Archive for the ‘language’ Category
Tagalog, language, deconstructed
Who would have thought that Tagalog could be de-constructed and that a mathematical order found in our use of verb phrases?
Who would have thought that there would be a discrete number of key verbs expressing, covering, every human experience, thought, action, possibility?
Who would have thought that different languages could be working from the same set of verbs, all perfectly lined up in a mathematical grid?
Who would have thought we could get to the bottom of language?
But this is exactly what Luis Umali Stuart, my mathematician-turned-lexicographer-turned-discoverer brother, sets out to demonstrate in his ebook The Secret Grid of Language. There is a foreword by Nicole Revel, an expert in Anthropological Linguistics and Semantics, and Director of Research since 1988 in the Section 34 (Languages, Representations and Communication) of the French CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research, the largest basic science agency in Europe if not the world). In Nicole’s words:
Luis approaches the morphosemantic problems of Tagalog in a totally different way: his is a rigorous mathematical intuition and mastery at the service of an extremely difficult empirical database and an observation of the perceptions of motion from the perspective of the speakers themselves.
My contribution to his work was to follow his thought without destroying his vision, while helping him to present his formal analysis in a way acceptable to linguists. It required (from) me a constant readjustment in order to free myself from classic linguistic references and to enter into another way of perceiving and ordering facts, a formal concrete-abstract way of apprehending an enormous number of roots and their semantic modulations–the subtle onmipresent interplay of affixes in spoken Tagalog–and accessing to the structure underlying them in an explicit manner.
This is a work in Cognitive Semantics but it avoids a complex metalanguage. Its very economy and minimal formulation should be a source of enlightenment to linguists and neurophysiologists. I am sure it cannot but please the mathematicians. I can only hope it will also be of interest to philosophers, for it points to our embodied condition.
Louie had many eureka! moments over the 20 years of his study of Tagalog and fleshing out of the grid, some shared with me on occasional one-on-ones over shots of lambanog, even if I could always only intuitively grasp the significances (not being as cerebral as he). Here’s our latest exchange via email, on the occasion of The Secret Grid:
A: Before the grid, my impression was that language was an inchoate, forever-evolving thing, with new words and expressions always coming in and old ones being thrown out, and even, rules changing, the unacceptable becoming acceptable. Not really pala.
L: A language, Tagalog, learns new words and expressions all the time but the grammar stays relatively constant. It is what turns Tagalog into Taglish. Nag-apply ako, iprinocess kami, na-hire siya sa call-center. The grammar is still Tagalog but the vocabulary is bi-lingual, or international even. Na-coup-d’etat siya noong mag-perestroika. Vernacular Tagalog is riddled with Spanish and English loanwords from our past history, not to speak of Sanskrit and Malay and, of course, Chinese. We are adding to this vocabulary constantly. But the grammar is no different from Balagtas or the Pasion.
A: What are dominant / current theories of language that the grid disproves / confirms / puts into question?
L: Hmm. The two biggest puzzles in Linguistics are the “origin of language” and the “deep structure of language”. In other words, what are the key elements and molecules of language? And is there a common structure to all the languages of Man, a universal grammar? The former is still up for grabs but in the latter, the dominant thinking is from Chomsky of MIT although many linguists in Europe still prefer the structuralist approach of Levi-Strauss. Neither has been able to get to the bottom of the two puzzles, and the general mood is that they are unsolveable; thus we are unable to teach computers to converse. The grid offers a new approach and likely solution to the problem.
A: This whole project started out with Pinoy Translator, when you started listing Tagalog words, yes? When and what made you focus on verbs in particular?
L: At the end of Pinoy Translator I attempted a closing section “Elements of Tagalog Grammar” for the beginning non-Tagalog student. In the effort, it was soon obvious that the complexity of Tagalog, the difficulty in teaching and learning it, was all in the verbs. The rules for nouns and pronouns and adjectives, even sentences, were simple enough to set up, but the verbs and adverbs were very unwieldy. When to use what affix was the biggest problem; there was simply nothing for it, until the first signs of a grid appeared in my verb lists. Brain scientists have long suspected that verbs are at the core of the neural structuring of language.
A: How did Nicole enter the picture? The foreword gives no indication that she speaks Tagalog rather well. What got her interested in the grid?
