Movement for the Preservation of the Chabacano Language - 2

My search for the people behind the Movement for the Preservation of the Chabacano Language led me to Prof. Enrique (Ike) Escalante, who lives on Zulueta St in San Roque, Cavite City.

It was by purely by chance. I had asked family friend Bong Donato if he knew who could be behind the stickers we saw at Chefoo Restaurant. Bong suggested we ask Prof Escalante and his hunch was right.

Prof. Escalante must be in his late 60s. He graduated from the Cavite National High School the same year as one of my uncles, and his mother was a classmate of my grandmother at the old Sacred Heart Academy. In other words, he belongs to the Cavite City of old, when it was a small town, when people knew each other, and when residents shared the same schools, the same friends, and yes, the same unique language.

Like most Cavitenos of his generation, Prof Escalante shifts from English to Tagalog to Chabacano with ease. He is a linguist. He has made it his vocation to study the Chabacano language and has gone around the world talking about it.

"Who is the head of the Movement for the Preservation of the Chabacano Language?" I asked him.

"We have a group but when I'm not around to call meetings, they don't meet!" he replied, which to me meant that he was the de facto head of this sort-of movement.

"Pronounce these words for me!" he ordered and proceeded to write down the words como and poco. I did as I was told. "O, see? Why do we Cavitenos pronounce these words co-mu and po-cu?" He proceeds to explain that that seems to be the pattern when Chabacanos pronounce two-syllable words where the accent is on the first syllable. The tendency is to go soft on the second syllable. Something like that.

We didn't have much time to talk. He had an appointment in a few minutes. "I can't talk, I have to drive you away. I have a 2:00 appointment!" he said in a candid but friendly way.

"May I have your cell phone number?" I asked.

"I don't have a cell phone. I bother no one and no one bothers me!" he declared. But now I knew where to find him and he gave me his landline number.

My next question: "Do you have an email address?"

"I have an email address. I can receive but I can't send emails!" So much for high technology in Cavite City.

We exchanged email addresses and I gave him full my name. "Aha, so you're named after your grandmother!" I guess that was bound to crop up in a place like Cavite City where the old folks could tell who you were just by your name. Your first name, that is.

We exchanged pleasantries and I told him I'd see him again come Holy Week.

In the meantime, let me just try to figure out what he said about the words como and poco.

Ñora Monang Online?

Every year around the second week of November, the San Roque Parish Church in Cavite City publishes the fiesta souvenir (or is it souvenir fiesta?). It is a publication where City and Church officials greeted Caviteños as they prepared to celebrate the feast of the Nuestra Señora de la Soledad de Porta Vaga, Cavite City's patroness. It is also filled with paid advertisements and greetings from Cavite City folk who have since scattered to the four corners of the globe.

One of the most entertaining sections of the old souvenir fiestas was the yearly column entitled Ñora Monang which was written in Chabacano by, who else, Ñora Monang or whoever it was who was writing using that pseudonym. I think it was the first time that I read any kind of literature in Chabacano, since to Caviteños, Chabacano has always been a spoken language.

I was delighted to discover that Ñora Monang existed online, or at least one such piece written by her/him did. Click on this link to read the entire piece, excerpts of which are below. The piece came from the website Chabacano El Lenguaje di Niso.

Naku, sabi bo Chichay, basta ahora tatimbla yo pag ya culda yo aquel lindol qui ya pasa cun niso. Pinsaba yo fin del mundo ya. Naku, ansina pala ese lindol recio. Ta taranta bo, no sabi bo si cosa quidi hace. Ta miña todo el mi casa y pono.

Ya cuji cumigo ta barri yo na niso solar. Campanteng-campante yo. Ta canta-canta pa yo despacio aquel mga cancion de ayer qui ta canta Rogelio dela Rosa.

Bigla ya lang ya sinti yo ta miña el tierra abajo di mi pies. Ya susta yo. Pinsaba yo ta almaria lang yo. Aba! Santa Balbara! Ya mang lindol ya puerte. Por poco yo ya cae de culo.

Ya abraza yo aquel pono di coco junto mio. La Virgen, salva me, La Virgen salva me, ya riza yo. Ya para un ratito el temblor y dispues ya tira ya naman. Ya cae un coco cerca di mi tras. Pinsaba yo tiene qui ta tira cañon cumigo.

