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Saturday, July 30, 2011

Learning With The Mother Tongue (Part 2)

By DR. FLORANGEL ROSARIO BRAID
July 29, 2011, 10:58pm

MANILA, Philippines — Let me now share some developments in reviving my mother tongue, Pangasinan, which is perceived as a “dying language.” “We are a dying tribe on the verge of extinction,” notes Santiago Villafania, the province’s leading poet.

This lament is shared by some local writers and researchers who explain it as a consequence of factors such as migration of skilled and unskilled workers to other parts of the country or abroad, inter-ethnic marriages, changing language use, and what is described as “relative cultural prestige” of the language.

Pangasinenses have the tendency to use Iloko or Pilipino during conversations, notes writer A.R. Ravanzo who thinks this could be due to “penchant or uncanny ability for assimilation – to absorb oneself into the cultural tradition of another place, and the proclivity to belong, to survive against all odds.”

Many Pangasinenses are multilingual and proficient in English, Tagalog, and Ilokano. The continuing influx of immigrants to central Pangasinan may have also contributed to its erosion as they speak a different dialect.

Melchor Orpilla, poet and broadcaster, further notes that many young people in the province think that speaking Pangasinan is “bakya” (pedestrian). He advocates the use of media to counteract this existing mindset. But we need a regular publication like those in the other languages, he says. There are about 1.8 to 2 million people who speak the language but they are scattered outside the province or abroad.

To date, Pangasinan has yet to be introduced in the school curriculum despite availability of literary materials. These include works by two eminent zarzuela writers – Catalino Palisoc and Pablo Mejia, renowned educator and suffragist Maria Magsano who published the Silew magazine, and fiction writer Juan Villamil, according to Erwin Fernandez.

Advocates in the use of the mother tongue like myself see the move to revive an endangered language as a much bigger cause than the loss of technical knowledge. Victoria and James Anderson aptly describe it as much more “threatening,” as “losing one’s first language means forfeiting much of one’s social and cultural identity.”

A challenge, therefore, for local literati and cultural organizations (among others, Pangasinan Writers Association, Pangasinan Council for Culture and the Arts), and lately, the Pangasinan Historical and Cultural Commission (PHCC), is that of mobilizing resources for publications, advocacy, and similar projects.

The online e-group of PHCC has generated considerable interest and serves as a discussion venue for its members. An idea that drew enthusiastic response is the conduct of an Urduja Festival next year.

The creation of a Pangasinan Wikipedia has been approved. A radio program, Pinablin Taoir (treasured heritage) geared saving the language is now broadcast in Dagupan City. After learning that most Pangasinenses do not speak the language anymore, Archbishop Socrates Villegas initiated a choral competition called Project Sanengseng which gets additional support from local schools and city government.

Villafania, author of a poetry collection called Diurnal, hosts a website devoted to Pangasinan poetry (http://dalityapi.com). As studies show, languages have a better chance of surviving if standard written forms exist and if the speakers are literate and if literature and the media continue to be produced in the local language.

But there are periods in our history (such as the Japanese occupation) which yielded almost nothing in terms of documentary heritage. In fact, a group in Dagupan had taken the initiative to produce an adaptation of the zarzuela as there was then no other source of entertainment.

There could have been at least a dozen of scripts written as the show went on for some two years. My sister was with the regular cast and I, a fifth grader, already enamored with theater, would often join the production crew during performances. I am not aware of whether we still have access to what I consider a valuable cultural heritage.

It is for reasons such as these that our local UNESCO Committee on the Memory of the World had been pushing for the preservation of the Jawi alphabet. Jawi is one of the languages of Indonesia and Malaysia and our Moslem brothers in Mindanao. And like Pangasinan, it is also facing the threat of extinction.

We need further research on the impact of the first language on learning as most of the local studies are anecdotal. Perhaps later, a more systematic and controlled field study can be undertaken together with project implementation.

Source: http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/328821/learning-with-the-mother-tongue-part-2

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

For us, who do not care (translated by Vijaya Kandpal into Hindi)

बेपरवाह

मैं बदमाश हूँ
ढूंढो मुझे झुग्गियों में पयाटास की
या फिर लोकल ट्रेन के भीतर

दफना दो मुझे चीथड़ों में
या फिर कागज के कम्बलों में रात को
जब में स्वप्न देखता हूँ एक घर का
अपना कहने के लिए

तैरता हूँ मैं दूषित नदियों में
मनुष्यों के द्वारा गन्दी की गयी
जिनकी आत्माएं पासिंग नदी से भी काली हो गयी हैं
चलता हूँ मैं मनीला की गलियो की
सघन हवा में
धुआं डकारती गाड़ियों से

चट्टानों सी ऊंची
इकठ्ठा करता हूँ गन्दगी
शहर की

शहर जो औजीयां अस्तबलों से भी गन्दा है
बारिश के दिनों में

दिन की रौशनी में यूँ ही चलते हुए
मालों में
देखता हूँ गनिकाएं व्यापार करती देह का
चंद पैसों के लिए

आह!