L: As far as I can tell she came in the late 60s to join the team of Robert Fox at Tabon Cave. She stayed around and did her doctoral on Palawan languages, in particular the epic songs of the Palawan tribal shamans. She joined the CNRS in 1972 as a researcher in Linguistics, and visits the Philippines almost yearly for teaching and continuing research. She has an outpost on an island fronting Tabon cave but has been discouraged from travelling there by her embassy since the Dos Palmas crisis. Since 1990 she has been building an Epic Poetry Archive at Ateneo. My translation of the Pasion Henesis was part of this. The archive has recently been digitalized and will be available on the net sometime this year if it isn’t yet.
She is structuralist in her linguistics and locked into my work because it was obviously structuralist as opposed to all the Chomskian work going on in current Philippine linguistics.
A: Could all languages really be griddable?
L: As I’ve often said, it is not reasonable that Tagalog alone should have this mathematical arrangement; I am convinced it represents a neural structure in Homo sapiens sapiens. In the book, I actually demonstrate how the grid would work for the English language, and the result serves as my evidence.
The accomplished work still only accounts for 1/16th of the grid. Mapping out the entire Tagalog grid is the next challenge. In the short term, workers in language who are fluent speakers of both Tagalog and English have their work cut out for them. Once done, all other languages will only need to mimic the results.
A: Nakaka-excite nga the implications for language translation. What are your great hopes for the grid in this age of the computer and the internet?
L: Because it is a mathematical solution it interfaces perfectly with the problem in artificial intelligence of how to teach computers to comprehend and speak languages, and finally pass the Turing test. Geeks in natural language processing (NLP) will see that the grid is actually a binary system that provides the perfect algorithm for the definition of knowledge sets and, from there, the perfect translation of any language to another.
A: Do you have any thoughts on how the grid system could help improve the teaching of Tagalog/Filipino and English here, given how terrible the quality of Tagalog and English of students and teachers in public and private schools alike these days?
L: The long-term theory, when the grid of language by way of Tagalog and English is all-mapped out and the downstream technologies are perfected is that we won’t need to learn languages anymore, in the same way that calculators have taken over arithmetic. You say something in one language and a translator phone dishes it out in the other.
In my lectures, the most excited reactions always come from the language educators and child psychologists, perhaps because the grid amounts to a natural program of learning, from four elementary ideas, to sixteen, to sixty-four and so on, from the most general to the most specific, simultaneously building up the language and worldview of the learning brain.
Fascinating stuff. Check it out. If you’re not into language or education yourself, share the link with those you know who are. http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/the-secret-grid-of-language/8537171
rocking with da reyna
quite interesting how manolo’s mistake spun off debates on academic credentials & credibility in the comment threads of filipino voices.com and reynaelena.com, and quite quite yummy how fv blogger benignO’s entry that manolo’s apology empowers “dimwits” added fuel to da reyna’s war on yet another fv blogger with homophobic ethics, yes the ilusyonado one who claims more than 8 million readers a day, lol.
naturally the conflict finds me siding with da reyna, having myself (hindi ako nag-iisa) been viciously attacked not too long ago by yet yet another fv blogger across three blogs — in fv, in his personal blog, and in mine — one irrational accusatory insulting diatribe after another, castigating me for abetting the abu sayyaf, condoning terrorism, giving away territory, even torture, moral turpitude, stinking words, apalling, disgusting, lack of humanity and womanity (!) at kung ano-ano pang kalait-lait daw about my person and my morals and my intellect, when nothing in my entry warranted it. the same fv blogger now gleefully claiming that manolo’s apology is “full of sarcastic, if hidden wit” but the reyna just doesn’t get it, and in the next breath talking “standards of civility.” talaga naman, ano ba yan.
worse, not a peep from editor-not-chief nick, as though the utter lack of tolerance for any deviation from an arrogantly opinionated one’s opinion is all right. as though it’s perfectly acceptable for fv to be used as a platform for sensationalist writing and irresponsible labelling.
…sa isang blog na ang titulo ay Filipino Voices at ang mga ipinagmamalaking manunulat ay sinasabing siyang tinig ng bayan, hindi kaya nararapat na kilatisin ng mga magbabasa kung sino ang mga taong ito?
At kung ang mga taong ito na tumatawag sa mga nagbabasa at nagkukumento stupido, hindi kaya dapat malaman kung sino sila at bakit may karapatan silang mang-insulto ng kapwa nila?
and da reyna, too:
Some writers and bloggers at Filipino Voices are guilty of being pa-intellectual. Feeling ba. Some are so uber-napoleonic with their own opinions, think and believe in all their ass that they’re the only one that is all knowing, high and mighty and what they say and write sway the nation. They believe that whatever they say would help create national policies and every one in the tralala-land gets their piece of opinion!
unfortunately, ito ang attitude ni nick-not-chief:
I personally believe that the readers should be able to discern for themselves with regards to many issues..
