The eradication of Spanish, the revolutionaries' language. American-promoted Filipino. IV

General Wood, at a recent banquet in Manila, is reported as making the following definition of a stable government:

A stable government means civic courage, courts of justice which give equal opportunities to the senator as well as to the simple tao, resources ready for disposal at any moment they are needed by the country, organization which will enable the country to defend its integrity, adequate hospitals all over the Islands which are not found in the provinces we have just visited, social organization which shows keen human interest in the protection of the needy and the poor, effective public sanitation, common language, and many others.
[underscoring supplied]

Diogenes, with his lamp, searched for less than this! All of the requirements mentioned by General Wood would be desirable in the Philippines; so they would be in the United States. Could either country ever fulfil them in the eyes of a hostile critic? Do any of the existing governments of the world to-day fulfil them? Would not the "common language" bar Switzerland, where there are four official languages, -French, German, Italian and Romansh? One fourth of the Canadians speak French, and English is hardly understood in Quebec. Would the Canadians relish this test as applied to them? Are they unfit for independence because they have not a "stable government"? Have they "adequate hospitals" throughout the provinces, and an "organization which will enable the country to defend its integrity" against all comers? Has Belgium? Has the millennium yet arrived in any part of this troubled globe? I seriously doubt it.

Author: Harrison, Francis Burton, 1873-1957.Publication Info: New York,: The Century co., 1922.

The eradication of Spanish, the revolutionaries' language. American-promoted Filipino. III

Patriarchal or feudal life in the remote districts was still the order of the day. Authority, always of powerful influence in Malay history, was elevated to the rank of a religion. In the villages a modified form of self-government was permitted, though the local priest was always the power behind the throne and the court of last resort. Schools were maintained by the padres, and instruction given in the native tongue, -in rare instances in Spanish. These schools were, however, skilfully used by the Spanish to accentuate and develop the differences in local dialects. Theirs was the principle "Divide and rule." Originally all speaking the Malay tongue, the Filipinos were encouraged through these centuries to enlarge and enrich the local differences of pronunciation, until to-day the Ilocano, the Tagalog and the Visayan can hardly converse with one another except through English or Spanish. The grammars written by the priests accomplished their purpose. Writing was discouraged by them except upon the religious themes prescribed by the priest himself. Dr. Niewen, of theyouthful but rapidly growing Educational Department of Java, upon his second visit of inspection to the Philippines recently, told me that in Java, in twenty years, the people had broken down the differences between their five dialects and fused them all again into one Malay tongue; it was his opinion that we could, with our much larger public-school system in the Philippines, amalgamate the large number of local dialects into one tongue within five years of teaching in the primary grades.

Francis Burton Harrison, 1922

The eradication of Spanish, the revolutionaries' language. American-promoted Filipino. II

On the other hand, I met no one, American or Filipino, teacher or layman, who believes that English can become the vernacular of the country, and the authorities do not seem to expect that it can or will. On this account, I paid close attention to the dialects of the several provinces, compared their books, and gathered phonographic records of them. These seven or eight dialects are not essentially different: they are only variations of Tagalog, and whoever knows one can easily acquire the others. The recently published exhaustiveTagalog grammar of Lendoyro says: "The similarity between Tagalog and the other dialects is such as to make it easy for natives from different parts to understand each other by using their respective dialects for general conversational topics."
I roughly calculate that half the words are identical in all and many of the other words have some resemblance, while the grammatical forms are the same. The mutual unintelligibility arises from variation in intonation and accent and from the difference in perhaps 40 per cent of the words.
I made an appeal through my teacher, Mr. Lope K. Santos, Tagalog editor of El Renacimiento, to all native editors and writers to hold a conference and make an attempt to fuse these dialects into a uniform or common one; first, by agreeing on the alphabet and spelling of words; second, by eliminating all Spanish words where a native substitute could be used; third, by collaborating and unifying the vocabularies of the dialects. This conference was held on September 3, 1903, and will doubtless result in some good. As strongly as I can I appeal to the Government, both in Washington and in Manila, to aid in this work of fusion. The editors to whom I spoke in Luzon and in the Visayas approved the movement. The publishers of the numerous popular books which are found for sale in every market place in the islands can easily be induced to cooperate. Men like Tolentino, who is in Bilibid prison pending his appeal on the charge of writing a seditious play, ought to be employed in such work. The constabulary can imprison such men, but I would win them and use them. Which is better politics?

