THERE’S THE RUB
Babel
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer
First Posted 11:30pm (Mla time) 12/05/2007
Someone tells me: The thing about their language is that they sound like they’re whining or remonstrating with each other with their long-drawn nasal sounds. We are at the Bangkok airport, caught in a layover of nine hours en route home, a situation conducive to making demented observations and unkind remarks. We are watching a group of Thai airport personnel engaged in animated conversation, their sudden bursts of laughter belying the notion of remonstration.
I say through the tiredness seeping through my bones: “You wonder what they’re saying about how we sound talking in Tagalog. For all you know they’re talking about us now, which is why they’re laughing their heads off.”
It’s not easy dozing off among the chairs in this cavernous place, something I’m normally able to do (used to be able to doze off standing on a bus in my student days). The airport’s air-conditioning is turned on full blast, offering an aftertaste of what we just had, and the modernist metal seats conduct the cold ferociously. You slouch on them for a while and you feel the cold radiating on your back. You would think people who had gone through so much trouble to build a spectacular edifice would have had the foresight to supply chairs that do not hold the promise of pneumonia.
I know, of course, the complaint just comes from envy that they’re able to build a spectacular edifice like this. I hadn’t been to Bangkok in years, and the last time I was here, they still had the old airport. And that already depressed me, the contrast between it and the Ninoy Aquino International Airport driving home the point about a Southeast Asian country that had progressed and another that had not. This new one adds whole new dimensions to the depression, its epic demonstration of confidence, if not bravado, driving home the point about a once developing country that has barged into the 21st century and another that has not.
And to think the Thais used to troop to the Mecca of knowledge that was the University of the Philippines in the 1960s and 1970s!
Listening to the airport personnel again, with their laughter and their elongated nasal twang, or whine, I am hit by sudden epiphany. Years after many Thais studied at the University of the Philippines and other universities abroad, their adeptness at the language, whether verbal or written, remains at best tenuous. It’s all passengers can do to carry on an easy conversation with airport personnel. You ask for directions, you have to rely more on the answerer’s physical gestures than on his words. I recall that the Far Eastern Economic Review used to have a field day in its Traveler’s Tales poking fun at the violence Thais wreak on the English language. I myself have heard all sorts of funny stories from friends about their experiences with Thais. One couldn’t understand why a flight attendant kept badgering him with “chiknapok,” only to realize after the attendant’s exasperated repetition that he was being asked if he wanted chicken or pork.
We, of course, pride ourselves in our apparent mastery of English (more apparent than real), particularly our ability to speak it with a reasonably understandable diction (including the often bizarre ones of congressmen), if not with a simulated American accent. The pride is not entirely without basis. Despite our deteriorating adeptness in English (a thing I would attribute in great part to the precipitous decline of reading, though the plague has spread to all parts of the world, even in Britain as a BBC report lamented), we still speak better English than our Southeast Asian neighbors. (The South Asians speak better English than we do.)
But there’s the rub. We speak better English than our Southeast Asian neighbors, but look at our Southeast Asian neighbors (including increasingly the former Indochinese ones) and you’ll see that nearly all of them have left us biting their dust. Singapore certainly has. Malaysia certainly has. Even Indonesia and Vietnam are so. Indeed, just look at this airport in Bangkok, as unabashed a display of prosperity as they come (you’d take a day traversing the expanse of it) and, well, what’s the feeling beyond depressed?
Maybe it has to do with language, with a grasp (or lack of it) of what it’s supposed to do. Those of us who keep emphasizing English as a way to communicate with tourists and to find jobs abroad -- which includes the current occupant in Malacañang; that was what she was saying in a graduation speech when she was heckled by one of the graduates -- may think we are saying the most commonsensical thing in the world. But other people would find that the battiest thing in the world. The primary function of language is not for a people to communicate with foreigners, it is for a people to communicate with themselves. The primary function of language is not for a government to communicate with other governments, it is for a government to communicate with its citizens.
Maybe that’s the reason they are what they are now and we are what we are now. Maybe they’ve built airports like this because they have found a way to talk to one another and tell one another exactly what to do. Maybe we’ve been reduced to looking for menial jobs in foreign companies or foreign shores because we’ve found a way to talk only to our employers and masters. Maybe they’ve been invited to the gala because they have interpreters who can tell the other guests what they’re saying and so engage them in conversation. Maybe we serve as waiters in the same event because we know enough to offer them a glass of wine and a smile. Maybe the twang and/or whine they emit when they speak is the sound of music and the mellifluous English our call-center army produces is the sound only of distant thunder.
Maybe we are cursed only to build an unfinished tower while speaking the language of Babel.
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