Literature and Filipino identity
By Amando Doronila, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Amid the frenzy of blame-seeking over the paralysis of the Aquino administration during the hostage-taking and massacre of Hong Kong tourists last week, a non-political event took place at the University of the Philippines Asian Center on Saturday, when the Union of Writers of the Philippines conferred the Francisco Balagtas awards on five Filipino writers in different languages forming the main body of Filipino literature, including in English. The awards underscored the failure of Filipino to foster national unity. The writers include Bonifacio Ilagan (drama in Filipino), Gremer Chan Reyes (fiction in Cebuano), Go Bon Juan (essay in English ) and Ricarte Agnes (drama/essay/fiction in Iloko).

Having received the award for English essay, I was impressed by the diversity of the contributions to the body of Filipino literature from our various linguistic regional cultures, but I was bothered at the same time by the fact that since President Manuel L. Quezon legislated the establishment of the national language, based on Tagalog, we have not evolved a national language to which all linguistic groups can relate. I raised the issue whether Filipino is the proper vehicle to promote Filipino nationalism and define our national identity. In my response, I delivered a message, an edited extract of which follows:

Reputed as the “Prince of Tagalog Poets,” Francisco Balagtas inspired the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas, of the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL), which recognizes works of Filipino writers in languages other than Tagalog.

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From Medellin to Diliman, through words
By Alfred A. Yuson, The Philippine Star 

Following are excerpts from Jimmy Abad’s Adrian Cristobal Lecture, titled “The Future Is First Shaped By Words,” delivered last Saturday at the UMPIL Congress:

“I am truly deeply honored by the invitation to be the first speaker in the Adrian Cristobal lecture series of UMPIL. I should quickly add, though, that only upon encouragement from National Artist Virgilio Almario and Prof. Vim Nadera, chairman of UMPIL, did I accept with much reservation and not a little embarrassment. Why so? simply because, to my mind, there are more worthy speakers who would do Adrian Cristobal, chair emeritus of UMPIL, much more honor.

“Let me first tell you about my recent experience at the 20th International Poetry Festival of Medellin in Colombia, South America, last July a celebration of the world’s poetry like nothing that I have ever witnessed. To that Festival were invited 100 poets from 58 countries; 93 poets came. I was astounded by the incredible spectacle at the inaugural ceremonies on July 8 in Cerro Nutibara at the Carlos Vieco theater a spectacle repeated there during the closing ceremonies on July 17.

“Imagine an open-air amphitheatre in the woods; imagine about 5,000 people in attendance, sitting on the stone steps that descend toward the stage; for four hours this multitude quietly, intently listen to the poets reading or performing their poems, non-stop, without intermission; and then it rains, a heavy downpour, and it becomes quite chilly, and our stage floods with little runnels of rainwater, but no one leaves, the audience just puts up their umbrellas, or puts on their white plastic raincoats, or takes shelter under the trees, and continues to listen avidly in silence and applaud, sometimes shouting out their approval.

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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…”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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The ascent of English as king of languages
Review by Howard Shapiro, Philly.com

To anyone who travels beyond the United States, it’s not news that, for better or worse, English has become the world’s language.

No longer will people abroad automatically let you try out your French or Spanish or Japanese at the start of an everyday transaction in a restaurant, or shop, where your American-tinged tongue is more likely to draw an immediate English response, no questions asked. Sure, there remain places where this rarely happens. They are not the world's cities. And they are likely to be remote.

Well, good for us, you might say, we can be understood, a primary benefit of being human.

Well, bad for the world, you might say; it is becoming less diverse as English becomes the universal lingua franca.

Language not only defines a national culture, it also gives its speakers the tools to turn thoughts into something concrete - and among the beauties of different languages is that they offer different ways of doing so.

Robert McCrum, associate editor of Britain's Observer, is not out to wow us with old news about the ever-progressing global advance of English. Instead, his book is a thoroughly researched, cleverly told big-picture tale of how our language got to be that way—and just what that way means: ungovernable, he says, taken for granted, ever-changing.