Govt. print. off., 1904] David Jessup Doherty

The eradication of Spanish, the revolutionaries' language. American-promoted Filipino. I

The first vocabulary of Filipino appeared in 1915. It was published by the American Philosophical Society. Its author, Eusebio T. Daluz.

CERTIFICATE OF APPROBATION

CERTIFICAMOS que este Vocabulario Filipino-Inglés fué aprobado y adoptado oficialmente por la Academia de la Lengua Filipina en sesión ordinaria celebrada el día 7 de Marzo de 1915. Y para que conste firmamos la presente en Manila, 1. F., hoy veintidós de Mayo del año del Señor de mil novecientos quince.

SOFRONIO G. CALDERON, Presidente de la "Akademyang Wikàng Pilipino".

REFRENDADO: PAUL L. STANGL, B. S, M. Ph., Secretario interino y Vice-Secretario de la 'Akademya ng Wikàng Pilipino".


PREFACE

This historical, constructional period, in which the national ideals seem to acquire definite form; when national boundaries are tending to become defined more and more along lines of ethnical cleavage and entities group on race affinity; when the consciousness of a world mission becomes the logical fruit of widespread education, and each racial unit tends to arrange itself upon its natural base, to develop more fully and take its proper place in the concert of world powers to bear its share of the burden and the heat of the day in bringing to richer fruition the heritage of man; this is the time of creating new factors of linguistic development. In this epoch the natives of the Philippines, after being, for over three centuries shut off by a worse than Chinese wall of exclusion of progress, tight bound by the swaddling clothes of religious and secular prejudice, whereby growth was hindered, have at last been freed of the trammels, and in less than two decades have taken enormous strides forward on the path of national greatness. It is at such time, when the trammels of dialects and other variants of speech are most strongly made manifest, and prove the test of true national fitness. A united Germany with its people speaking diverse dialects was only solved by making one of them the standard and from the rest enriching it, making it the virile expression of national consciousness.The world has seen no strong nation adopt the language of another people; still less that of a race alien in thought, feeling, speech and habit. Hence, however well meaning it may be to try or implant the English speech in these islands as a common medium, it is so obviously a violation of all psychic and ethnic unities, that can never, in the opinion of the writer, be a lasting success. Hence a solution along those lines that centuries of experience has proven to be the only logical, because natural one, that of a developed national language based on national stock and material, enriched and perfected, but akin to the native spirit of rich and poor alike, is the only one that, in the end, will succeed. Whatever the place of English, no doubt important in the economic development of land and people, a national malasian language is bound to be the proper vehicle of a united Filipino people. Hence a book like the present, which gives concrete form to this innate aspiration, and whatever its present imperfections, which definitely shapes the raw material along plausible, stable lines of development, is worthy of applause, study and support. It can only be recomended to the thoughtful study of friend and foe alike, in order that it may fulfil its mission of aiding in the solution of that important question, the future language of the Filipino people. May it meet with success, and that each successive edition be a vast improvement on the preceding one, is the earnest wish of

PAUL L. STANGL, B. S. M. Ph.

The price of blood. I

"The time is rapidly approaching," says Hon. John Barret, President Cleveland's minister to Siam, "when Japan, China, Korea, Siam, and the Philippines will consume every pound of the South's surplus cotton, manufactured or raw, and make her absolutely independent of the British or European market. Every farmer, laborer, and manufacturer in the South have deep concern in America's Asiatic opportunity. There should not be a discordant note from the Roanoke to the Rio Grande in support of a policy to extend, protect and control the markets of Orient."

Friday, December 1, 1899 Akron Pioneer Press