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The wages
of English
by Luis V.
Teodoro
As
all of us know from the payola and other scandals, the Philippine
Congress is full of sh_t. It’s also full of landlords and
lawyers, not necessarily in that order, which should tell you something
about landlords and lawyers. But it turns out that Congress
also has people worried about bad English, specifically bad English
among would-be lawyers.
Samar Congressman
Antonio Eduardo Nachura said last week that “the atrocious language
of most bar candidates is the surest way to failure, and with good
reason.” Speaking in defense of an unimplemented law that
transfers supervision of law schools from the Commission on Higher
Education to a body made up of, among others, representatives of
law schools (which should be enough to make anyone suspicious),
Nachura said bar examiners can’t be expected to read through ungrammatical
examination answers and poorly constructed sentences.
A person who
“could [sic] not even express himself properly and completely” can’t
be expected to be a lawyer, said Nachura. That inability,
he said, “right away prejudices his chances to pass the bar.”
Responding
to suggestions for amendments to RA 7662, or the Legal Education
Act, Nachura said “the need for amendments can only be justified
if the law has been found wanting when and after it has taken effect.
The perceived defects of the law at present are not so serious as
to render nugatory the purpose for which it has been enacted.”
That’s a lawyer-politician
for you. He can’t say “We don’t know how effective the
law is because it hasn’t been implemented.” Instead he has
to use phrases like “render nugatory.”
Not only lawyers
and congressmen are afflicted by a terrible case of prolixity and
bad grammar in this country even while they’re decrying bad English,
however. When they speak English or at least try to, businessmen
and engineers, clerks and teachers, doctors and architects, accountants
and pharmacists also go into an overdrive of incoherence.
Doctors, lawyers
and engineers usually mask their difficulties with speaking clearly
in English by overwhelming patients, clients and home owners with
the jargon of their respective professions, confusing them with
phrases like “bilateral myocardial infarction,” “the doctrinal
precedents which render this law nugatory,” or the “stress level
center-point of the load-bearing steel abutments.”
Politicians
are a class by themselves. They choose to be incomprehensible
at certain times, such as when they’re being asked embarrassing
questions like did they receive P500,000 for voting for the Power
Bill. This is when using a foreign language (English) is a
real convenience, and speaking plainly in Pilipino can be indiscreet.
When quoted the next day they can always say they were misquoted
or misunderstood, or quoted out of context, in effect blaming poor
communication via English for their troubles. Miscommunication
has its uses.
Unfortunately
for us Filipinos, communication is a human and social imperative,
and our stubborn insistence on speaking and writing the English
language is costing us dearly. Nachura is correct about the depths
to which the use of the English language has sunk. But English
writing and speaking in this country has reached basement levels
not only among students but also among those sectors of the population
our American captivity has decreed should speak English. These
are the business, government and professional communities, whose
members gamely try to speak and write in the language of our most
effective colonizer no matter how often they trip on their tenses
or verb-subject agreement, or get their idioms all mixed up. The
result is an orgy of miscommunication even among people who’re within
slapping distance of each other.
The English
language is one reason why meetings in this country last forever.
Every person in a meeting has to first decipher what everyone
else is saying, and then has to frame in his mind a translation
from the Pilipino of what he wants to say before saying anything.
Since the result is usually non-standard, ungrammatical and
non-idiomatic English, this same reply requires the same deciphering
a secret military code needs. By the time everyone finally gives
up on English and starts explaining what he or she means in Pilipino
(“Tagalugin na lang natin,” somebody usually brightly suggests,
or initiates the process himself without a by-your-leave), three
hours have passed, it’s time for lunch, and no one’s any wiser about
what’s been decided and why. Our classrooms are similar arenas of
miscommunication. An English-literate teacher uses idioms at his
or her peril, because they’re likely to be taken literally. In
a class of 20, 15 students will never open their mouths
during the semester if they have to speak English to say anything,
even if it’s just to ask a question. Those who do speak up start
in English but are often unequal to the task of completing a sentence
in the same language, and end up shifting to Pilipino midway in
their attempt to define, say, conflict of interest in journalism
ethics.
