Unoriginal
By Alex Magno, The Philippine Star 

November 20, 2010—The Department of Tourism (DOT) says it will conduct public consultations regarding its controversial campaign logo. That is quite unnecessary.

The world of social media has spoken. The ad has been trashed. It is not only uninspiring; it is also unoriginal.

Trust the world of social media to uncover what might have been thought to be undiscoverable. The new DOT logo has been found to be “plagiarized” — it uses the same font and basically the same colors as Poland’s tourism campaign logo.

Tourism Secretary Bertie Lim tries to play down the obvious unoriginality by saying the Pilipinas Kay Ganda logo has more colors. Yes, just one more color. Okay, there is a tarsier there to help clutter that logo along with the dictionary entry.

That is such a lame defense. He could have gone on the offensive by proclaiming that the controversial logo, by being as cluttered as a jeepney’s hood, is truly Filipino.

The font, however, is still Poland’s. With all the visual art talent we have around, couldn’t the DOT have found someone to render the logo manually?

Aren’t we the design and advertising powerhouse of the region? We are now told Filipinos designed and executed the “Malaysia Truly Asia” campaign. That is a classic in messaging.

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Gagged by language
By Lakambini A. Sitoy, The Manila Times

November 4, 2010—Learning a new language is a humbling experience, to say the least. It is as if someone had swung a plank first at one shin, then the other, bound your arms behind your back, thrown sand in your eyes, stuffed a rag in your mouth. Blinded, muzzled, crippled, you must progress nonetheless. For someone who has spent a lifetime working with words, indeed never been at a loss for them, it is psychologically disabling. In this position, I found myself as dependent on my language teacher as if I had been a child. This man, only a year older than myself, a smoker and a rabid football fan, someone so like my male friends back in the old life, but a type of Dane to which I didn’t have social access . . . I hung onto his every word. He was a good person: he knew when a student was ready to fold, and no one ever shed tears of humiliation in his class. But he employed a strategy of needling students to get them to talk, setting up opposition to our every word. For we too-readily admitted defeat, clinging to the security of silence as timid kids will hang on to a swimming pool gutter.

Yet, under interrogation, to suddenly find the words to answer back . . . ! This was exhilarating, like striking out on our own into cold green water, the teacher taking step after step back, arms extended, encouraging us to go farther, ready to catch us if we drowned.

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Pakistani fiction hijacked by English language writers
By Nazish Zafar, The Express Tribune

If Urdu literature remains restricted to ancient bookstores and libraries it may die out
Why is it that I can access Francis W. Pritchet’s English translation of Intizar Hussain’s Basti on the net but find nothing about the original Urdu novel? The only Pakistani fiction that is making its way on the internet is either written in English or is translated into English from Urdu. Thus a majority of Urdu fiction stays locked in the black and white pages of books – out of the reach of potential readers.

The world now knows contemporary writers like Nadeem Aslam, Muhammad Hanif, Kamila Shamsi and Daniyal Moeenuddin as representative Pakistani writers because English books can easily be accessed. But veteran names like Amjad Islam Amjad, Iftkhar Arif, Mustansir Hussain Tarrar, and Shehzad Hassan are out of sight as their work stays walled in the national language and a single medium of print.

The issue with the phenomenon is that a minority is being considered representative of Pakistani fiction by the world at large. Consequently emergent is the restricted and myopic view of Pakistani society.

Having come across Granta, a recently released literary publication I was surprised to find that most of the pieces are not what could be considered representative of Pakistani fiction. The works included were either originally written in English or had been lucky enough to get translated into English from Urdu and thus catch the eye of editors of the magazine.

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These Twits should get off the sofa and get a life
By Janet Street Porter, DailyMail.co.uk

November 15, 2010—The English language is wonderfully adaptable: not a week passes without a new bit of slang getting an airing—usually on “Strictly Come Dancing,” where I suspect the judges have each been issued with a nugget of street-speak to work into their pompous pronouncements in a sad bid to appear trendy.

Last Saturday, for example, airhead Alesha and co were falling over themselves to tell contestants they were “on it.” On what? Answers on a postcard, please.

If you’re not “on it,” don’t worry, you could be “sofalising”—which is the latest jargon describing how we communicate.

Sofalising: People are using phones and lap tops to communicate to one another while watching TV instead of having real conversations

Researchers claim nearly a quarter of us sofalise every night — rather than go to a pub, club or village hall to meet people face to face, we plop down on the sofa, turn on the telly and multi-task, spending hours updating our profiles on social n etworking sites, chatting online or Tweeting, while half-watching TV programmes.

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An Irishman’s diary
By Frank McNally, The Irish Times

November 13, 2010—I know it’s well established by now and it seems to be popular among those it describes. But even so. Is there a sillier euphemism anywhere in the English language than “people of colour”?

The phrase made its latest news appearance, with slight variation, in that story about San Francisco banning the McDonald’s “Happy Meal” (a prize euphemism in itself). More particularly, the city has banned free toys with food that does not meet certain nutritional criteria. Defending that move, a spokesman explained: “Rates of obesity in San Francisco are disturbingly high, especially among children of color.” It was bad enough him implying that there are adults in the world – including most Europeans – who have no colour. But I can deal with that. It’s the suggestion that our offspring are equally afflicted I find offensive.