…which is like washing his hands of any responsibility for anything. e ano kung walang karapatan ang ilang taga-fv to speak for filipinos. e ano kung walang karapatan kahit sino na mang-insulto o mambastos. wtf. is this the same nick who stood up and accused malu fernandez of stuff that some of his bloggers are now accused of? ah, but nick is not the chief, there is no chief.
filipino voices could use a leader who would value the collective as a whole and not be intimidated by the noisy know-it-alls, never mind if their pasaway ways bring in traffic. the kind of leader who at the very least would impose standards of honesty and civility. otherwise fv is suspect as a source of credible information and rational opinion, because how can anyone tell that the good ones have not been infected by the bad ones? all it takes is one rotten apple to spoil the barrel. three or four speeds up the process.
this is also to say that i don’t agree with the conventional blogging wisdom that values more the freedom to say anything than the rightness, correctness, of what is said in the context of nation-building, especially for a collective blog that claims to sway public opinion and shape government policy. leaving it to readers to “discern for themselves” who’s right and who’s wrong is such a cop-out and just so mainstream media.
manolo’s mistake
this certainly doesn’t sound like mlq3 of the blog daily dose where he is usually quite formal and circumspect, pa-fair and objective, even when provoked. i suppose he was on a different mode in facebook, probably thinking that it would be only among like-minded friends (it wasn’t), it would not get out to the real world (it did), and so he spoke with all candor, language and tone revealing a different, scrappy, manolo — (in his own words) arrogant, unthinking, unfeeling, bigoted and prejudiced. descriptives that approximate dona victorina’s and reyna elena’s GRRRR! retorts.
i’m glad manolo apologized. there are ways and ways of disagreeing without being offensive. while manolo’s commment is true of most pinoys — we are not into satire, we tend to take things literally — still he could have couched his critique without the crap and the slap, facebook or not, and spared himself the royal ire of the donya and the reyna.
strike two
oh my, the “sassy” one strikes again. how boring. pwedeng di na lang patulan pero on second thought, why not, lalo na’t baka isipin niyang tama siya porke walang response.
having trained in psychology, i cannot but read “tyranny of the insecure” as a demonstration of freud’s “defense mechanisms” (projection and intellectualization, in particular) – the product of a mind feeling “undermined” and “threatened” by criticism. in effect most of what she says applies to herself mismo, if she would only see.
infinitely more interesting, actually, is that she manages – by sticking to generalities – to steer away from the language issue she raised against ka amado’s mga ibong mandaragit, as though that’s all been settled in her favor and there is nothing more to say. (it’s called “being in denial,” another defense mechanism.)
in fact, nothing’s settled in her favor. contrarily, the sentiment is remarkably, wonderfully, pro-mandaragit, such as jaywalker’s comment to salamat, “sassy”:
This is a classic case of one spitting against the wind……… naturally it goes smack in ones’ face, lol. . . . So now we know, to increase the sales of Filipiniana books all one has to do is to get sassy to read it, enough for her to rant about it and voila… success.” !
sassy: aiming high, hitting low
imagine. complaining about the tagalog of amado v. hernandez in mga ibong mandaragit [now required high school reading, thank goodness, being a sequel to rizal's fili].
that’s sassy? that’s stupid. and lazy. and, really, anti-filipino, i.e., anti everything that filipino stands for.
clearly connie v. has no love for the filipino language. she takes pride in speaking it fluently, but she can’t be bothered to write it or read it or value it, unless it’s something simple and easy, blog-easy LOL and, maybe, illustrated, para hindi boring? kidstuff, in other words. what a value to pass on to her daughters.
clearly she’s never read the pasyons or rizal or bonifacio in tagalog. that’s even more different from the tagalog, ok, filipino, we write today. but you just have to concentrate a little more than usual, and yes, a good dictionary helps, it’s certainly worth the effort, expands the mind no end.
anyway, by the way, what’s going on ba? why does connie v. actually think she deserves to have it easy and simple? what’s with this sense of entitlement? hubris? is she just so full of herself?
