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We’d like to believe that we deserve a society that treats people fairly regardless of how well they speak and write English and regardless of whether they speak it with a regional accent or not. We think, if we continue stomping our feet enough in a loud appeal to nationalist sentiment, that we could one [...]
Bangkok Thailand: I just returned from Chulalongkorn’s field station on the Gulf of Thailand. This is my first good look at the Thai capital. Colleagues from Chula and Thammasat tell me that the recession hit Thailand bad. They say that the city isn’t crawling with Westerners unlike in the past. They took me to the [...]
A fact that Filipinos gloss over is that when English was introduced as a result of American occupation of the country in 1898, there was rapid acceptance of the language. Thus after two decades of American sovereignty, about 800-900 thousand Filipinos (out of 10 million) were functional in the language and this proportion increased.
It also amazes me that like the reinstitution of capital punishment, the Philippine Congress (and the rest of elite Pinoy society) can’t settle the language issue. The Philippine Daily Inquirer takes essentially the same position as leading our own language and academics do. The language gurus in the UN and our colleges of education have long known that [...]
Basic education reform is close to my heart since those who end up in my freshman class are products of our basic education system. The extent of reform and its hindrances are the subject of Professors Cynthia Bautista of UP College of Social Science and Philosophy, Dina Ocampo of the UP College of Education and [...]
In yet another Tagalog vs English “debate” this time on Peyups.com, I — tounge-in-cheek — proposed a kind of a test on the efficiency by which Tagalog can articulate complex concepts by issuing a challenge to translate the following text into Tagalog: Just because molecular irregularities cause a ballbearing’s radius to vary by nanometers along [...]
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