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Verbals: An elusive concept in English language studies
By Kerry Michael Wood, Helium.com

Verbals are an integral part of the English language. We all use them on a daily basis. They are forms of verbs that act like nouns, adjectives or adverbs. The three kinds of verbals are infinitives, participles, and gerunds. Let’s look at them in simple situations.

INFINITIVES are verbals usually involving the word “to.” An infinitive can act as a noun, and adjective, an adverb, or an absolute.

[Infinitive as noun] To swim is an important skill. [To swim is the subject of the sentence.]

[Infinitive as adjective] Hamlet is a difficult play to direct. [To direct is an adjective modifying play.]

[Infinitive as adverb] The contestant smiled to suggest confidence. [To suggest is an adverb modifying smiled.]

[infinitive as an absolute] To tell the truth, she guessed at the answer. [To tell the truth modifies the entire sentence. Because they are part verb, infinitives may take a direct object like truth.]

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Speak good English, no sms-language please
By Esther Ng, TodayOnline,com

Speak Good English Movement’s chairman Goh Eck Kheng was shocked by an email recently. It was not just the sms-language—truncated words and poor spelling - but that it came from a senior manager of a “service-oriented” company.

“There was no salutation and the email came across curt and rude—I don’t think she intended it—but it’s certainly not suitable for business correspondence,” said Mr. Goh.

He would not have minded if the message was sent as an sms from a friend, but the senior manager was corresponding with him for the first time.

The incident prompted Mr. Goh to pen a line—an example of inappropriate phrases—for this year’s campaign publicity materials: “Hi! Saw yr ad in ST class yestdy. I wt to apply 4 the job of secy in your co. Can? My Eng is v gd.”

What concerns Mr. Goh, who is also the publisher of Landmark Books, is that there are “people who think it is appropriate to write this way” and that sms-language has affected spelling and grammar.

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Learning languages still matters

The British mentality surrounding language learning is summarized by the question perpetually asked by pupils: “Why do I have to learn German? They all speak English anyway.” (Wer will heute noch Sprachen lernen?, G2, 25 August).

One only has to watch 15 minutes of German television to realize the influential power that the English language has in Germany. This is repeated around the world, and it is the instrumentality that English embodies in the minds of foreign learners that must be instilled in the minds of native English speakers if they are ever going to want to continue to learn languages. How this can be achieved in a world where English is the lingua franca is a challenge which I believe will only get harder with time, but as a graduate about to embark on a PGCE in German and Spanish, I am going to make it my aim to ensure that German is not seen as the language of war, Hitler and people with mullets, but as a language which can open doors of communication, culture and broader understanding.

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Learning a foreign language: Now you’re talking
By Jeremy Hazlehurst, The Guardian UK

Arsenal, Lyon, Milan and Celtic played at the Emirates Cup football tournament in London this month. After the games, as always, the players milled about in the corridors, mingling with the journalists. It can be a bit of a scrum. Andy Brassell, though, was in his element, interviewing one player in French, another in Spanish and a Brazilian international in Portuguese. “It really helps to speak the languages,” he says. “The players tend to open up a bit more, just talk more freely, and you get better stories.”

Although he speaks three foreign languages, Brassell only learned French and German at school until he was 15. He discovered his talent for languages in his mid-20s when he and some friends were planning a trip to South America and hired a Spanish teacher. “It turned out I picked it up with reasonable speed, then I started to remember my school French,” he says. From there, he went on to take A-level French and Portuguese at night school, and GCSE Spanish.

He is now a well-travelled European football journalist, and when he followed Portugal at the European Championships in 2008 he ended up befriending megastar Cristiano Ronaldo. “He was taking the mickey out of my accent by the end,” chuckles Brassell.

His story shows that languages can really boost your career, but as a nation we are notoriously rubbish at them.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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