Recent Posts

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 10
11
Site Announcements / Playlist Update for March 23 - 29, 2024 of the Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 26, 2024, 07:15:00 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MARCH 23 - 29, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essay by Jose Carillo: "The Tree of Life, aka The Tree of Knowledge”




2. Use and Misuse: “What are substantive and attributive clauses?”


                                         
                                     
3. Getting to Know English: "The grammar of antecedents in English”




4. You Asked Me This Question: "Is there such a thing as a complex-complex sentence?”


COMPOUND-COMPLEX SENTENCES, YES, BUT THERE ARE
NO COMPLEX-COMPLEX SENTENCES


5. Getting to Know English: "Some perplexing aspects of noun usage in English”




6. Students’ Sounding Board: "Is the multiple use of the first-person 'I' necessarily a redundancy?"




7. English Grammar Basics Refresher: “A puzzling peculiarity of grammatical objects in English”




8. You Asked Me This Question: “Simple random questions that need a lot of explaining to answer”




9. Language Humor at its Finest: "Gems of the fine but now vanishing art of persiflage”




10. Essay by Jose Carillo Retrospective: “A personal tribute to the late Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez”




11. Time Out From English Grammar: “A chronicle of the discoveries that shaped the Copernican revolution”




12. Advice and Dissent: "After over 500 years, will the true site of the first Holy Mass be affirmed at last?”


The environs of 1521 Butuan and map of Mazaua Island as drawn by Pigafetta in his chronica


13. Readings in Language: "Five ostensibly factual expressions we need to take with a grain of salt”




14. Time Out From English Grammar: "Revisiting our faith this Good Friday” by Maximo Tumbali, Forum Contributor




15. The Forum Lounge Retrospective: “Things my Mother taught me,” shared with us by Ben Sanchez, Forum Contributor





12
Essays by Joe Carillo / The Tree of Life, aka The Tree of Knowledge
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 26, 2024, 04:30:04 PM »
The Tree of Life, aka The Tree of Knowledge
By Jose A. Carillo

I have given it a lot of thought, and now I suspect that the original Tree of Knowledge aka The Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was not a living plant but a powerful computer. The Bible was surprisingly silent about the nature of that tree, so artists and writers through the ages had felt free to variously picture it as an apple tree, a fig tree, a pear tree, a dragon’s blood tree, even a banana tree. I understand that in a 13th century cathedral somewhere in France, there was even a fresco that showed Eve finding a serpent coiled around a giant branching European mushroom, the lightly toxic and hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria, drawn with Provencãl innocence to represent the tree that gave us our much-dreaded mortality. These images of the Tree of Knowledge are as charming as the Romans envisioning their messenger-god Mercury as a runner with winged feet, as frightening as the early Christians sketching the devil as a thoroughly beastly creature with serpent’s snout and bat wings, and as heavenly as the Renaissance artists conjuring archangels with majestic, blindingly white eagle’s wings.
                                             LEAD-GLAZED EARTHENWARE MADE BY THOMAS TOFT, ©THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge: C.206-1928

All of this ancient imagery, however, miserably fails to capture the essence of a device or icon that is supposed to represent the most powerful source of wisdom and instruction the world has ever known. An apple tree, a banana tree, or a vine-like mushroom as the Tree of Knowledge? This seems to me to stretch the credulity of even a nine-year-old grade-schooler much too much! I would therefore rather think of the Tree of Knowledge as a Pentium 4 personal computer with a 56 kbps fax modem, hooked up by a powerful Internet server to the World Wide Web, capable of directly feeding on the 2.5 billion documents accessible to the Internet and of being able to sift through 520 billion more that are publicly accessible in other databases.* I could not think of any other compendium or structure, no matter how massive, that could draw on such a huge database and merit “Tree of Knowledge” as a sobriquet, much less make this database accessible to even the small populace of the Garden of Eden close to the time of Creation.

