Issue #21: The funny side of Tagalog 🇵🇭
Not long after I announced my 20th newsletter issue last week, I received one from one of my favorite content-creators, Anne-Laure LeCunff, who writes the blog and newsletter Ness Labs. Appropriately enough, she starts the newsletter with 25 reasons to start writing online. She even attached art of the same palette as mine! Blue and pink. What an amazing encouragement to keep up this creative project weekly.
On to the write-up! A format that makes me happy at the moment: book+music+art
Language vs Reality by N. J. Enfield
A follow-up on a previous post, I’ve finished the book and have come back to reflecting on it. The book is a collection of deep dives about the uses of language and how it helps us persuade and achieve goals, rather than make accurate depictions of reality. Thus, language is a strong tool for lawyers and not scientists.
One such deep dive is on the use of passive and active voice, and how much the use choice changes the amount of responsibility someone has in a described sequence of events. Recall the advice of William Strunk and E. B. White in Elements of Style: Use the active voice. Here’s the excerpt from the book:
The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive:
I shall always remember my first visit to Boston. This is much better than:
My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me. The latter sentence is less direct, less bold, and less concise. If the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me,”
My first visit to Boston will always be remembered, it becomes indefinite: is it the writer, or some person undisclosed, or the world at large, that will always remember this visit?”
It brought me to reflect on the Tagalog language of my home country. Tagalog (and other Philippine languages) have a sentence structure brings even more kinds of focus and nuance: the symmetrical voice is apparently an Austronesian construct, and there are at least four voices (instrumental, locative, benefactive, and casual). I’m just hypothesizing here, but this quality of our language may explain something that Nicholas Epley uncovered in his book Mindwise (my reflection on the book is here). It is that Southeast Asian cultures are more likely than Western ones to consider the context and underlying relationships when evaluating an action. When the way you speak gives options to shift your focus from actor to the patient, environment, or instrument, you can be more considerate and encompassing of other points of view. Tagalog doesn’t even have separate pronouns - It’s one of the least gendered languages out there.
The more I learn about how differently Tagalog is structured from other languages, the more I appreciate how I learned Tagalog from exposure (comprehensible input, as they call it in the adult language-learning sphere). At this point I could never unlearn Tagalog and start over by studying it formally using verb tables.
By the way, Filipino is indeed a different concept from Tagalog. Both are languages and have so much overlap that I could launch into an entire history and culture-based monologue about what makes them different.
Music of Note
Fall In Love Alone by Stacey Ryan is such a lovely earworm! It came out in 2022 but feels reminiscent of the 2000s and good old R&B. It has an especially smooth jazzy instrumental, and, you guessed it, an awesome bassline.
A Study in Watercolor
My series of micro-paintings continues! Yes, it is bamboo 🎍
Here’s a compilation of every song I’ve recommended on the newsletter:
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Peace!
-Isa