the state. Doubtless Korean readers on Twitter are grateful for the chance to (re)read such gems as Kim Jong-il’s musings on the North-South Joint Declaration of 2000.

Of greater interest is uriminzokkiri’s Youtube.com channel which, considering North Korea is one of the most secretive countries on Earth, makes intriguing viewing. From psychedelic children’s cartoons (featuring an animated pig with a school satchel bowing respectfully to a dog in a blue coat and glasses), to a moving concert with performers dressed in military uniforms playing the gayageum, a Korean string instrument, these videos are a window into North Korean society.

Full story...