Of course I realize that a myriad conceptual objections can be raised against this seemingly whimsical intellectual construct. Chief of these is the question of how the Pentium 4 and the Internet could have gotten themselves into the Garden of Eden in the first place. Could it be that they had managed to quietly transport themselves back in time and install themselves into the Tree of Knowledge, or else disguise themselves as the tree itself? Those fixated with time’s immutability would of course deem this too farfetched, as improbable as the tales of extraterrestrial visitations peddled by the Danish writer Erik von Daeniken. But it is at least not as preposterous a concept as a fruit tree being the source of all human understanding and wisdom. A tree as a source of life, yes, like our coconut with its proverbial one thousand and one uses, from food to shelter to medicine to fuel and to lumber; but just any tree as source of all knowledge, I really wonder.

Imagined digital art rendition of The Tree of Knowledge
 

And what about the paradox that would result if we believed that the Tree of Knowledge drew its power from a state-of-the-art Pentium? Would that belief still hold if we consider the fact that the computer and the Web are actually the culmination of the series of small and big inventions that sprung from Adam and Eve having eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge itself? Remember that the computer became possible only because somewhere early in time, man discovered and learned how to harness fire, then found a way centuries later to use it to melt the tiny particles of glass in sand into wafers of silicon, then developed a method for converting these wafers into transistor chips and into extremely powerful motherboards and processors that are the heart of the modern computer. Remember, too, that the Internet and the Web are of a much more recent vintage. It was only in 1973 that the Internet came into being, the happy result of American research into technologies to interlink computer networks of various kinds. Another 21 years into the future, in 1994, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to unify and integrate the Internet’s global information and communication structure. Since then it has expanded into a global network of networks, enabling computers of all kinds—including yours and mine—to directly communicate and share services throughout much of our planet.

What is perhaps little appreciated in this dizzying train of inventions is that the modern computer and the Web have been essentially a continuing but silent Hindu-Arabic-European-American co-production, and that at the root of it was the ancient Indo-European language and the Arabic number system. We know, of course, that these twin foundations of our civilization moved into Europe and jumped across the English Channel into England, polishing themselves into the English language and into the Arabic number system that we know so well today. It really is no wonder that Boolean algebra, a mathematical system of representing logical propositions that became the foundation for the modern computer, was developed by the English language expert and mathematician George Boole in the very same soil that produced the wonder of English literature that was William Shakespeare. The Chinese may have invented paper, the abacus, and gunpowder, and the Romans may have built their empire that extended all the way to Africa and to the banks of the Mesopotamian River in what is now modern Iraq, but I simply cannot conceive of the modern computer built from Chinese script or from the Roman numeral system, with which no stable building taller than the Roman Coliseum could be built because the system simply could not multiply and divide numbers properly.

That the Tree of Knowledge could not have been a fruit tree but a computer linked to the Web may remain debatable, and I will not quibble with that fact. But to me, one thing is clear and certain: the computer and the Worldwide Web have made the Tree of Knowledge much more accessible and closer to us than ever before, and it would be a tragedy if not outright foolish for anyone not to learn to freely partake of its fruits. (2002)

From English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright 2008 by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
-------
*Since this essay was written, of course, the Pentium 4 processor has since been supplanted in personal computers by much more advanced and powerful processors like the Core-Duo, and Google has grown even more explosively from 2,469,940,685 web pages in 2002 to over 30,000,000,000 today. It can thus be said that the computing machines and the online search engine capability that I had described glowingly in this 2002 essay are now obsolete. (2009)

This essay, which first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2002 and subsequently formed part of my book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, is part of a collection of my personal essays from mid-2002 to date.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
The Tree of Life, aka The Tree of Knowledge

(Next: The importance of grammar-perfect English)     April 4, 2024
13
Site Announcements / Playlist Update for March 16 - 22, 2024 of the Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 21, 2024, 01:35:15 AM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MARCH 16 - 22, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Getting To Know English: “Keeping English prose trim and slim”


                                         
                                     
2. Use and Misuse: "Avoiding awful misuses of the English possessive”




3. You Asked Me This Question: "The strange grammar of 'need' as modal auxiliary”




4. Getting to Know English Better: “Playing it by ear when to use a gerund or infinitive"




5. Students’ Sounding Board: “Differentiating the use of 'than' and 'than that of'"




6. Getting to Know English Better: “When even the passive voice won’t suffice”




7. A Holy Week Retrospective: “A matter of faith” by Jose A.Carillo




8. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: "The facts make it physically impossible for Limasawa to be Mazzaua"