Click here for more of Ñora Monang.

Cavite City politics-2

I just got a text message from a friend saying that the May 2007 elections in Cavite City is shaping up as a fight between, on one hand, the incumbent Mayor Totie Paredes and Vice-Mayor Dino Chua, and on the other Ezon Medina and Omie Ramos. I was told Medina is the brother of the late Julian Medina who was Cavite City mayor in the early 1980s. Paredes is going on his third term.

I wonder, though, what Chua's plans really are. He is one of the politicians behind the formation of the party-list group Partido or Pwersa ng mga Bayaning Atleta (PBA). Yup, you guessed it. It will have basketball stars and other athletes as members. Similar acronym as Philippine Basketball Assocation, popular basketball league in the country.

The PBA (the party, not the league) has plans of penetrating the House of Representatives through the party-list system which was originally intended for the impoverished and marginalized sectors of Philippine society whose voices aren't heard by policy makers. The party chooses nominees, who become members of Congress depending on the number of votes they get.

Perhaps Filipino athletes, including stars of the PBA (the league, not the party), believe the public and the government aren't paying them enough attention, outside the three or four nights a week the public watches the PBA (the league, not the party) on TV. Hence, the run for Congress.

Cavite City's Dino Chua is the first nominee, while the second is basketball star Jerry Codiñera.

Will they win? Next to movie stars, count athletes as among those who automatically have a passport to elective office because of fame and name recall. Some names: Freddie Webb, Robert Jaworski, Philip Cesar, etc. That's why Manny Pacquiao is also reportedly in the running for the position of South Cotabato governor.

Filipinos, and Caviteños, will know for sure on March 29, the deadline for filiing certificates of candidacy for local posts.

Movement for the Preservation of the Chabacano Language

This is the sticker that greets Caviteños in select establishments in Cavite City.

It was actually my son who pointed them out to me. He noticed them stuck above the door handle at the entrance to Chefoo restaurant, a position Chefoo patrons are sure to see when they enter the place. We also saw it in another restaurant and a store along P. Burgos St in San Roque.

It seems odd though that the stickers we saw had letters scratched out, as though someone thought there was something wrong with the phrase.

Maybe because the word Buenas should have been written with an exclamation point, as in "Buenas!" which is a common salutation among Chabacanos to say hi and hello, good morning or good afternoon. Without the exclamation point, the uninformed reader would think that the three words Buenas Entra Ustedes form one sentence, and they do not.

More on the movement to preserve Chabacano in a later post, but suffice it to say that I was happy to know that such a movement exists, led and participated in by Caviteños belonging to my mother's generation.

Cumpleaño ya naman

Ya pasa dos cumpleaño na niso pamilya, ya olvida ya naman yo. Ya celebra birthday el sobrina y sobrino de mio. Carang cara daw de mi mga hermana este dos. Y pareho intelihente, como rin mga hermano y hermana di lo, sacao con niso pamilya, y siyempre con el mga tata din. Happy Birthday, Cheena y Josh!

Tahong Chips

Only in Cavite province will you find this: Tahong Chips.

They are sold by tahong (mussels) vendors and some sari-sari (variety) stores in a seaside district in the town of Bacoor, bearing the label "Ocean Fresh."

I couldn't help but ask the vendor (who was also selling raw mussels), whether the chips passed through proper food handling and processing and she assured me they did, having been checked by the Bureau of Food and Drug. Of course, she'd say that.

The ingredients are listed as: fresh mussels, flour, spices and salt. And I really don't want to know how they make these things. I do remember having tried them before, and not being particularly impressed. This time though they came in a more professional-looking package.

I asked my son's opinion and he too is not that hot about it. He says the Tahong Chips are blander than the shing-a-ling, the long, crispy chips Filipinos are familiar with. There's just a hint of mussels when you bite into the chips, which are probably more flour than anything else.

They're also a bit malansa, they give off an odor that makes you think you're by the sea in Bacoor or Kawit or in a fishpond with fresh mussels and oyster around you. Yes, the seaside towns of Cavite are known for tahong and talaba (oyster) and I guess someone was bound to find a way to make finger food out of them.

Cosa daw?

What exactly did Prof. Romanillos mean when he said the lyrics to the song below (Tindera de Tinapa) "were written by a San Roqueño because of the peculiar phonetic and orthographic characteristics, especially vowel alterations"?

