The death of a language

Bawat patak man ng ulang masinsin

Ay lagyan ng talim, ako ay sasayi

Di ko iindahin ang ulos at hiwa ng mumunting patalim

Ang iyong kalinga’y, kanlungang matibay

Lilim nito ay langit ng aking tanggulan

Pag ito’y natiklop, lalantahin ng araw

Lulunurin ng unos ang marupok kong buhay

Aking hihintayin ang iyong pasabing

Nagbalik ka na, Mahal.

Lyrics by Bienvenido Lumbera

From "Tales of the Manuvu"

Philippine Airlines could save our lives. It could embroider the meandering depths of a farewell by Bienvenido Lumbera on its headrests just like Aer Lingus of Ireland has pieces of James Joyce’s Ulysses woven in its airliner seats. Imagine sitting in 12A, in an emotional embrace of all the memories you can bear before take-off and a courageous shedding of whom and what you have to leave behind. Then, your gaze would get transfixed on Lumbera’s language and you feel his words stitch on to your Filipino traveler’s soul, the promise and meaning of home.

Linguists are lamenting the pending death of over half of the 7,000 known languages in the world and they say, with it are also stories of natural life as we have come to know and understand it in various cultures. Terralingua, a non-profit organization, helped emphasize the dimensions of the loss of languages when they revealed that the places where biodiversity (more kinds of habitats, genes pools, and species of plants and animals) is highest are also the places where more languages exist. This means that these languages and the natural histories associated with them, are on parallel courses toward death.

The relationships of humans with their living spaces are carved out in language and when the living spaces that have inspired the language are eroded, so do the languages associated with them. "Saranggola ni Pepe" has faded as the vigorous towering breaths that the Earth makes in our corner of our planet are sullied by poison air. Play "Saranggola ni Pepe" now to an asthmatic kid doomed to play indoors with video games and he would not have the slightest idea what kind of language it is, much less the meaning it evokes. When a language loses its meaning, it gradually disappears.

Last month, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $5 million in grants and fellowships to help study and document these vanishing languages. These will entail a massive digitization of these languages while we still have traces of them. They will try to save the disappearing languages from being irretrievably lost so we can refer to them when we feel like we have lost pieces of ourselves when we lost the way we once communicated.

While the linguists are saving lost languages, some intellectuals are recommending early death to some words and phrases that have lost their meaning because politics and corporations have thoughtlessly and fragrantly employed these words and phrases that they have eventually lost their meaning. In a book called "Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words and Management Speak are Strangling Public Language" (Gotham Books: 2006), its author Don Watson eloquently makes the case that marketing talk by corporations and platitudes in political speeches (right, left, up, down) have stripped us of the meaning we can get from the language with which we could express the meaning of our lives. Watson wants the funeral march in public language as early as possible for words and phrases like "outcome" (because it anesthetizes and lumps everything from a dairy product to dead civilians during war as "outcome"), "key strategies" (because anything could be "key" as there is always more than one way to do something), "core values" (if it is not "core," it should not be valued in the first place), "enhanced" (anything from lipstick to liposuction qualifies as "enhancement"), "bottom line" (does not say anything about how deep or shallow the line really is) or even "axis" (as in "axis of evil" since no "axis" can be found by any stretch of imagination in that context), "freedom" or even probably in our national case, "sorry" (need I explain this?).

After reading Death Sentences, I am signing in to be one of the pallbearers of the kind of language he spoke of. This language includes phrases that have become the authoritative titles of slides in PowerPoint briefing presentations where we, as consumers to marketers and as constituents to politicians, are thrown animated bullet thoughts. This is not a condemnation of the PowerPoint software but the PowerPoint way of thinking and communicating. A language born out of thinking only "in slides" riddled with bullets and encased in jazzy templates, is a language that could not survive a full journey of thought from beginning to end. Watson’s personal signal that he had to begin Death Sentences was when his 12-year-old grandkid was asked in school to make her own PowerPoint personal vision-mission statement of her life.

I recently watched a show called Yspeak and they discussed the mix of Pilipino and English in our public language and how this is justified by the natural "evolution" of language. I have no quarrel against the mixing of the two but I want to clarify the use of "evolution" as a justification. "Evolution" is always used in public discussions to mean "development." But "evolution," as defined in the natural sciences, has no direction, in the sense of progress. It may be a deep disappointment to most but from an evolutionary point of view, the journey to being human from a point in natural history, for instance, from our ape ancestors to the swaggering bipedals we have become is NOT progress but nor is it a demotion. It is simply adaptation. However, when we speak of human language, we are no longer talking solely of the influence of the physical space but also of conscious collective efforts of different groups in societies to influence the way we view our lives and akin to this is the way we express these views – the language of our lives. Therefore, language has a direction unlike natural evolution and we should not just be passive users of words that do not hold any meaning, or those that limit the meaning of the ones we have spoken or written to enliven with sound or ink, the march of our collective lives.

Watson’s book made me re-examine more deeply the language that I use for this public space for the mind that I inhabit with my readers. Watson reminds those of us who engage in public language that we are not merely "wordsmiths" but writers. What we do with words could not be separated from how we think and therefore the latter activity is not a mere option when you are engaged in public language. It reinforced the idea that public language should not only express a fashionable idea. It should be able to connect that idea with an old one and foreshadow another one. It should be able to swing and embrace a whole journey of thought.

"Mabuhay" as we greet each other has died a little with each national tragedy and disappointment that has wounded us. Maybe we can save some of our own meaning with the forced death of some languages and the birth and resurrection of some – those that have always held our souls. "Aking hihintayin ang iyong pasabing nagbalik ka na, Mahal" – language so poignant it holds you in an invisible embrace and you go, able to read more life on to your own journey.

* * *

For comments, e-mail [email protected]