FILIPINO PECULIARITY...

Dan Mariano column for Wednesday June 6, 2007
The Manila Times

Wayward tongues, lazy minds


It has been a while since I have done any serious writing in my native language. I was managing editor of the now-defunct Diyaryo Filipino in the late 1980s and Bandera in the early 1990s. In college, I used to regularly dash off protest manifestoes and, during martial law, prison poetry in Tagalog. Yes, that was some time ago.

Yet whenever I come across grammatical lapses or some other abuse of my mother tongue, the old Tagalog editor in me goes ballistic in the old-fashioned newsroom in my mind.

This is why I try to avoid listening, lest I suffer a hypertensive attack, to certain radio and TV news programs that take liberties with my mother tongue. As soon as I hear a reporter or an anchor use phrases like "kung saan," I immediately switch stations or tune out altogether.

It is bad enough that our own government—driven by the need to produce overseas contract workers and call-center agents who speak English, of a sort, to generate foreign exchange—has demoted Filipino to the status of a second-class tongue.

Must the broadcast media, too, join in the gang-rape of what the Constitution still calls the National Language?

Given media's influence over how we all think, talk and even behave, it is no wonder that a growing number of Filipinos can no longer speak and write a single, grammatically correct sentence—be it in Tagalog or in English—even if their life depended on it.

Our poor excuse for a lingua franca, Taglish, reflects not just cultural schizophrenia but also mental indolence. Speakers of this pidgin tongue follow no rules of grammar; its vocabulary is, to be kind, a work in progress. This mongrel language, which possesses neither clarity nor precision, provides more evidence of our nation's backwardness.

For all the verbiage and bombast that clutter the airwaves, radio and TV have done little to clarify the burning issues of the day for their audiences. They are skilled at stirring popular passions, I'll grant them that. But they fall short of educating their listeners and viewers—in the original Latin sense (ex ducare) of leading people out of the darkness of ignorance.

Even some institutions, for whom communication is vital, have come under the "dumbing" influence of the broadcast media.

Take the case of the Society of St. Paul, which publishes Sambuhay, a Mass guide that is distributed weekly in Catholic parishes nationwide. Last Sunday its opening article discussed the mystery of the Holy Trinity, which it translated into Tagalog as Isangtatlo.

Santatlo would probably have been a less cumbersome rendering in Filipino. After all, our P100 bill does not say Isangdaang Piso, but Sandaang Piso.

Obviously, whoever formulated Isangtatlo never took to heart the elementary Filipino rules on kennings, or linked words, and how "-ng" prefixes for root words that begin in "p" or "b" must end in "m" as in pambansa—not pangbansa—while those for words beginning in "d," "l," "r," "s" and "t" must end in "n" as in sanduguan—not isangduguan.

Maybe the author did not want parishioners to mistake Santatlo for yet another saint. Who knows?

We can perhaps excuse the author's lack of familiarity with this rule of Filipino grammar. What was unforgivable, however, was his repeated use of niyo instead of ninyo. N'yo is the correct contraction for Tagalog equivalent of the plural "your."

There's more.

In the Panalangin ng Bayan, or Prayer of the Laity, one portion mentioned hukbong sandatahan, rather than the correct sandatahang lakas, or armed forces. Hukbo already means "army," which by definition is an organization that is equipped with weapons, or sandatahan. Hukbong sandatahan is thus redundant. I would bet that the author borrowed that phrase from some radio reporter or TV anchor.

The prayer also talked about the kapulisan, in evident reference to the police, for which the proper Tagalog translation is pulisya. At least, the translator spared us from such other philological monstrosities as kasundaluhan or kakalsadahan.

All this might seem like pedantic drivel, but the fact remains that language is a basic tool for getting our ideas and feelings across. The more careful we are with what we say, the more clearly would we be understood, the more unmistakable our message and our intent.

It is no accident that, say, Iglesia ni Cristo preachers speak in perfect Filipino—a real joy for native speakers like me. They are evidently aware that when discussing religious doctrine, there is no margin for misinterpretation— much less error.

Communication is not just a matter of shooting your mouth off or scribbling down the first thing that comes to mind. Glibness is often a dead giveaway for intellectual bankruptcy.

When the mouth is ill-disciplined and the mind uninstructed what all too often results is miscommunication and confusion—in whatever language.

Maybe, one major reason Filipinos cannot seem to agree on anything anymore is that they do not mean what they say—and, worse, cannot say what they mean.