Babel

Imagine yourself preparing for a bungee jump. The harness and ropes are tied to your body and the staff tells you: “No jump.” You hear it as “Now jump” and jump, not knowing that the ropes have not been secured to a cable or whatever structure from which you are about to jump.

That was what happened in Spain two years ago: A 17-year-old Dutch tourist jumped to her death from a bridge. She had the harness on but didn’t know that the ropes had not been tied to the bridge. The Spanish guide said “no jump” but it seems—this had to be reconstructed from the guide’s account—she may have heard it as “now jump.”

The case went to the courts, with the bungee guide, and the owner of the firm, being found guilty of negligence for three reasons: The girl was underage, bungee jumping from bridges over a highway is not allowed in Spain, and the bungee handler had bad language skills.

I thought of how the case was the tower of Babel in reverse. You will remember the story in the Old Testament of men trying to build a tower to reach heaven. Furious with the arrogance of humans, God made them begin to speak in different languages. Unable to understand each other, they could not push through with their Tower of Babel, and “Babel” since then has referred to any situation where chaos ensues because people can’t understand one another.

Precarious language

The death of the Dutch teenager shows how tour agencies, especially those doing extreme sports, need to recognize how precarious languages can be. The Spanish court hearing the bungee jumping case ruled that the fatal misunderstanding came from “incorrect use and pronunciation of English.”

The irony is that a Spaniard and a Dutch were trying to communicate with a lingua franca, English, but with all kinds of possibilities. English and Spanish use the same “no” but the “o” is short in Spanish and long in English. The Dutch word for “no” is “nee” (pronounced like the English “nay”) so maybe there was a disconnect with the English “no.” Even worse, I realized with horror, the Dutch word for “now” is “nu,” pronounced somewhat like “nyo.” Was it possible that the Dutch teenager heard “no jump” as “nu (Dutch) jump”?

International tourism is growing in the Philippines but we are not able to cope in terms of infrastructure, particularly airports and roads… and human resources, including language skills. I recently talked with a professor from a Chinese university and he told me that Chinese tour agencies have been asking for help to get more Filipino tour guides who can  speak Putonghua or Mandarin Chinese. There just aren’t enough of them.

Linguistic competency is even more complicated—a matter of not just speaking a language but having cultural literacy. We boast that we have many Filipinos who can speak English, but the English you need with tourists, especially the serious ones, has to be of a higher standard.

I am reminded of a joke, probably based on an actual incident, involving a foreigner asking a local tourist guide as they looked at a church: “Oh, this must be very old.” The guide answers, “Yes, mam, very old, built before the Spanish came.”

Languages can divide, and confuse. But working in anthropological linguistics, I think linguistic diversity can be something to celebrate. Each language has words and phrases that defy translation. Think of the Filipino “nakakataba ng puso,” which sounds horrible as “my heart is being fattened” but, in Filipino, captures so well the feelings of being moved and being touched by someone’s graciousness.

That’s why it’s good to keep some of the original words that we borrow, or teach those original words if we are raising children to be multilingual. I always remind my kids about the magic word “please” but sometimes forget to remind them about the equivalents in Tagalog (adding “paki” as a word alone, or as a prefix to a verb—for example “pakikuha,” or “please get”), in Cebuano (“palihug”), in Minnan Chinese… Now that would be a real feat because it will range from “pai tok” (closest to “please”) to a long “ma huan di” (“sorry to inconvenience you”) to “pai se ho” (“I’m really ashamed to ask but…”). I’m also always impressed, and charmed, hearing Filipino-Americans speaking mainly English but attaching “po.”

In multilingual environments, we overcome Babel by borrowing from each other. The Japanese may be very nationalistic but their language is peppered with garaigo (loan words imported with very little change, for example “handubagu” for “handbag”) as well as “wasei-eigo” (English words that are “japanified”—for example “firipin-pabu,” or a pub or bar with many Filipino workers).

Now ‘na,’ more ‘pa’

Filipinos are always blending our languages with English in social conversations. My favorites for Tagalog and English blending are “now na” and “more pa.” If we stick to English alone and want to emphasize our “now,” we raise the volume of our voice. Using “now na” underscores the urgency, but in a
sweet way as we shift to a more affectionate, if not teasing tone. “More pa” goes through that metamorphosis as well. Imagine the situations that start with “now na,” and end, or think we’ve ended, with “more pa.”

There seems to be no limits to the admixtures of languages. Wilkinson Wong Gonzales, a Filipino student doing graduate work in English language and linguistics in Singapore, recently delivered a lecture at UP on “Hokalish,” a “trilanguage” combining Hokkien (Minnan) Chinese, Tagalog and English. An example: “Oh, no, lumalaohui” with English (Oh, no), Tagalog (the prefix luma) and Chinese (laohui, which means bleeding).

During the open forum, I suggested research among Filipino-Chinese in non-Tagalog areas because in effect, you might end up with quadrilanguages—for example, combining English, Chinese, Cebuano and Tagalog. My father’s side is from Davao and there, the ethnic Chinese often end their sentences, already a mix of English, Chinese and Tagalog words, with the Cebuano “man,” said in a Chinese tone.

We should revisit the biblical story of Babel and emphasize the moral lesson against arrogance, and that when people with different languages meet, we should be humble enough to try to overcome those linguistic barriers, exchanging and sharing words to build, not new Towers of Babel, but friendships.

mtan@inquirer.com.ph