I was interested because our family is from San Roque in Cavite City. Alla ya naci y ya quida grande mi aguela, pati ya mi nana y todo el hermano y hermana di eli. Cosa ba aquel "peculiar phonetic and orthographic characteristics, especially vowel alterations"?

Siyempre ya busca yo na Internet el definition de orthographic. Aquel pala, otro daw el spelling y pronounciation del mga de San Roque. El quiere eli abla, vowel alterations, como ta cambia daw mga de San Roque quel mga vowels. Pero no lang vowels si no masqui consonants, no ba?

In the song "Tindera de Tinapa," el cuarta ya quida cualta; fuerte/puerte ya quida fuelte; porque ya quida polque.

Es verdad! Na Chabacano, belday!

"El Tindera de Tinapa"

How could we have missed this? Maybe we weren't paying enough attention.

Three years ago, in 2004, the St. Scholastica's College (SSC) Grade School Department staged a musical called "El Tindera de Tinapa." SSC even posted a page in its website announcing the event, which is still there.

The blurb on the poster says "El Tindera de Tinapa. A zarzuelita set in a navy town in Porta Vaga, Cavite City about how the Doña (rich lady) haggles with the Tindera (vendor) to buy fish for a low, low price. Written in Chabacano by Teofista Cabezaz and translated in English by Prof. Naty Crame-Rogers and in Filipino by Mrs Filomena Callo. Music composed by Teofista Cabezaz and Espectacion Crame and edited by Cielto Mirandilla. Presented by the Children's and Teachers' Theater of St. Scholastica's College, Grade School Unit. Free to the public."

Prof. Emmanuel Luis Romanillos wrote about a popular folk song called "Tindera de Tinapa" in his book Chabacano Studies. The professor says it must have been written by a Chabacano from San Roque "because of the peculiar phonetic and orthographic characteristics, especially vowel alterations." He included a version of the song, abridged from the original "conserved for posterity" by Ms Norma Bersabe. How nice it is to hear and read this folk song.

Luego por la noche yo quieri cena
tostao de morisqueta y asao de tinapa.
Carne todo el dia, yo ta pastidia.
Pasa un tindera que curriendo ta lliva.
- Aba, ñora, cosa ba ese curriendo ta lliva?
-Tienda, ñora, di tinapa.
-Cuanto ba, ñora, un cualta?
-Yo ta vindi, dos numa.
-Ay que caro!
-Dos un cualta, sa puhunan kulang pa!
Yo ta vindi dos numa.
No uste si pintot pintot puelte
polque mi tienda di machaca.
-Ustedis mana tindera
cargao di machinada chuca.
-No uste abla ansina,
baka uste desgracia.

Speaking in codes

My grandmother is turning 95 later this year. She has difficulty walking but refuses to just stay home so she regularly goes out, hardly misses Sunday mass, and has to be pushed around in foldable a wheelchair. And her mind is as sharp as ever and extremely alert to her surroundings.

We went to the SM Mall behind Manila City Hall last Sunday and were inside an elevator, my grandmother seated in her wheelchair, on our way to a fast-food restaurant in the upper floors. We actually had the elevator to ourselves, family members and househelp plus the elevator girl, when suddenly a man entered and invaded the tiny enclosure that was to have been our own personal space for the few seconds it took to go up two floors.

The guy could have been Korean (Metro Manila is crawling with Koreans), or he could have simply been Chinoy (Chinese-Filipino). Frankly, I didn't even notice his Chinese/Japanese/Korean features until my grandmother blurted out, "Este hombre, de otro nacion?"

I almost jumped! What if the guy was multilingual and could understand that he was the subject of her question, "Is he from another country?" What if the alien could actually speak Chabacano, or worse, Spanish? I wanted to whisper in my grandmother's ear, "Mang, calla la boca! (Shut your mouth!)" as I'm sure she would have done had she been in my shoes.

An awkward silence followed her question, and I was praying for the elevator to go faster when suddenly my uncle, beside me, replied: "Estranjero?" I almost jumped again! Surely, this alien, the subject of speculation, could understand! What if the foreigner was really Pinoy, took the required 12 units of Spanish, and knew what estranjero meant? What if he committed to memory Dr. Jose Rizal's Mi Ultimo Adios and remembered the line "Adios, dulce estranjera"? What if? What if? And surely he must be Filipino because he was talking to the elevator girl!

