Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

About a week ago I had a long email discussion with Heber, and after seeing his column on the Balita, thought about starting a Filipino language blog. It sounds hideously ridiculous that one even thinks of writing in his/her native language.

Balita is a very popular tabloid read by the Tagalog-based speaking population (there are a variety of other similar publications in the vernacular in the various parts of the Philippines). So it makes sense that writing is in Filipino. On the Internet, most of my correspondences are in English; very few of my Filipino friends communicate in Filipino (notably Heber, who also sometimes even writes in the poetry form, and a few ka-Bangga based in the US such as EdLab and Rod (who both write in very lyrical Filipino), and Neal, a friend from the old BBSs).

Basically, I can read Heber’s columns in Balita and emails written in Filipino with ease and pleasure, very much the same pleasure when I read the highly organized writings of JJ Gibson on perception. I wondered why this was so. I suspect that this has little to do with content but rather more with the form of the language (although the two are inter-related). So perhaps it is the clarity of the syntactic and semantic rules of the language that I find pleasurable. Or perhaps it is the apparent expressive, constructive and functional power of the language that pleases me.

I grew up in a Filipino speaking environment - family, work, friends. However, I was educated in an English speaking environment within a school-social environment that was mostly Filipino. Thus, there was often a large leap of translation and interpretation when we were required to speak English in the (Filipino) social context, and less so insofar as the recapitulation of things studied in school was concerned.

Thus, the greater the distance between the phonetic form output and the mental form processing, the more time and energy I have to coordinate proper grammar and diction in a foreign language such as English. So when I am speaking to Trevor, my English is mestizaje: a nearly instantaneous Filipino processing and English output. Here, with grammar and diction broken in various directions, I could easily be considered “illiterate” and “uneducated.” In this similar vein I find interest in Zialcita’s writing about the cultural mestizaje, and the distinctions between the authentic and the exotic. I think it might be possible to draw a parallel line with regards to language and learning.

For one, the cultural mestizaje might actually be a good method or process of learning and teaching, whereby “the sybolic subcodes drawn up by various human groups do not just co-exist, but faced with a new symbolic subcode, devours it and assimilates it” (as Zialcita describes, citing Bolivar Echeverria,”El ethos barroco”, Mexico). What I find quite interesting here is the possibility of learning and teaching as consisting of the tensions and oppositions articulated in the cultural mestizaje. It is “authentic” learning and teaching, and not “exotic.” By “exotic”, I mean a manner of teaching and learning that aspires to be “pure” (i.e. mere transfer of information from book to brain, no processing which can “tint” (make impure) the information).

Anyway, back to language, as I was ruminating on certain language domains that limit, restrict and inhibit creative thinking, my friend Eric wrote recently, “as more people develop immunity against branding hype, the ads increasingly “show their seams,” increasingly say “this is a strategy.” And you know what? The deconstruction works wonders. Consumers’ defenses go back down again, and they willingly fleece themselves. Very sophisticated.”

While I think that all linguistic systems have the capability to perform any computational task (without necessarily guaranteeing that such a task will be fast and efficient given factors from the environment and from the organism), I believe that there are language domains that restrict and limit computation (processing, critical and creative thinking) in humans. An example of such a language domain is advertising design. I told Eric an adage from Victor Papanek, “Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today.”

Phony. What a funny word.

More on these later.

A UST graduate student, Koi, has just been at the apartment and had a long discussion with me and Trevor, quite an enjoyable time, really. Much of what we discussed also related to the problems of language and definitions. The relationship between internal and external was also of relevance, those two domains traversed by language in the articulation of concepts.

Well, another day.

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