The Filipino Language

Way back in the early seventies. when we were in high school, we had this teacher in Filipino who took us aback. She had a cool way of pronouncing and spelling Filipino words. To this day, I'll never forget what she told us "high school" is in Filipino. I myself thought she'd say "mataas na paaralan." Instead she said and wrote, "haiskul."

That to my mind marked a transition of sorts for the Filipino language. A transition that has remained unabated, again, to my mind, because I don't profess to being a linguist, not even to minimal proficiency in what is and should actually be my mother tongue.

Whenever I hear mass in Filipino (tagalog), I would usually translate the words I hear in English, and the translation doesn't come easy if it comes at all. So I tend to be unable to follow what the priest is saying. Lucky for me if the gospel or readings are familiar because then I'd get what it is about. But if they're not, wow, I'm lost. A few Sundays ago the first line of a reading went "ang mabuting trigo". Offhand, trigo for me is short for Trigonometry, hardly an apt translation in something Bible-related. So what does trigo translate to? Trinity? From context clues I could still gather nothing. Oh well. I could have looked at the dictionary when I got home but then the rest of the text of that reading had been lost.

Back then I had thought of blogging about the issue but it slipped my mind. then yesterday I met two people connected to the publishing world and they asked me if I knew anyone who could edit textbooks written in Filipino.

I asked two friends and right off, they said, "not Filipino", a stark confirmation of what the two people I met yesterday lamented: finding editors of Filipino works is not easy. Strange isn't it? But why is this so?

We tried to brainstorm why and more or less agreed that the ever changing rules of the language may be responsible. For instance, back when I was in school, you'd conjugate patay and say, "nakakamatay". But now, the signs of MMDA read, "Bawal tumawid dito. Nakamamatay." When I first read this, I balked. Where did that come from, I wondered aloud. Then my son who's 34 years younger than I answered, "Mama, that's correct". I wondered, "since when?" WHen did they change the rules and who did? In the first place, who's been making the rules?

Another reason: our dictionaries, of which there are quite a few. There's the series of Leo English, a Redemptorist priest, therefore American-- yes, an American wrote a Filipino English dictionary and vice versa. then there's the so-called Vicassan, a rather thick and heavy volume, There's also UP's dictionary in burgundy which mixes tagalog and english words and alphabetizes them interspersed; that is it doesn't separate Tagalog entries from English ones.

So far, I have seen one Tagalog-Tagalog dictionary which is useful if the teacher asks for a definition of a tagalog word in tagalog, rather than its translation in English. But this is a small and thin volume, so it doesn't help if your teacher is up there in terms of proficiency.

So what do we do? I don't know. I am as much at a loss for answers to this issue. What has caused it in the first place? Are other countries/languages in the world similarly situated? is the Filipino language so young and are these but mere growing up pains?

Someone, please do something.