The 1521 map Pigafetta drew of Mazaua and his own sketch of the island as site of the first Holy Mass


9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “40 choice paraprosdokians to make sense of our times”




10. Readings in Language: "Self-taught scholar-researcher uncovers 'inspiration' for 11 Shakespeare plays”




11. Time Out From English Grammar: “A novelist in ill health races with time to finish a masterpiece”




12. Time Out From English Grammar: “What do you do if Medusa gazes at you or Dracula bites your neck?”




13. The Forum Lounge: “A wheelchair dancer lives up her dream” by Tonybau, Forum Contributor




14. The Forum Lounge: “Hidden miracles of the natural world,” a Louie Schwartzberg TED video presentation




15. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Growing up with my father" by Angel B. Casillan, Forum Contributor





14
Getting to Know English / Keeping English prose trim and slim
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 18, 2024, 02:50:39 PM »
Very much like the human body, English prose has to be kept trim and slim to command attention, to be credible, and to merit continuing interest. Compositions become unsightly and a pain to read when they use the passive voice much too often, when they take recourse to expletives at every turn, and when they rely too much on adjective clauses to qualify or relate ideas. The result is unhealthy flab that must be ruthlessly excised through self-editing and—if need be—total rewriting.


We already know that using the passive voice indiscriminately makes English sentences such sluggish creatures. That’s what happens when the subject of the sentence receives the action of the verb rather than does it: “The key was inserted into the doorknob by the woman, and it was turned by her.” Two actions (“was inserted” and “was turned”) were done to the subject (“the key”) by someone (“the woman”). Things happen as if in slow motion right before our eyes.

Now see how the active voice gives the sentence the spark of real action: “The woman inserted the key into the doorknob and turned it gently.” This time, “the woman” becomes the rightful doer of the action, the action unfolds as it happens in real life, and “the key” is put in its proper place—not as something that can act by itself in a void, as in telekinesis, but as something one physically does something to. Fewer words are used in the process (16 versus 19) and the preposition “by” makes a neat disappearing act.

The active-voice mindset likewise forces us to use active verbs instead of passive ones that need the verb “be” for grammatical support. Look at this passive-voice description: “The car was overturned by the strong wind.” The conventional way of reconstructing this weak sentence into an active one is, of course, to use “the strong wind” as the doer of the action: “The strong wind overturned the car.”

This reconstruction is good enough as it goes. But see how much more direct and more vigorous the prose becomes by using active verbs, even with “the car” still as the subject: “The car flipped [somersaulted, twirled, turned turtle, rolled over] in the strong wind.” The active voice—with very few exceptions—is always our best bet for keeping descriptions vivid and narratives moving briskly.

Excessive use of expletive constructions likewise slows down the rhythm of prose. Recall that expletives are the words that we use as grammatical crutches to form thoughts quickly and with little effort: “It is,” “There is,” “There are,” “There were.” The problem with them is that they perform no grammatical function other than to get our sentences started. See how they just lengthen and weaken sentences: “There is an abundance of fruits in summer.” (The expletive excised: “Fruits abound in summer.”) “There were no takers of the special bargain offer.” (“The special bargain offer had no takers.”) “It is my opinion that the movie is overrated.” (“The movie is overrated.”) Notice how eliminating the expletive allows the verb to spring back to life and do real, honest-to-goodness work.

The overuse of adjective clauses is another cause of wordiness—aside, of course, from hampering the smooth, natural rhythm of prose. Adjective clauses, you will remember, are those strings of words that we add to sentences to modify a noun or pronoun; they are introduced by the relative pronouns “who,” “whom,” “whose,” “that,” and “which.” These relative pronouns serve sentences well by qualifying ideas and establishing relationships among them, but they are often expendable: sentences often flow and read better without them.

