Babel

My son asked me the other day what the Tagalog word kwan really means. My beloved late mother was the master of kwan and I am her youngest apprentice. I chuckled and replied that aside from driving their mom crazy, kwan is a magical word that defies any definition or rule of grammar. Paired with the appropriate supporting words, it could be a noun (Nasaan si Kwan?), adjective (Ang kwan talagaa niya!), verb (Kinuwan niya yung bola!), adverb (Pinasa niya yung bola nang napaka-kuwan), and so on. In fact, you can even make all of these different applications function simultaneously in one sentence (Ang kuwan talaga ni Kuwan, kinuwan niya nang napaka-kuwan yung bola!). My son nodded in understanding but said that he was more partial to the kwan’s close relative, ano.

As maddening as it may be to linguists, such are some of the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of Tagalog that a foreigner would need to master should he/she want to communicate fluently in our mother tongue. I wonder how my old Japanese friend Ichiro Baba would have coped. He could never get over the time when he thought that his Filipino co-workers were calling out his name. He discovered, instead, that they were in the middle of a conversation that left him dumbfounded. “Bababa ba (Is it going down)?” asked one Filipino. To which another Pinoy nodded and replied, “Bababa (It’s going down).” Of course, the Japanese language has its own peculiarities as well. One thing that I could never fully understand was all the rules of etiquette that you had to remember. Your choice of words would sometimes change depending on whether you were talking to a man or a woman, to someone older or younger, to someone higher up than you, and so on. A foreigner friend of mine who learned Japanese from his girlfriend was actually suspected of being gay because he tended to use a lot of words that were considered feminine. While I did not have too much difficulty pronouncing Japanese words, I always got tongue-tied with Mandarin. I simply could not decipher the various tonal variations that were critical to distinguishing the different meanings of syllables, which would otherwise sound alike. The only word I was really able to master was the Mandarin word for ice water or bing shui (pronounced “bing shway”). I don’t know if it has since changed, but during the time I lived in China in the late ’80s, they did not serve ice water in restaurants unless you specifically asked for it. Not a lot of people apparently did and after some time, the waitresses in the hotel coffee shop would whisper to each other in Chinese that “Bing Shui is coming!” whenever they saw me approaching. Of all my experiences with other languages, however, the most memorable was when I found myself in a group of people from several Asian countries, all of whom could only speak their native tongue and just a little bit of English. Unfortunately, they used whatever English words they knew a little differently from each other. In order to facilitate their discussions, I had to substitute the English words of one person with English words that the other person understood better. And so I literally found myself translating English into English!

One linguist wrote: “Culture is to language what a glove is to a hand. Language is the bond which holds people together.” Of all of man’s attributes, it is probably his capacity for language and his resulting ability to communicate that makes him unique from the rest of creation. In the beginning, according to the Old Testament, “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” But because of man’s pride and ambition that manifested itself in his attempt to build an enormous tower (Tower of Babel) that would “reach to the heavens,” God confused “their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.” He caused man to speak in different languages so they would not understand each other. The resulting chaos thwarted the plans to build the tower and God subsequently “scattered” the people all over the face of the earth. My intimate exposure to other languages makes me think, however, that the Babel experience was perhaps one of God’s plans for us to learn humility and patience by forcing us to strengthen our ability to truly listen to each other. Only when we make every effort to understand and grasp what the other person is saying, as we experience when trying to communicate with people of other languages, can we really learn to perceive each other’s thoughts and feelings. It is for this reason that I wish for my children to learn another language or two (foreign or local dialect). Not because it could somehow lead to a good job for them someday. Not also for them to necessarily become fluent in it. I just want them to develop a genuine ability to empathize with other people. If we can let all our kids have the opportunity to vividly experience the world through another person’s language and encourage cultural awareness, perhaps we can someday finish that ancient tower of long ago. Because then, it will no longer be a monument to our vanity but rather to our common and universal humanity.

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