A new crop of Palanca winners
By Butch Dalisay, The Philippine Star

For the first time in a long while, I failed to attend the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature ceremonies last Wednesday, for the most annoying of reasons—arthritis. I woke up last Tuesday with a throbbing pain in my right knee, something I’d never had before. A visit to the orthopedist later that day confirmed what I suspected: my age and weight were taking their toll on my bones. They bled out some fluid and injected cortisone into my knee to get me back on my feet, but I still felt too wobbly to go up the Palanca stage.

But never mind my medical travails. What made this year’s Palancas special was the fact that it was the 60th anniversary of this cultural institution, an event anyone who’s ever won a Palanca—and there should be several hundreds by now—would have wanted to be a part of. Some of us had earlier suggested that President Noynoy Aquino be invited as guest speaker to share his thoughts on Philippine art and culture—for which the event would have been the perfect occasion  but with his administration just settling in, the Palancas thought it more prudent but no less an honor to invite one of the true icons of Philippine literature, the fictionist and essayist Gregorio Brillantes.

I had other reasons to want to go: I chaired the board of judges for the short story in English, and the first-prize, first-time winner—a teacher from Cagayan de Oro named Elena Paulma—was a student of mine; her story “Three Kisses” was written in my graduate fiction class. Now, before your eyebrows hit the roof, listen to this (short) story.

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A celebration of evocation
By Alfred A. Yuson, The Philippine Star 

Greeting guests at the foyer of the Manila Pen’s Rigodon Ballroom at the 60th Palanca Awards Night was a special exhibit of photographs collected over six decades.
The round tables were made to fit a dozen instead of the usual 10 guests. The aisles became much narrower as more tables were set up at the Rigodon Ballroom of the Manila Peninsula Hotel, the customary venue for Palanca Awards Night. All with reason. On Sept. 1, 2010, the most prestigious literary contest in the country marked its 60th year.

Guest of honor was the eminent, elegantly silver-haired Greg Brillantes, who delivered a speech that would likely be discussed among literary circles, provocative as its thesis was: basically that there is no need to rule out any language that Filipino writers use as being only that of the “power elite.”

National Artist for Literature Frankie Sionil Jose listened intently, only deigning to directly address the speaker once when a technical glitch kept depriving him of the elite power of the microphone: “Ayaw sayo!”

We’re that kind of joshing family, anyway. Make that a community, as Sylvia Palanca-Quirino stressed in her own remarks.

“We have stood together for 60 years now. We have celebrated this awards night together since that first historic affair held on Sept. 1, 1951, when we initially honored the best among our writers…”

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The good and the bad
By Ramon J. Farolan, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Last month, the nation marked the arrival over a hundred years ago of a group of American educators who were sent in 1901 to establish a public school system in the Philippines. Known as the Thomasites, after the US transport ship USS Thomas, which brought them to the country, 530 teachers—365 men and 165 women—some with their families, signed up for a three-year commitment. Their salary was $125 per month, more than what they could earn in the United States. For some, it meant adventure in a distant and strange land.

The Thomasites contributed to the creation of the third-largest English-speaking nation in the world. They also brought about the idea that education was for all people and not just for the elite.

Some critics argue that the Thomasites, in introducing the English language, did more damage to the growth of a national language as a unifying force for the country. To this day, the debate on the use of English or Filipino as the language of instruction in schools continues, and a by-product of the ongoing discussions has been the development of a third form of communication known as Taglish.

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Are bookstores dead?
By Dennis Posadas, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Are bookstores dead? With the advent of cheap e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle ($139 with wifi) and cheaper versions available from China, and with the news that ebooks have overtaken paperbooks saleswise at Amazon.com, logically it becomes a question worth asking. Plus, looking at the way Apple iTunes and MP3 players laid waste to businesses like Tower Records, technology's role in demolishing entrenched businesses is worth looking at in this case.

But paper books do have their merits. First of all, they do not require electricity or batteries. If you drop them, they are shockproof. Also, the merits of reading metal typefaces on acid free paper, with nice artwork covers, in a comfortable library or bookstore with a cup of coffee at hand, is one of the cheap finer pleasures in life. On the other hand, if you are a medical or a law student and have to lug around several books, ebooks (if you like them) might be a useful alternative if the books you need are available in that format.