One way to get rid of them is to change the relative clause into a phrase: “The man, who was identified as the suspect, was freed for lack of evidence.” (“The man identified as the suspect was freed for lack of evidence.”) “The woman, whom we thought was most suitable for the job, backed out at the last moment.” (“The woman we thought most suitable for the job backed out at the last moment.”) “My architect is the one whose office building designs won international awards.” (“My architect won international awards for his office building designs.”) “We are looking for office space that has an independent air-conditioning unit.” (“We are looking for office space with an independent air-conditioning unit.”)

Sometimes we can change a non-restrictive clause into a neat appositive phrase: “Many baby-boomer parents expect their children to wake up early in the morning, which is a habit they themselves learned from their own parents in the 1940s.” (“Many baby-boomer parents expect their children to wake up early in the morning, a habit they themselves learned from their own parents in the 1940s.”)

In some cases, a single word or two can nicely take the place of an entire phrase in a sentence: “One of the members of the delegation that represented the Philippines missed the flight.” (A Philippine delegate missed the flight.”)
------------------------
This essay first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times and subsequently formed Chapter 138  of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

Check out “A masterful guide to the craft of modern nonfiction writing,” the Forum’s earlier feature of Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd’s book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, in the Forum’s Readings in Languages section. https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=5836.0

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
Keeping English prose trim and slim

(Next: The Tree of Knowledge)        March 28, 2024                                                                                              

Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
15
Advice and Dissent / "The facts make it physically impossible for Limasawa to be Mazzaua"
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 15, 2024, 07:10:56 PM »
The Forum is publishing today a photographic reproduction of a letter by Philippine historian Vicente C. de Jesus way back on April 7, 1998 thanking Dr. Samuel K.Tan, then the Chairman and Executive Director of the Philippine National Historical Institute, for furnishing him a copy of the Gancayco Panel Resolution that officially accepted with finality the island of Limasawa in Leyte as the site of the very first Holy Mass in the Philippine Archipelago officiated on March 31,1521 or over 500 years ago.

De Jesus rued the Gancayco Panel's decision: "We offered new proofs, documents and arguments crucial to Mazzaua. Our study cover[ed] historiography, linguistics, hydrography, calligraphy, paleography, celestial navigation, and others...[T]he body accepted without question the Gines de Mafra eyewitness account and other documents...that Magelan's fleet anchored west of the isle, that Mazzaua is below Butuan separated from it by 15 leguas, that the isle's size is 3 to 4 leguas. All these make it physically impossible for Limasawa to be Mazzaua...

"Limasawa was an honest error by well-intentioned historians victimized by a conspiracy of circumstances. In excluding Gines de Mafra particularly, I am afraid a lie is being foisted on the Nation..."
------------------
*legua (plural leguas) - a traditional Spanish unit of distance equivalent to about 4.2 km

Below is the de Jesus letter in full:


This is apropos to "Historian's commentary on Gines de Mafra's account of the Magellan expedition" as posted in the Forum by Dr. Jorge Mojarro Romero, Ph.D, on March 9, 2021.

Mafra’s account of the Magellan expedition
By Dr. Jorge Mojarro Romero, Ph.D

This commentary on the eyewitness accounts of Gines de Mafra and Antonio Pigafetta--they were a crewmember and the official chronicler, respectively, of the Magellanic Fleet and its landmark sojourn in the Philippine archipelago 500 years ago--came out in the Opinion section of the March 9, 2021 issue of The Manila Times. The Spanish historian Dr. Jorge Mojarro expressed the hope that this brief reminder about Gines de Mafra's eyewitness account of the Magellanic expedition will highlight the necessity to read the original sources critically and to compare the different versions of events to arrive at a more accurate and truthful reconstruction of the past. https://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=8340.0
16
Site Announcements / Playlist Update for March 9 - 15, 2024 of the Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 13, 2024, 12:35:44 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MARCH 9 - 15, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Getting To Know English: “The age of imprecision”


                                         
                                     
2. Getting To Know English Better: “The great importance of parallelism in good writing” - Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4




3. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: "Good communicators hone the use of indirect questions to a fine art”




4. You Asked Me This Question: “How do ‘I hope’ and ‘hopefully’ differ and is the latter acceptable usage?”




5. Getting to Know English Better: “Can superlative attributes apply to any number of comparables?"




6. Just In Case You Missed The Forum's 2016 Year-End Folio: “Six personal essays and six general-interest readings”




7. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: "How genius is within everyone’s reach—but even wisdom, too?”