As a father of three, it has been my experience that even Caucasian children can be intensely colourful, sometimes alarmingly so. I still remember the shock – not having attended any prenatal briefings – of seeing my first-born emerge into the world and thinking, “Oh my God, she’s purple!” Then, mercifully, the oxygen took effect and the baby settled into something more like the shade of pink we’d been promised in the catalogue. But a day or two later, she changed again, this time to yellow – the effects of jaundice, which most newborns develop while their livers get up to speed.

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My beloved rebel
By Lim Bee Hoon, TheStar.com.my

November 14, 2010—I doted on my son and that became a bone of contention between me and my daughter, who is three years younger than him. When my son was young, I would read to him every night without fail.

As an English language teacher, I would make sure he digested whatever I had to impart to him. In short, I was a tyrannical mother and educator.

I left my girl with the babysitter and only took her home when she was a toddler, my excuse being that I had no time for her as I had to ferry my boy for music lessons and do home tuition with him daily after he turned three.

The babysitter’s house was just a short distance away and I would drop in occasionally, thus I had no qualms about neglecting my daughter at all. At that point, my son mattered most to me.

Fortunately for me, my daughter turned out to be good in writing and expressing herself through words. Initially, I did not notice her talent.

But when I came across an article she’d written for her school magazine, I posed the same question her class teacher had asked of her: “Did you write it yourself?”

My girl responded: “Of course, I did it myself. Who the hell do you think wrote it?” That shut me up for a couple of days.

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Let Englishes live together in peas
By Fred Khumalo, TimesLive.co.za
 
November 14, 2010—Some Afrikaans speakers are a marvel to listen to when doing their on-air reportage in English ... you might get totally lost

At most watering holes and restaurants, you are warned not to discuss politics or religion. Maybe they should add “or language.” Language has become such an emotive issue that some of my friends were thoroughly pissed off with me for publishing an article by musician Simphiwe Dana who argued for the elevation of Zulu to the status of the country's lingua franca. My friends said by publishing that article, we were promoting Zulu chauvinism.

I shall not respond to those accusations—but will take yet another stab at this sacred cow, albeit from a different angle. My beef is with those who seem to suggest that we should be speaking English as if we were in Britain. They forget that even in Britain there is no universal accent. Over and above the many accents that they have there, they are saddled with a proliferation of regional dialects.

The BBC “standard” English is confined to the broadcast industry. A cockney taxi driver doesn’t understand the modulated intonations from the Beeb. I agree that, for the sake of intelligibility, those who work on radio, television and in other industries in this country where spoken English is crucial should work hard at being understood at the very least.

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African languages are cool, ok?
By Thandeka Mapi, Mail & Guardian online

October 15, 2010—There is a crisis in African languages, particularly at school level, that everyone concerned—language experts, academics and the government—will have to address.   

I say this after having spent time with learners at Grahamstown schools, who spoke to me about the role of African languages in learning, teaching and socialisation.

The learners are at two township government schools (Mrwetyana High and Nombulelo High), an English-medium private school (Kings-wood High) and a dual-medium (English and Afrikaans) public school (Mary Waters High). They said they did not speak English as fluently and confidently as they would like to. It was clear that all felt it was important to speak and understand English better, both to be accepted socially and to have better employment opportunities. In other words, they viewed English as the language.

“If you speak English well, people respect you. But if you speak isi-Xhosa, it does not matter how well you speak it, no one looks at you differently,” said Sanelisiwe Njongo.

She might have been expressing a personal view but this does seem to be how most young black South Africans think and feel about their mother tongues. One gets the impression that most of them just cannot wait to finish high school, where these “boring” (African) languages are stuffed down their throats.

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Aussie English and proper English
By Patrick Cox, TheWorld.org

Not that Australian English isn’t proper…

English is so widely and variously spoken that it barely can be called a single language. That hasn’t stopped grammar stickler Simon Heffer from trying to re-establish order. The man is seriously old school, and he doesn’t like what any of Britain’s new schools are teaching –or failing to teach — about English usage. We take a trip with Heffer to a school in Suffolk, where he makes the case for his version of correct English: the difference, for example, between “I will” and “I shall.” Heffer doesn’t like it when English speakers get in a muddle over foreign terms. The Italian term panini, meaning sandwiches, has essentially become an English word. Most of us either don’t know or don’t worry that panini is plural. Heffer, though, does. If he’s buying just one sandwich, he will insist on asking for a panino.

No one’s going to arrest him for that.

Heffer, of course, is far from alone in trying to control our use of the language, before it descends into hellish and unseemly chaos, no doubt taking us with it. In the eighteenth century, English bishop Robert Lowth tried something far more proactive: he laid out a set of grammar rules for English that were, essentially, borrowed from Latin. To that end, he criticized the likes of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton for their “false syntax”.

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