In the traditional book business, for a book that sells for around $10 (around P400), roughly 30-40% goes to the bookstore. Bookstores in a way do not really sell books; they sell consignment space in most cases, but in some cases (like Harry Potter) they do purchase the books…

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Japanese students and politeness
By Mike Guest, The Daily Yomiuri

Leave it up to academics to take something that should be simple and make a long, complicated theory out of it. Politeness, for example. Your mother taught you about being polite, right? Something like: Treat others the way you’d like to be treated, show kindness and respect to others, don't make trouble.

But Mom’s advice wasn't enough for linguists Stephen Levinson and Penelope Brown. In 1987, they produced the seminal work on politeness theory, a 364-page tome titled, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage.

It is always dangerous to summarize a lengthy work in just a few sentences, but then again you do read this column for the danger, right? So, here goes: Brown and Levinson are not concerned about prescriptions for being polite but rather a linguistic description as to what constitutes politeness. And not only for English speakers but, as the title implies, for all languages.

Their focus is largely upon face-threatening speech acts. These FTA’s (to use the common abbreviation) form the core of the theory. The basic notion is that under normal circumstances people try to behave (and speak) in a manner that preserves both their own face and the face of others. (No, face is not just an Asian concept.)

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Don’t blame JET for Japan’s poor English
By Debito Arudou, Japan Times

The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, touted as the world’s largest cultural exchange scheme, has brought thousands of non-Japanese into the country to teach at local boards of education. These days, with many government programs being told to justify their existence, a debate is raging over whether JET should be left as is, cut or abolished entirely.

Essentially, the two main camps argue: (a) keep JET, because it gives outback schools more contact with “foreign culture” (moreover, it gives Japan a means of projecting “soft power” abroad); versus (b) cut or abolish JET — it’s wasteful, bringing over generally untrained and sometimes unprofessional kids, and offers no measurable benefit (see Japan’s bottom-feeding TOEFL test scores in Asia).

The debate, however, needs to consider: (1) JET’s misconstrued mandate, and (2) Japan’s psychotic—yes, psychotic—system of language teaching.

First, when critics point to Japan’s bad English, bear in mind that ESL (English as a Second Language) instruction was not JET’s foremost aim.

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Getting readers off to a good start
By David McKie, Guardian.co.uk
The opening sentence of a novel should pique the curiosity. But its closing should be masterly

To Fowler, for the English language, and Roget, for words that elude one, and Brewer, for almost everything else, I now have to add a new name among reference books: Weaver. He’s Bruce L Weaver, compiler of Novel Openers – First Sentences of 11,000 Fictional Works, Topically Arranged with Subject, Keyword, Author and Title Indexing, published in North Carolina and London in 1995. The best way to capture readers with fiction, he says in his preface, is to put them, instantly, somewhere else, and in the same breath pique their curiosity.

That advice might have been beneficial to some of Weaver’s contributors. Perhaps the most famous bad opening sentence—so celebrated that an annual competition is held to write one that is even worse—was bequeathed to us by Bulwer-Lytton in his novel Paul Clifford: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” How could anyone wade through this stuff? Yet he was one of the best-loved writers of Victorian England.

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English lives. Tell the grammar police

Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute says we ought to remind ourselves that language lives, breathes and learns more as it goes along. He advises professionals to write carefully, but not defensively and certainly not drably. Host Scott Simon speaks with Clark about his new book, The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English.

SIMON: Roy, thanks so much for being with us.

Mr. ROY PETER CLARK (Author): Scott, it’s my pleasure to be here.

SIMON: And you say - you open the book by saying you don’t want to give people rules so much as a box of tools.

Mr. CLARK: Well, that’s what my book is trying to do. It’s to help people remember that language not only lives inside of them, but they have the ability to live inside the language, to feel its power, to feel its glamour.

SIMON: A lot of people think—to get to some of the fine points in your book—a lot of people confuse literal and figurative.

Mr. CLARK: And they have for a long time. Many famous writers, including Mark Twain and many others, have used literal to mean figurative or as an intensifier. As in: her brains literally exploded when she heard the professor speak.

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Back to the future for the pope
By Michael McGough, The Los Angeles Times

Pope Benedict XVI will celebrate important parts of the Mass in Latin during his forthcoming visit to Glasgow, Scotland. Like his preference for elaborate vestments, the pope’s partiality to Latin is a signal that he is, as they say in Catholic circles, a “restorationist” when it comes to the pre-Vatican II church.

According to the Herald, a Scottish newspaper, the pope plans to say the Canon of the Mass, or Eucharistic prayer, in Latin “to emphasize the universality of the faith and the continuity of the Church,” as his master of ceremonies put it.