8. Just a Fleeting Look at History: “Truer, flesh-and-blood portraits of Borgia, Machiavelli, and Da Vinci”




9. Language Humor At Its Finest: “What the teacher says and what the teacher means”




10. Time Out From Grammar Retrospective: “Coping with our inability to predict natural cataclysms”




11. Readings in Language: “An exemplar in horror fiction shares his thoughts on writing”




12. Time Out From English Grammar: “Three eye-opening science readings to fight irrationality”




13. A Forum Lounge Special: “Two magnificent performances of 'The Prayer,' spaced 10 years apart”


THE CHARLOTTE CHURCH-JOSH GROBAN “THE PRAYER”
2002 LIVE CONCERT PERFORMANCE


THE CHARICE PEMPENGCO AND THE CANADIAN TENORS
“THE PRAYER” 2010 LIVE TV PERFORMANCE


14. Their Thoughts Exactly: “Medjugorie, here they come“ by Fred Natividad, Forum Contributor




15. The Forum Lounge: “Charles Aznavour sings a classic!”





17
Getting to Know English / The age of imprecision
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 12, 2024, 12:11:06 AM »
In a sense, editors of business and journalistic prose are in the same league as medical doctors, surgeons, dentists, and chiropractors, who exist to treat the ailing, excise diseased body tissue, extract rotten teeth and fill up ugly cavities, or straighten fractured bones and limbs. The only difference is in the patients. Medical and health-care practitioners work on human bodies, while editors work on masses of thought that have congealed into words and strings of sentences. Perhaps in one out of 50, these masses of thought could be turned into decent, well-functioning prose by just compacting loose prose fiber, but the rest of the time they could be so maddeningly mixed up and obtuse as to defy the act of editing itself.


There are, in fact, moments when editors get the overpowering urge to kill off bad prose altogether as an act of mercy. Unfortunately, the only word surgeons on earth that can administer euthanasia on terminally ailing prose—and well they should—are the newspaper and magazine editors in both print and online. Those who must earn their keep as editors of business, professional, and academic prose couldn’t engage in such a cruel practice. They must keep their patients alive no matter what horrible shape or state they are in. Often, in fact, they must perform nothing less than acts of resurrection on prose that’s already perfectly dead or comatose.

The volume of bad prose churned out by our society every day is so huge that a competent editor need not fear losing his livelihood—only his patience and sanity. The syndrome thrives not so much on lack of research or enthusiasm of writers but on bad English, bad thinking, and plain mental laziness. It gnaws not only at newspaper and magazine reports and feature articles but more so at educational writing and academic dissertations, advertising, and business communication. There’s so little precision in thought and language—and not enough evidence of intellection and imagination—in not a few of the published works that fill up the tons of newsprint and book paper that roll out of the presses every day. 

Take a look at this passage from a supposedly expert dissertation that was serialized sometime ago by one of the leading newspapers:

“The trend of an emerging economic and social world may be pushed backward by counterforces from within which may be national cultural traditions. Resistance and conflicts may continue to simmer under the thin veneer of nationalism and a myopic view of cultural traditions as a kind of motionless stonewall or a wrong historical sense focuses only on the remoteness of the past including the present… However, it is not unbridled license for an egocentric calculation and development of anti-axiological values and a resolute anti-establishment disposition of new world order heading for a global village.”

Even after reading the passage five or six times, I still couldn’t fathom what profound insights about culture it was telling me, and I was willing to bet that probably only one of every 100 editors would. But the greater mystery was why the newspaper running the series had not bothered to do substantive editing on the incredibly obtuse and incomprehensible material, or at least to ask the authors to boil it down so more people can benefit from its wisdom.

