Sunday, January 20, 2008 - I Speak What?
Most people have no clue about the language they are speaking, or where it came from. We speak English in America. English in America, not Indian, or maybe I should say, Native American. The Mexicans, and most Central and South Americans, speak Spanish. The Brazilians speak Portuguese. That’s the way of the Western World. It’s colonization at its best. As most people know, American history is rich with immigration and missionary events. But then again, so is most of the world!
Being a Filipino native, we are also highly influenced by this “western world” of colonization. Unlike most countries in Far East Asia, The Spanish and Americans got to us, and their influences go very deep. The Spanish colonized us for over three hundred years, and the Americans saved us from the Japanese during World War II. But unlike the Mexicans, or the Americans, we do not speak outside languages like Spanish or English. We speak Tagalog, which is a mish-mash of Spanish, English, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, and the original language from that part of the world, Malay.
As to most people who don’t know where their language came from, I was one of them. When I was in high school, I learned about my own language the hard way. It came from an Indonesian guy named Howard. Of all people, Howard owned and ran a liquor store, only a couple of blocks away from my house in Los Angeles, called the Silver Glen Liquor Store. I was in high school in the early to mid eighties when he gave me my jaw-dropping language lesson.
Howard was a great guy. He gave my brothers Rene and John a job, to work at his store as a cashier. He also hired a couple of other neighborhood kids to work for him, at a time when they needed the job. At the time, Silver Glen Liquor was a local popular stop. Potato chips, sodas, beef jerky, popsicles, and an Atari video game, I would find a reason to go there, even for just a few seconds.
One afternoon, I had a very revealing conversation with Howard. He was telling me about a cousin of his who had just arrived from Indonesia, and how he was in the early process of learning English. He mentioned to me that he knew, being Filipino, that I spoke Tagalog. Then he told me that we spoke the same language, that of Malay.
My respond was: “I speak what?”
“Malay”, he said.
He then explained to me how Indonesians, Malaysians, people from Singapore, and Filipinos all spoke a diluted version of Malay, the Latin of our people. He then told me about how English, Spanish and French are all from Latin. That I already knew, but Malay, I had no clue.
My initial response was disbelief. I almost didn’t want to believe him. I asked him to prove it to me, and he responded by saying:
“How do you say goat in Tagalog?” Kambing, right? Well that’s how we say it in Indonesian, too!”
At this point, I was amazed! I never knew this.
He then starts counting in Indonesian: “Isa, dalawa, tatlo, apat, lima…” “Is that how you count, too?”
At this point, my jaw is on the floor! If an alien landed on Earth, and started speaking a similar language to us, like Arabic, Chinese, or some ancient language, then tells us its similar history, well that’s how I felt!
I simply never knew! The world got smaller at that moment for me. It was as if I found out I had more family than I thought. It started to make sense. It made me want to read and discover more about my cultural background, and made me appreciate this place called America.
After this event, I had a different view of Indonesians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, and people in that part of the world. Even though we have different countries, we all share the same background, going back even before written history.
You take things for granted. You don’t realize how incredibly similar Earthlings are. We have more similarities than differences, and this I am very sure of.
My older sister Beth, whose life in the last eight years have been nothing less than nomadic, (she, her husband and their daughter has visited more countries than most people know!) told me last year something I never realized about America. She said “The minute you live in America, you truly become an American.” There’s no other country on earth where you can do that. She’s lived in India, South Korea, and now lives in The United Emirates, and as she said, she will never call herself Indian, Korean, or Arabic, even if she became their citizen. Yet anyone can go to America, and immediately feel American!
What a great place!
I am very proud to be an American!
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