Tagalog-10

[potet]

"1.  I'm afraid you mistook a "couple of branches" for the "tree." T. RAMOS

Many branches are still missing: mathematics, physics etc. - the list is
very long. Isn't it obvious? :-)

"4.  Del Rosario's Maugnaying of ..... was an attempt to force language
change towards a certain direction.  As linguists we know that it doesn't
work that way." T. RAMOS

I am afraid this is a generalisation that is stultified by recent history.
The extremely large numbers of scientific and technical coinages in English
and French have caught on because specialists (scholars, engineers,
technicians, scientific journalists) learned them and used them in their
publications. Just think of words like photograph and telephone.

Decades ago, I remember reading an article in _Le Monde_ (the newspaper of
the elite - the one that gives yesterday's news under tomorrow's date)
regarding French coinages in computer sciences - a field almost foreign to
us then. The journalist claimed nobody would ever use terms such as
_ordinateur_ "computer", _informatique_ "computer science", _logiciel_
"program", _octet_ "(8 bit) byte"  etc.  etc. etc. Yet, nowadays, every
French person dealing with computers knows these terms, and does use them.
:-) Even those who still don't have a computer know what an _ordinateur_ is.

I used to know the director of the Panthéon-Sorbonne computer center, a man
of the older generation, by the end of his career. He had been through the
whole development of computer science in France. What was interesting with
him was that sometimes - naturally enough - he relapsed into using the word
_computeur_, because this was the term he used before _ordinateur_ was
coined.  I suppose that if he, and his colleagues, had carried on using the
_franglais_ term _computeur_ with their students, the latter would have used
it, and so would have the following generations of specialists, and
_ordinateur_ would be unknown. This didn't happen, though, because they
learned all the new terms as they were coined, and used them. The same
happened in the English-speaking world.

If Filipinos use _kompyuter_, and have never heard of the coinage _panuós_,
it is just because specialists never ever tried to learn the latter, and use
it. It is their right to adopt such a language policy. It is not my problem.
As an observer of the language, I merely record the fact. :-)

On the other hand, many Filipinos do know the artifical terms _balaríla?_
"grammar" <  _balanang_ "[?]" + _díla?_ "tongue", _tatsulók_ "triangle" <
tatló "three" + súlok "corner" [stress shift unaccounted for], because they
were "forced" upon them by authors.

"5.  Anthropology, History, Political Science, and others, have been using
Filipino as the medium of instruction for several years now.  Several
conferences I have attended had papers read in Filipino." T. RAMOS

Well - I thought I had made it clear that the problem was not with law,
humanities ans social sciences. :-)
The problem is with mathematics, physics etc.
Why is everybody sending me to the social sciences department when all I ask
for is at least one college-level title in mathematics or physics? This is
really amazing. :-)

Best

Jean-Paul G. POTET. B. P. 46. 92114 CLICHY CEDEX. FRANCE.