Scribbles

I was supposed to submit a short essay about language attitudes I experienced growing up. This is what I turned in tonight. I think it’s appropriate.

I spent the first twelve years of my life in the Philippines. I learned two languages simultaneously while growing up – English and Tagalog. Most of the people in my family also spoke both.

At my elementary school, everyone was expected to speak English at all times, by rule. This was meant to help everyone learn the language. People needed to learn English…because it was English. Naturally, since it wasn’t everyone’s native language, the rule was broken all the time.

At one point (I think this was the fourth or fifth grade), someone came up with a system of fining people a small amount (a few cents) for breaking the “English only” rule. I’m not really sure where the money was supposed to go. Anyway, this worked only for a very brief period of time. When the rule first started, kids in class would tattle on others by saying “So and so said ‘such and such’, he should be fined.” Eventually, smart alecks would say “Hey wait a minute, you just said ‘such and such’ yourself, you should be fined too!” The tattler would of course respond, “Example only!” This was meant to excuse them from the fact that they used some Tagalog words.

Well, after a while, everyone started having full conversations in Tagalog, being careful to preface their Tagalog speech with “Example only” even if they weren’t quoting anybody. Soon enough, the system of fining people got dumped.

When we moved to California, I had no accent at all. (Or maybe I had a California accent.) I think this was because of all the American television I watched growing up. People were always surprised when they found out how recently I had moved here. I have always been more comfortable speaking, reading and writing in English than in Tagalog. And actually, I think I’m fairly illiterate in Tagalog at this point.

The first week’s topic was morphology. It essentially describes the different ways languages allow different words to be derived from other words. The practical implications may be hard to grasp if someone is monolingual. They may be hard to grasp even if one were multi-lingual if one only knew languages that had the same morphologies. I may be lucky in that the two languages in which I am fluent - Tagalog and English - have different morphologies. I am therefore able to distinguish these differences pretty easily and apply it to the textbook knowledge I’m reading about.

My primary textbook is Language, its Structure and Use, by Edward Finegan. I remember seeing these books around somewhere before - probably during my days at UCI. (Of course, I just checked the copyright on it, and it only dates back to 2003. However, it is a fifth edition, so the previous editions may have an earlier copyright. Not sure how that works. Anyway, five editions over the past ten years or so seems pretty reasonable.) It’s not as exciting a read as the Pinker book, but that’s to be expected. So far so good. I don’t have much else to say about it right now, bad or good. I’m going to read chapter three this weekend (on phonetics), then get started on the short essay assigned. I’ll probably knock that out this weekend too, unless I end up going out (doubtful because of the rain).

I decided to log the progression of my linguisitics studies. Currently, I’m just getting started and am in the first week of an online introduction course to the subject via UCLA’s extension program. The plan is to figure out how much I actually like it and if I want to continue with it. I read one one of the class’s textbooks over the holidays (Stephen Pinker’s The Language Instinct) and enjoyed reading it. The first week’s homework and reading assignment on morphology was also pretty cool.