A good number of print advertising in the newspapers, although written by professional copywriters, display the same unbelievable imprecision and nebulousness. Look at this doggerel used by a real estate ad for a picture of newlyweds:

“Is love forever? …I promise to cherish you to be there for always, to be your husband and your lover, your teacher, your friend as you are to me, and more…forever.”

The profound question is never answered, and the problem with parsing and punctuation is so severe that it has rendered the passage practically meaningless.

The same recklessness in language is evident even in infomercials. Look at this photo caption of a leading cellular phone company, quoting a female chef endorsing the product:

“Motherhood by [brand name withheld] is easier with my cooking schedule…keeps me in touch 24 hours a day 7 days a week."

That really is weird, a cellular phone that has become a mother, and weirder still that the motherhood process could be made easier by one’s cooking schedule! I thus wonder if I should ask my wife to have her current mobile phone unit replaced by one of those fecund cell phones…”

Then, from one of those learning institutes that should have known better about language, here’s an ad copy for a course on corporate culture-building:

“Values are the most important glue that keep the organization together. Values determine the true worth of the company, as it reveals the nature of its people. Amidst the challenging milieu, upshots of values and culture, which are in constant motion, slowly define the distinctiveness of the organization. To forge commitment, is to discover the culture and what holds the people together in values.”

Too bad that I was never able to figure out what that ad wanted to say, so I obviously had decided not to take that course at all.
------------------------
This essay first appeared in my English-usage column in The Manila Times and subsequently formed Chapter 140 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, ©2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times:
The age of imprecision

(Next: Keeping English prose trim and slim)        March 21, 2024
                                                                                             
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
18
Lounge / Retirement benefit remains most availed SSS benefit reaching P156.7 B in 2023
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 08, 2024, 03:07:47 PM »
The Social Security System (SSS) said it released PhP156.7 billion retirement benefits to 2.2 million members in 2023, making it the most availed SSS benefit last year.

SSS Vice President for Benefits Administration Division Joy A. Villacorta said that of the 4.7 million benefits disbursed to pensioners, members, and their beneficiaries in 2023, nearly half or 47 percent received retirement benefits.
 
Villacorta said SSS released about PhP156.7 billion in retirement benefits to 2.2 million payees in 2023, up by 10.7 percent from the PhP141.5 billion retirement benefits given to over 2 million payees in the previous year.  The majority of these payees, at around 87.46 percent of the total, are pensioners.


“Retirement benefit is a cash benefit being granted by SSS to a member who can no longer work due to old age. Members who paid at least 120 monthly contributions will get a lifetime monthly pension while those with less than 120 monthly contributions will receive a one-time lump sum amount,” Villacorta explained.
 
She said that death benefit came in second with a total release of PhP70.1 billion to 1.4 million beneficiaries last year, slightly lower than the PhP70.2 billion death benefits to 1.3 million beneficiaries in 2022.
 
“SSS grants cash benefit to beneficiaries of a deceased member. Deceased SSS members with 36 monthly contributions will entitle their beneficiaries to a monthly pension. In comparison, beneficiaries of those with less than 36 monthly contributions will get a one-time lump sum amount,” she added.
 
Maternity benefit follows with a disbursement of PhP14.1 billion to 357,000 members in 2023, which rose by 9.6 percent from about PhP12.9 billion recorded in 2022.
 
Villacorta said that female members who have paid at least three monthly contributions in the last 12 months before the semester of childbirth, miscarriage, or emergency termination of pregnancy can avail of the maternity benefit.  As provided in the Expanded Maternity Leave Law (EMLL), the SSS maternity benefit is paid to an eligible member at every instance of her pregnancy since March 2019.
 
Meanwhile, Villacorta noted that disability benefit came in fourth, with PhP7.5 billion released to over 130,000 members last year, a 16.3 percent increase from the PhP6.4 billion released in 2022.
 
“Members who become disabled either partially or totally can receive a monthly pension or lump sum amount under the disability benefit. Members who have paid at least 36 monthly contributions are qualified to get a monthly disability pension while those with less than 36 monthly contributions will be granted a lump sum amount,” she added.
 
