Manileño for March 2008
I HAD an interesting if a bit overheated discussion online with some members of my Macintosh users group—not about computers but about the English language, which I realized could be a a more incendiary subject than the pros and cons of the new ultraslim MacBook Air.
I’m a pretty quiet and laidback guy who thinks he did all his shouting during the First Quarter Storm and the two EDSAs. It takes some effort to get me all worked up about anything. I don’t get white-hot angry when my students manifest laziness or ignorance, or even stupidity—they’re being what 18-year-olds (and even 54-year-olds) will occasionally be; I show displeasure and disapproval, and enforce discipline (albeit gently), but I don’t scream. I reserve that for instances of cheating or willful deception—and, in this present case, for when we let others put the Filipino down, wittingly or otherwise, with nary a whimper from ourselves.
What got me started was an innocuous-looking (and, I was sure, well-intended) blog entry by a member, apparently a foreigner who’d been in the Philippines for some time and who’d learned some Filipino—who observed that “the Filipinos’ most common grammatical error” was the expression “For a while,” which your mother and your brother and mine routinely use to answer phone calls with. This “dependent clause”, he said, was incomprehensible to foreigners, and deserved banishment from our vocabulary.
I had no problem with that observation, per se—of course “for a while” means nothing to the Americans, the British, and the Australians, in the same way that “at sixes and sevens” means nothing to us Pinoys, even those of us with PhDs in English.
The real problem was that, well, there was no real problem. “For a while”—which, to begin with, isn’t a clause (dependent or otherwise) but a phrase (a prepositional phrase, to be exact)—is perfectly understandable and useful to most English-speaking Filipinos. It’s our equivalent for “hold on” or “hold the line” or “just a minute” or some such expression in Standard American or British English. It meets the most basic purpose of language: communication. (I remember when a critic took me to task for using “Kill the light” as a direct translation for “Patayin mo ang ilaw,” until I showed him all the times Americans themselves used it in their own writing, idiomatically—go ahead, do a Google search.)
In other words, it’s not an error—grammatical or otherwise. Grammatically, it would be had someone said “a while for” or “while for a”, which goes against the way words fall into their proper slots in phrases in English grammar. What was being read as an “error” was the fact that it’s Filipino English, a local adaptation of a language we never asked to learn but had to, anyway. We’re dealing here with a matter of usage, which varies widely in time and place, and not grammar, which tends to remain fairly fixed.
Let’s get something out of the way. English today has many varieties, none of which is necessarily better than the other; they’re all useful in their own way, in their own cultures; Singlish works for Singaporeans, Chinglish for the Chinese. (Taglish isn’t Filipino English, but a kind of hybrid, which has its own usefulness, and its own limitations.) The word “limitations” is important, because this is what the language police tend to pounce on, especially with a phrase like “for a while.”
“Speak and write in Standard English,” we’re told, because otherwise, “You won’t be understood by others.” That’s right, and I absolutely agree: we should know the difference between the language we use for and among ourselves, and the language we need to know to communicate with the outside world (which we often associate with business, government, and education—the big, “official” things).
But the question is, where are we, anyway? With whom are we speaking? If it’s a foreigner calling—and most Filipinos will be able to sense that by ear—then “for a while” won’t be quite the thing to say. The thing is, even if we did, just how grievous an error (of choice of words) would that be? Why is it that we Filipinos will trip all over ourselves to understand American and British expressions in both written and spoken forms, and feel or be made to feel that we’ve committed a crime when we use our own?
And I’ll tell you what really made my blood pressure shoot up during that largely civil exchange on the message board. It wasn’t the fact that this probably well-meaning white man (going by his avatar) had chided us over a small matter of English. It was the number of fellow Filipinos who responded, “Oh, thank you for correcting us, kind sir!”, even after I’d pointed out the problems with the fellow’s reasoning, and with his own faulty grammar and spelling.
It’s not that we can’t or shouldn’t take criticism. Of course we should—and we do, all the time, sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes not. “Why can’t you be like Singapore?” “Why can’t you Filipinos come to meetings on time?” “Why do you eat with your hands?” But we should know when to serve others, and when to be ourselves, even and especially in this globalized universe.
Sometimes we come down too hard on ourselves and apologize too much, thinking that there’s some white man out there watching us with beady eyes, ready to cane us for the slightest misdeed. Sometimes we think that to be “world-class” and “competitive,” we have to speak, dress, and act like the white guy.
In my earlier days as a teacher and writer of English, I used to be one of these finger waggers. I understand the need to draw the line somewhere, and that’s part of my job. I’m not saying that anything goes, certainly not. But—if we’re truly smart people—we should know what to say when, to whom, and how.