These students
graduate to end up in a newspaper where they use phrases like “cope
up with” or the word “lowly” to modify a modifier, as in “our lowly-
regarded computer schools.” Some even end up writing captions for
front page photographs and enlightening the reading public with
gems like “Mrs. Loi Estrada buzzes his husband on the cheek,” “police
found a carton box,” or “Glass from broken windows scatters
out in the street.” However, none of these is in the same
league as a former student paper editor’s classic “He was
milling around in the examination room.” (This linguistic terrorist
was, interestingly enough, a law student.)
Even the graduates
of our most expensive elite schools have problems with “s”. They
think it’s okay to say “equipments” and “furnitures,” even “thanks
God,” or for SM to describe several dozen handbags in a display
case as “new arrival.” Those we expect to be literate in the
English language can’t tell when an “s” is needed and when
it isn’t, and usually get it all mixed up, to the detriment of communication
and the peace of mind of grammarians. And speaking of mixed up,
who hasn’t seen in supermarkets that giant tin of cookies described
as “mixed up” biscuits?
No big deal,
however, since most Filipino readers wouldn’t know the difference
between “cope with” and “keep up with,” “buss” and “buzz”
or even “his” and “her,” unless the former First Lady complains
that the caption above suggests that she’s either a bee or an airplane,
and that she’s undergone a sex change. It’s a rare bird who‘d know
that one person can’t “mill around” unless he has multiple personalities
and all of them have materialized in the same room. And who
really cares if a room has been stocked with “furniture” or “furnitures”?
But what about when a building’s capacity to withstand earthquakes
depends on how well an engineer has communicated his requirements
to a contractor—or when a lawyer has to impress upon a judge just
what makes his client innocent of a capital crime?
One can only
imagine what a bar examinee from some college in Siquijor reads
like when he or she tries to answer bar examination questions so
he or she can join the ranks of the law profession in the hope of
becoming obscenely rich. But listening to a lawyer speak English
in court is an experience horrifying enough to make you wonder if
the nuances of the law and the fine points that can make the difference
between being adequately represented and therefore being found innocent
or else scheduled for a lethal injection are getting through to
the judge, who usually ends up issuing oddly-phrased rulings. I’m
not even talking about their pronunciation, which should be enough
to make William Safire blanch. Could it be English, not poverty,
that makes justice so elusive in this country?
But most Filipinos
will repeat like a mantra the conventional belief that Filipino
familiarity with English is the country’s edge in the Age of Globalization.
It’s an edge, all right—in getting Filipino BSEs hired as
domestics in Singapore and Filipino BA ComArts graduates employed
as copying machine operators in Qatar. Mostly this supposed familiarity—not
too great to qualify the legions of Filipinos who leave the
country daily for high-end jobs in Britain, but not too low either
to disqualify them from serving as nannies or day laborers in Malaysia—has
helped nurture the exit mentality.
Their widely-alleged
familiarity with the English language makes it easy for Filipinos
not to be committed to this country enough to want to change it—
only enough to react to the difficulties of living here by
leaving it. I suspect that one of the reasons Thailand has so quickly
recovered from the financial crisis is the average non-English speaking
Thai’s realization that he or she has only one country and must
do everything to save it. Too many Filipinos think they have
several—or at least two, the second being “America”— because of
their familiarity with the English language.
Unfortunately,
without authentic development that familiarity only makes it easier
for them to leave so they can empty somebody else’s trash-bin in
another country— or, here at home, to take orders for drinks from
foreigners while waiting on tables. Among other consequences, the
(mis)use of English makes education twice more difficult than it
already is and communication a near-impossibility among Filipinos.
We do have a language problem in this country, and its name
is English.
Reprinted
with permission of the author. This article first appeared in Today,
May 20, 2000
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