If universality is the point, English, not Latin, would be the way to go. English isn’t just the language of the congregations the pope will be encountering in Britain; it’s the closest thing there is to a universal language. The Latin of its day, you could say.

It’s likely, however, that universality—and comprehension—are less important to the pope than continuity with a particular period in the church’s history.

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How far do we push the language envelope?
By Hau Boon Lai, The Star.my

To describe or to prescribe, that is the question linguists and users have to face when dealing with language.

Have you ever felt like you are the only one left in the world who thinks the phrasal verb “impact on” should not be used? Do you cringe each time you hear someone say: “this action impacts (on) the bottom line negatively” instead of “this action has a negative impact on the bottom line”?

If so, welcome to the club of English language users on the more prescriptive side fighting a losing battle against the more descriptive users who believe that it is the job of linguists to document the language and not to dictate what people say or write in a language.

In other words, if large numbers of people began to use “impact on” as a phrasal verb frequently enough, descriptive linguists will include the meaning of the verb impact as “having a strong effect” in the dictionary, acknowledging that common usage is the rule of thumb.

This is on top of the usual meanings of the word as a verb of “coming into forcible contact with another object”, as in “the shell impacted only metres away from him”, and of “pressing something firmly”, as in “human feet impact and damage the soil less than the hooves of horses and cows do”.

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Residents of Singapore urged to speak better English
By Angela Kaye Mason
 
As the country of Singapore rises to the position of financial services hub as well as a popular tourist destination, the government is once again trying to get the locals to speak more proper and clearer English. While the country shifts its economy from services to manufacturing, the Singaporean government feels that mastering the standard English language is imperative in raising the living standards of the country.

Some citizens are concerned, however, feeling that by pushing standard English, the unique “language” of the country, known as Singlish, could be lost forever. They consider this way of speaking to be a “cultural glue unifying the multiethnic, multi-religious city-state of 5.1 million people,” according to the ‘Associated Press’.

“There are many people who champion ‘Speak Singlish. But I appeal to you to think of our children. Put aside some of the more emotional elements that language always engenders,” Vivian Balakrishnan, who is a government minister, stated in a speech given on Tuesday.

Singlish is actually a combination of the four official languages of the nation, English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, along with vocabulary from a few Chinese dialects.

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Central government still not serious about national language
Vijay Pinjarkar, The Times of India

NAGPUR—Come September and all central government departments and public sector undertakings remember the national language. It’s time to observe “Hindi Fortnight” and “Hindi Week” to be concluded by “Hindi Day” on September 14.

But most of these things are now mere ritual as nobody appears serious about doing actual work in Hindi. The Official Language Rules 1976, state that 90% of the work in government offices should be done in Hindi. A secret survey conducted by an NGO in 2007 had found that work in Hindi was done only by Rajbhasha cells or sections set up to promote Hindi.

Dalsingar Yadav, director of Rajbhasha Vikas Parishad (RVP), a city-based NGO promoting Hindi, says the extent to which Hindi can be used will depend on effectiveness of preparatory measures. “The plan for actual use of Hindi in addition to English needs to be reviewed from time to time,” he says.

He also says the Centre itself is not serious on the issue. A query under the RTI by his organisation exposes this lack of seriousness. RVP had posed 26 queries to the Rajbhasha department of Union ministry of home affairs, New Delhi.

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Linguist says Setswana language is a unifying force

Mmegi staffer EPHRAIM KEORENG sat down with UB don Dr Thapelo Otlogetswe and found out the linguist’s passion for Setswana and new found love for politics.

Mmegi: Where are you from?
Otlogetswe: I am from Ruele Kgotla in Kanye.
Mmegi: Are you married?
Otlogetswe: Yes, with two boys, Lebopo and Popo.
Mmegi: What religion do you subscribe to?
Otlogetswe: I am a Christian and worship at Pentecostal Holiness Church.
Mmegi: How did you become a linguist?
Otlogetswe: I was fascinated by language way back at Seepapitso Secondary School whilst I was a student where we had essay competitions. That is what built an excellent foundation for me for language. I went to the University of Botswana and did English, French and African Language and Linguistics (ALL) and graduated as a single major in English.
Mmegi: So how was your time at UB?
Otlogetswe: It was the place where I read the finest works of English language and literature. Literature exposed me to commentary on social issues like politics, gender, cultural conflicts and a lot more.

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