She said that funeral benefit follows with PhP4.8 billion reimbursed to 211,000 payees, and sickness benefit with PhP3.2 billion provided to 376,000 members.
 
“We grant SS funeral benefits to whoever paid the funeral expenses of the deceased member.  Claimants of deceased members with 36 or more monthly contributions may receive a variable amount from PhP20,000 to PhP60,000 depending on the number and amount of contributions paid by the member.  The funeral benefit arising from the death of a member who paid less than 36 monthly contributions is fixed at PhP12,000,” she continued.
 
Further, Villacorta said that sickness benefit is a daily cash allowance paid for the number of days a member cannot work due to sickness or injury.
 
“Unemployment benefit is the least availed benefit in 2023 with a total disbursement of PhP914.1 million to 64,000 members, down by 4.9 percent from the PhP961.4 million released to 75,000 members in 2022. This is also a reflection of the continuing improvement in the Philippine labor market with the unemployment rate reaching its lowest levels last year,” she said.
 
Villacorta noted that benefit payments in 2023 amounted to PhP257.4 billion, up by 6.9 percent from the PhP240.6 billion disbursed in 2022.
19
Site Announcements / Playlist Update for March 2 - 8, 2024 of the Forum's Facebook Gateway
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 06, 2024, 04:40:42 PM »
PLAYLIST UPDATE FOR MARCH 2 - 8, 2024 OF JOSE CARILLO ENGLISH FORUM’S FACEBOOK GATEWAY

Simply click the web links to the 15 featured English grammar refreshers and general interest stories this week along with selected postings published in the Forum in previous years:

1. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “Editing oneself”


                                         
                                     
2. Getting to Know English Better: "Using the subjunctive more confidently"




3. Getting to Know English Better: “The four forms that absolute phrases take”




4. My Media English Watch Retrospective: “There’s more than meets the eye in media’s odd use of 'concerning'”




5. Forum Lounge Retrospective: “When an English teacher prescribes an awful subject-agreement blunder”




6. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: "The quest for answers on why the world exists to begin with"




7. Getting to Know English: "A quick review in the use or non-use of modifiers”





8. Education and Teaching: "Tarlac university offers English course to Japanese students”


     TARLAC STATE UNIVERSITY - OSAKA UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS PARTNERSHIP


9. Language Humor at its Finest: “A cavalcade of palindromes”




10. Your Thoughts Exactly: “Whatever became of ‘Fine!’, ‘You’re Welcome!’, and ‘Dead’?” by Isabel Escoda, Forum Contributor




11. Readings in Language: “Style as pleasurable mastery rather than minefield of grievous errors“




12. Advice and Dissent Retrospective: “Historian's commentary on Gines de Mafra's account of the Magellan expedition,“ by Dr. Jorge Mojarro Romero, Ph.D




13. Essay by Jose A. Carillo: “‘Like’ and ‘such as’ are such slippery grammar trippers“




14. Time Out From English Grammar: “Redux: So now as it was then, this is the world in 854 words“




15. A Forum Lounge Special: “A stage musical presentation to take your breath away!”
 





20
Education and Teaching / Tarlac State University to train Japanese students in intensive English course
« Last post by Joe Carillo on March 06, 2024, 04:01:10 PM »
The Manila Times reported in its March 6, 2024 issue that the Tarlac State University (TSU), the premier higher education institution in Tarlac province, signed a memorandum of agreement with Japan’s Osaka University of Economics (OUE) to train 13 of its Japanese university students in a two-week intensive English course under the TSU’s English Language Proficiency Program.

   
TARLAC STATE UNIVERSITY - OSAKA UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS PARTNERSHIP

Nine faculty members in the Communication and English Departments of TSU’s College of Arts and Social Sciences headed by its dean, Dr. Aloysius Madriaga, will teach the Japanese students the four English language macro skills of writing, listening, speaking, and reading.

The agreement between the two long-established Asian higher education institutions was signed by their respective university presidents, Dr. Arnold Velasco of TSU and Dr. Shunichiro Yamamoto of OUE.

Read the report in full in the March 6, 2024 Internet edition of The Manila Times
Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 10