Finally, after an eternity, the door opened and from the back of the elevator I felt like jumping over my grandmother's wheelchair to escape the stuffy enclosure. What an awkward few seconds!

And yet, how many times have we spoken in Chabacano (in my grandmother's case, Spanish) among ourselves if we didn't want others to understand what we were saying? There are a few places where you can't do that, though. Not in Zamboanga, where everyone speaks the language (my sister and I realized this while I was visiting her there once), and definitely not inside an elevator, where the subject could immediately sense he was the topic of the conversation, if he were not dense.

Of course, at 95, my grandmother can get away with anything, including talking about someone to his or her face, in Chabacano.

Sacred Heart

My Uncle sent me a short text message to say the monthly meetings of the Sacred Heart Academy Alumni Association of Cavite City have been discontinued. He quotes one of the members he talked to. "Members are getting fewer, with many survivors now disabled," he said. The last Sacred Heart gathering was a Christmas party held December last year but only seven showed up.

Caviteñas Long Ago-2

Sacred Heart was an exclusive school for girls that existed in Cavite City in the early decades of the last century. It figured a lot in my grandmother's stories because she studied there. I've written about it in an earlier post. (That post got a comment from JPS who is looking for information about Sacred Heart).

Anyway, in response to JPS: the remaining Benedictine sisters who used to run Sacred Heart in Cavite City are now living in their convent in Baguio. Tiene ve, ta bisita mi aguela con ilo na Baguio. Aquel ung madre, Sister Gala, ya quida madrina de mi aguela (wedding sponsor). Tiene eli sobrina, Sister Brigida, vivo pa y talla rin na Baguio.

JPS also mentioned the names Sister Beata and Sister Renate. According to my Uncle Bobby who accompanies my grandmother to visit the Benedictine nuns, Sister Beata has been long dead and is buried in Leyte.

At right is a photo of a Sacred Heart Academy reunion and, as the banner in the picture says, it was held in 1988, nearly 20 years ago. My grandmother is standing in front, third from left, the one with the black hair. In the old sepia photo on top, my grandmother is the one seated right smack at the center.

Also according to Uncle Bobby, there is a Sacred Heart Alumni Association meeting every month and is presided over by Ñora Puring Ballesteros.

Ferry service

Ya habla mi tio di tini ya naman daw ferry service na Cavite. This time, alla ya di si dock na detras del Cavite City Hall. Sabi yo, el ta usa ilo di quel, aquel cerca del PN. Bueno naman si tini ulit ferry. Pero cuando kaya?

Hydrofoil Days

In relation to Manila, Cavite City is a place that's always been so near yet so far. As in, you think it's so near because you can see it across Manila Bay from Roxas Boulevard. On a clear day, you can even see the water tank towering at Sangley Point (or is it PN?), and can almost distinguish (or imagine?) the city's landmarks.

But, as Cavitenos know, the City can be so far, given the traffic that seems to lengthen travel time as the years pass. So, what is supposed to be a 32-kilometer or so ride from Manila to Cavite--which technically should take less than an hour if you were travelling at 40 kph--stretches to two or even three hours because of the many chokepoints that line the route.

What has been an alternative mode of transport was by sea. After all, what faster way to get from point to point than by a straight line, and no straighter line could there be than one from the Philippine Navy Headquarters in Manila to the Philippine Navy Base in Cavite. Or at least points near those two PNs which are located on opposite sides of Manila Bay.

I remember as a child that we used to ride the hydrofoil, some sort of fast craft, going to Cavite which we boarded at PN Manila. I am reminded of those days every time I venture near Manila Bay.

Anyway, the hydrofoil disappeared, perhaps because the venture wasn't a viable one, but it would be replaced over the years by many other commercial ferry services that linked Cavite to Manila.

There were many incarnations of the ferry service, but last I checked, the ferry service seems to have been discontinued again. It's supposed to dock at the point beside PN (down the road from Cavite City Hall) but when I passed by recently, the compound seemed to have been shuttered for good, and there were no signs of ferry schedules and services.

Well, it's probably become a losing venture to those running the service. And for commuters, travel by sea is fast, yes. But the problem is once you get on land in Manila. How to get from the PN or the Cultural Center Complex behind to Manila or Makati is the big problem. So near, yet so far.

