I guess some will readily crucify this dude for sharing his mind through this article.
Nasaktan ang ilan dahil tinawag na "not language of the learned ang Filipino." Na para ito sa mga masa at hindi sa mga elite at intelektwal. Hindi ko alam kung napansin ng ilan ang kaunting "sarcasm" sa kanyang punto. Hindi ko alam kung hindi napansin ng ilan na ganito nga ang realidad sa Pilipinas ngayon, na minamaliit/kinakahiya/pinagtatawanan ang mga nagsasalita ng Bisaya o Ilokano o Tagalog at kinabibiliban ang mga nagsasalita ng Ingles o French lalo na yung mga may accent na banyaga.
"It was really only in university that I began to grasp Filipino in terms of language and not just dialect. Filipino was not merely a peculiar variety of language, derived and continuously borrowing from the English and Spanish alphabets; it was its own system, with its own grammar, semantics, sounds, even symbols.
But more significantly, it was its own way of reading, writing, and thinking. There are ideas and concepts unique to Filipino that can never be translated into another. Try translating bayanihan, tagay, kilig or diskarte.
Only recently have I begun to grasp Filipino as the language of identity: the language of emotion, experience, and even of learning. And with this comes the realization that I do, in fact, smell worse than a malansang isda. My own language is foreign to me: I speak, think, read and write primarily in English. To borrow the terminology of Fr. Bulatao, I am a split-level Filipino.But perhaps this is not so bad in a society of rotten beef and stinking fish. For while Filipino may be the language of identity, it is the language of the streets. It might have the capacity to be the language of learning, but it is not the language of the learned.
It is neither the language of the classroom and the laboratory, nor the language of the boardroom, the court room, or the operating room. It is not the language of privilege. I may be disconnected from my being Filipino, but with a tongue of privilege I will always have my connections.So I have my education to thank for making English my mother language."
If he considered Filipino as a language of learning, it definitely can be classified as the language of the learned. My take on this, knowing that he was once honored as best Filipino high school debater, is he may be just trying to make Filipinos realize how much we have forgotten our local tongue, that we may have relegated it to the streets unknowingly. (Or maybe he is indeed just being conyo and an a-s about it.
)