यह क्या भविष्य देखता हूँ मैं

-संतिअगो विल्लाफनिया की कविता ' फॉर अस हु ड़ू नोट केयर' से अनुवादित


For us, who do not care
(after Maya Angelou)

be me urchin
seek me shanty in Payatas
or under the LRT

bury me in tattered rugs
and paper blankets at night
while i dream me home
a family to call my own

swim me river defiled by men
whose soul is darker
than the waters of Pasig river

cross me streets of Manila
and breathe me air thick
with smoke belched from buses
trucks and jeepneys

collect me garbage
high as a mountain
worst than Augean stables
on rainy days

walk me malls in broad daylight
where courtesans trade their bodies
for six-pence in a day

o give me what future?

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Friday, July 15, 2011

“PINABLIN TAOIR” ON AKSYON RADYO TO KEEP PANGASINAN LANGUAGE ALIVE

DAGUPAN CITY – For the love of the “dying” Pangasinan language, Mayor Benjamin S. Lim is personally sponsoring a 30- minute radio program dubbed as “Pinablin Taoir” to be aired over Aksyon Radyo Pangasinan (ARP) starting July 15 and every Friday thereafter from 8 to 9 a.m.

“I love the Pangasinan language and I speak the language pretty well because of my mother who is a pure Pangasinense. That is why, I am passionately interested in the rejuvenation of the language to be the common tongue once again among residents of Dagupan and the province as well,” said Lim.

He said the project aims to arrest the interest of every Pangasinan speaking people to make sure that usage of the language passes from generation to generation without threat of extinction.

It has been observed that Pangasinan’s vernacular language is in danger of being lost due to the entry of other languages in the province. The threat is said to have come from the Ilokanos and Tagalogs.

Contributing largely to the slow death of Pangasinan tongue is the practice of more parents in using Tagalog at home purportedly to familiarize their kids with Filipino, which is used as the official teaching medium along with English in schools.

This is so because of the imposition of the national language when former President Ferdinand E. Marcos imposed the bilingual policy in 1974, which required Filipino and English to be the mediums of instruction.

This practice downgrades the language and turns it into a minor tongue, instead of being one of the major languages in the country.

Erwin Fernandez, a former history professor at the University of the Philippines and author of the children’s story entitled “Si Liwawa, say pusan agto gabay so ondangol” (Liwawa, the cat who refused to bark) was quoted in Vera Files to have said “This educational system made it impossible for the Pangasinense children to think and speak in Pangasinan.”

“We have surrendered our right to our inherent language to other languages. This is the reason why there is a decline in our own culture,” Fernandez said.

In the same file, Pangasinan poet Santiago Villafania was also quoted to have expressed different opinion by not entirely putting the blame on the other languages being used in the province. He said it is the Pangasinenses who refuse to use their language and realize that its inherent beauty is something that is not to be ashamed of.

The program is anchored by ARP's veteran broadcaster Orly Navarro along with known Pangasinan historians and writers like Emilio Jovellanos, a lexicographer or specialist in the vernacular vocabulary, who authored a Pangasinan-English dictionary and others.(CIO-Joseph Bacani)

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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Repost: In Search of Urduja

I found these scanned pages from the book Cathay and the Way Thither; being a collection of Medieval Notices of China while searching for some available articles online about Pangasinan's beleaguered Princess Urduja. Pages 233-237 are about the brief sojourn of Ibn Batuta in the country of Tawalisi and his meeting with Princess Urduja.

Some Pangasinan historians and literati claimed that Urduja's kingdom was in Pangasinan. Most of our historians nowadays, however, do not support such claim and that the Turkish-speaking princess was not from Pangasinan and that she is just a myth.

The line Dawat wa batak katur, roughly translated by Batuta as "bring or handover there is the inkbrush" sounds like Pangasinan, huh?. But I would literally translate this in modern Pangasinan as "Yawat/gawat (handover/reach) wa (there is) batak (ink) katur(o) (brush)"

The ancient word for paper in Pangasinan is lost but we still have the word batak (ink) or batakan (to sign/stamp). Batak is akin to Tagalog word patak (drop).

Dawat sounds like yawat (handover) or gawat (reach) in Pangasinan language. Interesting, huh?

Now tell me if "dawat wa batak katur" is in Turkish language :)