Chabacano Glossary

Thanks to the efforts of Ms Joy Picache de la Rosa and Mr Roger Santos, Caviteños can now consult an online glossary to look up Chabacano words, which may disappear from memory because the language is no longer spoken as often as it used to.

The glossary is posted in the website Chabacano: El Lenguaje di Niso whose articles I had also referred to in previous posts.

For easy reference even for non-Caviteños and non-Chabacano speakers, the glossary lists the original Spanish word, the phonetic transcription, the Chabacano equivalent and the English translation.

Below is a sample. You can access the glossary by clicking this link.

Smugglers' Paradise?

That piece below got me agitated enough to set aside my deadlines and sundry commitments to start blogging again.

Years ago, Cavite province was known throughout the country as smugglers' paradise, one that thrived through the protection of assorted goons and toughies in the mold of the late Nardong Putik, who became a legend allegedly because he ate bullets for breakfast and never got felled by them. Yep, Caviteños pride themselves on being tough as nails but they've also been known to use this grit and tenacity for not-so-legal endeavors.

And the news that they're turning Cavite City into a container port somehow brings back the ghosts of Cavite's smuggling past.

Yet when you talk of the bad that was associated with Cavite, you never imagined Cavite City embroiled in all that. That was the work of de afuera, as my uncle wrote sometime back. These de afuera were Caviteños from elsewhere in the province whom my uncle described as "people who were looked down upon because of their boorish behavior and lack of culture and aesthetics." And because they couldn't speak and understand Chabacano, they took no offense at being called de afuera and considered loco.

I remember my grandmother talking about the rest of Cavite as being the badlands (she singled out places like Imus with a reputation of being a town where the lawless reside), and Cavite City being somehow above and detached from all that, a civilized place where children spoke English, grew up to be professionals, played baseball and learned to rollerskate (according to my mother, she and her siblings rollerskated when they were children, proof of American influence that came in through Sangley Point).

Okay, okay, I may be unfairly romanticizing the past and harsh on de afuera but I couldn't help but recall biases of old and feel dread and impending doom after reading this morning's paper and seeing what they wanted to do with Cavite City. Que horror! Cosa ya di pasa con niso? Quilaya ya el mga genti na Cavite? Di intra ya todo el mga loco. Pobre naman niso todo!

Sa 'yo ang Tondo, Akin ang Cavite!

I nearly fell off my chair when I read the Philippine Daily Inquirer's front page article entittled "Arroyo’s birthday ‘gift’ to Revilla: Sangley Point." The gist of the story is that Gloria Arroyo "gave" Sangley to ex-Sen. Ramon Revilla to turn into a container terminal and special economic zone as a present on Revilla's 80th birthday.

What the......!!!!! Totally unbelievable! What has our nation come to? What has become of our leaders? Does being president allow you to choose any piece of real estate in the Philippines and give it as a birthday gift to a favored friend? Aren't there supposed to be laws and procedures for doing these things? Aren't there supposed to be plans discussed and drawn up first before you do these things?

Revilla, self-proclaimed womanizer and has-been action star, happened to be a former senator from Cavite whose son is an incumbent senator. His family, including 30 of his 50 or so children (I kid you not!), showed up to greet their father.

The president dropped by and took part in the celebration. According to the Inquirer: "President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, a special guest of Revilla’s during his birthday bash on Wednesday night, told the former senator and action star to prepare the executive order that would make his birthday wish come true."

So all Revilla has to do is write an executive order, leave it at the president's desk at Malacanang, and voila! Sangley Point becomes Ramon Revilla kingdom. Oh my god!!!! I wonder what he plans to do with it? Make it a loading dock for all the fighting cocks that he imports from God knows where? Yes, he was once a customs agent or something in the government, but exactly what interest and expertise does he have in turning Sangley Point into a container terminal and economic zone? What does he know of those things? What the hell is happening?

Yes it sort of reminds me of that movie starring Fernando Poe Jr and Ramon Revilla himself--"Iyo ang Tondo, Akin ang Cavite (Tondo is Yours, Cavite is Mine). I wonder what gifts the president gave herself and close family members, if she can give Sangley Point someone who is not even an incumbent senator, whose intellectual capabilities failed to manifest themselves when he was in the Senate, and who spent his time at the Senate session hall doodling away on sheets of bond paper!

Read the story here and weep.