for more here’s katrina, who’s with academe (on and off) and into philippine lit with a passion:
i’m the last person who will look down on what people enjoy reading, nor will i insist that you must read certain books in order for you to be called “literary”. i will insist though that anyone who dares to diss any form of literature, particularly philippine lit, should have more to go on than just his or her superficial notions of taste and literature, and in this case, language.
this is exactly what connie veneracion did in her manilastandardtoday column last Tuesday. she complained about the difficult Tagalog of Amado V. Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit, and in the end questioned its inclusion in her daughter’s school curriculum. obviously exasperated that neither she nor her husband could read this Filipino classic, she went on and on about literature and creativity, about writers making things more difficult on purpose, about the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and how it was so easy to understand, and how there are Filipino writers like Jay David who do write in a Filipino that’s easy to read. in the end, she blamed Ka Amado – and i imagine any other writer – for the difficult writing she had, and failed, to endure.
the question really, is this: why was she not blaming herself?
when we have difficulty reading literature in Filipino, and then have the gall to complain about it, we must should be ashamed. the question here isn’t whether or not a writer purposely made his or her writing difficult – how do you even prove purpose? the question is, why exactly you yourself, as a Filipino, cannot sit through a Filipino classic novel without complaining about its language. in the case of veneracion, Ka Amado was to blame for his kind of writing, because look! Hemingway and Jay David are so much more easy to read. never mind that Hemingway writes in a different language altogether, and David is of a different generation and therefore uses a different kind of Filipino in his writing.
it seems to be lost on veneracion that these are false comparisons, based only on her personal taste and range of reading capabilities, both of which are infinitely problematic in its insistence on simplicity and ease in reading, because literature of any kind is so much more than these.
whose requirement is it that literature be easy, anyway? isn’t this different for every person? popular literature such as David’s, for example, will be a difficult read for a Filipino who has English as a first language, for example, or someone who doesn’t use Manileño Tagalog; in the same way that Old Man and the Sea will not be an easy read for someone who isn’t familiar with Hemingway’s kind of English.
the language of literature – even when it seems easy – never is. in truth, if anyone imagines Hemingway to be easy, then in reality they do not understand him. in fact, the last thing i imagine any writer would want to hear is that his or her work was “easy” or “simple”, as neither is synonymous with “well-written” or “life changing” or even just “ang galing mo magsulat!”.
which points to another glaring fact about veneracion: she isn’t even aware of her own limitations as a reader of all these texts, and how what she had to say against Mga Ibong Mandaragit wasn’t a simple case of language, or the dichotomies that have come out of her discussion: creative writing versus popular writing, the classics versus the contemporary (as the discussion in her blog has pointed out), high art versus low art.
none of these dichotomies are easy to pin down, and the last one’s particularly difficult for a text such as Mga Ibong Mandaragit. yes, Ka Amado’s status as a Tagalog classic that’s required reading makes him “high art” in a sense, but contextualize that in the continued dominance of philippine writing in english (and here i speak not just of literature but of magazines and blogs as well), and the notion of high and low become problematic.
in fact, a little reading would tell veneracion that the presence of these Filipino classics (Mga Ibong Mandaragit, Florante at Laura, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo) in our school curriculum is anything but an effort at making it more difficult for our daughters (and apparently their parents) to appreciate literature. reading some history would’ve told veneracion that in truth, the presence of these Filipino classics in the curriculum is the product of a continuous struggle to wrest our classrooms from the throes of a western(ized) syllabus/reading list. and yes, save our children from colonial mentality – for good measure, as apparently some parents are beyond saving.
all the issues veneracion raises about literature in this country are complex, none of them are easy. what was wrong was that her discussion went beyond simple. it was simplistic. and unjust.
this is revealed even more by veneracion’s assessment of Jose Garcia Villa and his comma poems which she calls “crap” (in her blog she calls it “lokohan”). my question of course is “relative to what?” because if you are forced to respect ee cummings for his experiments in form, then why not the same respect for Villa? and let’s say you don’t care for cummings either, then at the very least, Villa – and any other writer for that matter – deserves respect for writing the way he did in the context of Philippine poetry that had yet to get it, or do anything like it.
i wish veneracion had better literature teachers when she was growing up, then maybe at the very least, she would have the words to actually praise the literature she likes other than saying they’re “easy” and “simple”; she’d also have better sense than to simply say that the works she doesn’t like – and can’t understand – are crap.
because no text, no literature, no writer, least of all Ka Amado and Mga Ibong Mandaragit, deserves that.”