I recently mentioned in my column in The Manila Times that prospective Filipino call-center agents are trained to acquire a neutral American English accent to communicate more effectively with the North Americans they have to deal with over the phone. In response, a US-based reader, Celso Madarang, wrote me that he couldn’t imagine how a school or a seminar can teach people a particular English accent.

He might find it surprising, I told Celso, that there are now a good number of language institutes in the Philippines that specialize in teaching people how to acquire a desired English accent. In addition, most of the call centers themselves have in-house accent training departments that drill prospective call-center agents on the English accent the call center specifically needs.

In fact, my eldest son Eduardo underwent one such English accent training the other year when, on a lark, he tried applying for a call-center job. He got accepted and worked as a call-center agent for two months. He eventually quit because as a working student, he couldn’t take the “graveyard shift” from 10:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m. anymore, but the accent training certainly gave him a very pleasant American English accent. It served him very well in his job as part-time instructor in computer basics and web programming in a leading Metro Manila computer school (and, if I may add as a postscript, in his current job as a call-center technical support representative).

I also told Celso that lately, I had also been pleasantly surprised to learn that American English accent training is being taught in an even more massive way in India, particularly in Bangalore. India, having been colonized by the British for almost 200 years, has a strong English-language heritage like the Philippines, but most people in India happen to have such a pronounced natural singsong accent when speaking in English. That accent therefore needs to be neutralized for globalization’s sake, and I told Celso that I had come across a detailed account of how this is being done. This was in an early chapter of Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book on globalization, The World is Flat, that I am currently reading.

Friedman recounts that English-language trainers drill the Indians with stupendously complicated English-language phonetic drills. Among them is this mean tongue-twister: “Thirty little turtles in a bottle of bottled water. A bottle of bottled water held thirty little turtles. It didn’t matter that each turtle has to rattle a metal ladle in order to get a little bit of noodles.” Indeed, when I tried enunciating this particular phonetic drill, my tongue got so hopelessly tangled inside my mouth. I suppose, though, that the drills are doing wonders to the Indians, for I understand there are now tens of thousands of them serving as call-center agents for North American target markets.

These thoughts that I shared with Celso drew the following rejoinder from him:

“About my interest in how someone develops accents, I want to tell you about an experience I had when I was in Sydney, Australia, in 1966 when the ship I was with was on rest and recreation after a three-month tour in the Tongkin Gulf war zone in Vietnam. For the two weeks that the ship was in port, it was designated as a visiting ship. This meant that civilians could come on board to mingle with the crew and see how the sailors lived; our living quarters, of course, were understandably off-limits.

“Anyway, a group of Filipinos came on board one day. We got into conversations that alternated between Tagalog and English. In one of those conversations, a female Australian among the ship’s crew told me that I had ‘such a beautiful accent.’ Now, that remark really surprised me because I knew I didn’t have an accent; indeed, it was she and the others who had an accent—an Australian one—that they seemed not to be even aware they had. Isn’t that funny?”(August 09, 2008)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 9, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved

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Many of the languages closely related to English have a well-developed imperfect tense, that tense which shows a past action or condition as incomplete, continuous, or coincident with another action. This is true with Greek, Spanish, Italian, French, and most of the other Romance languages; they all elaborately inflect or morph their verbs for the imperfect. Those who have tried memorizing the many Spanish inflections for its preterito imperfectos, for instance, know how complicated this could get.

In contrast, English does not inflect its verbs for the imperfect, in much the same way that it doesn’t for its future tense. The farthest English has gone to formally capture the essence of the imperfect—the past imperfect in particular—is the past progressive. The English past progressive, of course, either shows an action in progress at a specific time in the past, or one in progress in the past when another action happened or interrupted it.

To better understand how English evokes the imperfect tense, it will be instructive for us to formally distinguish first between the “imperfect” and “perfect” in traditional grammar. Recall that verbs, apart from indicating the time element, also conveys other information about the verb’s action. This information, which is called aspect, shows whether the action is continuous, complete or incomplete, in progress, or habitual. Some languages, like those mentioned earlier, have several of these aspects and reflect them through the inflections of their verbs. In contrast, English has only two aspects: the perfect, which refers to a past action that was completed or “perfected,” as in “She danced with me,” and the imperfect, which refers to a past action that was still in progress or was incomplete, as in “She was dancing with me.”
  
We can see that the imperfect aspect of English verbs is grammatically formed in the same as their past progressive, which as we know simply combines the past tense of the verb “be” with the main verb’s—ing or present participle form. For the verb “dance,” for instance, the imperfect singular aspect is “was dancing” and the imperfect plural aspect is “were dancing.” Also called the continuous participle, this basic form of the English imperfect is meant to describe an action or event that was in progress in the past. To form the past imperfect, however, we must make it clear that the unfolding action or event was unfinished or interrupted, not “perfected,” as in these sentences: “We were touring Paris when the recall order came.” “She ran the business while her husband was gallivanting in Europe.”

Another way of saying this is that in English, a simple past progressive statement like, say, “We were touring Paris” is not enough to establish the past imperfect aspect. It always needs a time frame established by another past action or condition. Thus, the statement “We were touring Paris” is meaningful only in the context of being an answer to a previously asked question like, say, “What were you doing when the recall order came?” That question, in tandem with the past progressive “We were touring Paris,” establishes the statement’s imperfect aspect.

The past progressive is, thankfully for users of English, not the only way English can evoke the past imperfect. To compensate for its inability to inflect verbs for the various shades of this aspect, the language came up with three other ways of capturing the sense of continuous, incomplete, or coincident past actions. They are as follows:

“Used” + the verb’s infinitive form. This form elegantly expresses repeated, regular, or habitual actions or situations in the past: “We used to dance all night every summer.” “Dreams of Vermont winters used to obsess me in my youth.” “The couple used to host lavish parties until the Asian economic crisis crippled their export business.”

“Would” + the verb’s basic form (the verb stem). “We would dance all night every summer.” “Every night the astronomer would wait for the stars to manifest themselves in the sky.” One caveat here: the past imperfect usage of “would” is not the same as its conditional usage, as in “If the weather were clear, we would dance all night at the terrace.”

The verb’s simple past tense + an adverb of frequency. “We were always dancingpartners in our younger days.” “She often sang each time I played the piano.” “We rarely complained whenever she made impossible demands.”

To sum up, the English past imperfect always conveys the idea of someone doing something or something happening when something else happened. Its job is always to emphasize the continuation or interruption of a past action, in contrast to the past perfect, which always makes sure of putting a finis to that past action.

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 5, 2004, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. This essay later appeared as Chapter 53 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

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