Tagalog

[gil]

Dear all,

This may not be directly relevant to the issue of how to translate a
certain text into Tagalog, but the following passage by Jean-Paul is
worthy of comment:

> 1) Today's Tagalogs are unable to express themselves fully in their own
> language. They freely mix up Tagalog and English (the result is called
> "Taglish"); so much so that scholars, experts and the general public just do
> not know the few coinages that exist in the scientific and technical fields.
> I even have the strong impression they couldn't care less.

The claim that "[t]oday's Tagalogs are unable to express themselves
fully in their own
language" is one that is often bandied about, but in my own experience
is utterly false. To the best that I can tell, its widespread currency
is a result of it being true, to a certain extent, with respect to the
social elites in the Philippines, who, admittedly, may be the prime
consumers of Mr. Furey's products, but who are nevertheless a small
numerical minority of the total number of Tagalog speakers.  The large
majority of speakers of Tagalog speak little or no English whatsoever.
Of course, they have active mastery of a very large vocabulary of
English and also Spanish loans into Tagalog; however, these forms are
entirely "nativized", and when used, the speaker is speaking Tagalog,
not code-switching between Tagalog and English or Spanish.  (Just as an
English speaker is not code-switching every time s/he uses a word of
Romance origin.)  One of my fondest memories from the time I spent in
the Philippines was in the "People Power" days of early 1996.  Cory
Aquino, still a hopeful candidate, was in Luneta, the main park in
central Manila, addressing an audience which was billed to be the
largest gathering of humanity ever assembled in a single place --
millions of people.  She was speaking in English, of course, and
everybody was cheering at the right times and so on -- but the large
majority of the audience could hardly understand a word she was saying!
The reason I ended up picking up some Tagalog during the time I spent in
the Philippines was that I needed it in order to communicate: outside
the usual tourist haunts, and the trendy upmarket joints, English was of
very little use.

This issue is not specific to Tagalog and the Philippines.  Living in
Malaysia for two years, I heard peeople saying the same thing about
Malays, that they can't express themselves without slipping into
"Manglish".  Again, this was true in the university department where I
worked, but completely false in the neighborhood where I lived, where
hardly anybody knew more than the most rudimentary English (even though
their language was peppered with nativized English loans).

Cheers,

David

--
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstrasse 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-9952321
Fax: 49-341-9952119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://monolith.eva.mpg.de/~gil/