The illogic and illiteracy of this De La Salle professor of Filipino.

SABBATICAL NOTES. 6 JULY 2014. SUNDAY. N1. 
The illogic and illiteracy of this De La Salle professor of Filipino. 

I AM NOT GOING to name this academic of De La Salle University. He might enjoy the attention given him, as he is enjoying now the attention of all those ethnocentric people at that Tanggol Wika site, and perhaps, some of his comrades at the Alliance of Concerned Teachers. He says in his posts he is a member of ACT. The last time I checked, ACT is an organization of liberals announcing freedom to every person in the Philippines.

This associate professor--how did he become one when he cannot even write a grammatically correct English sentence?--argues without context, and his facts are neither here nor there. Is it because he loves his Filipino dialect so much that he has not learned enough English grammar to be able to come up with a clear, concise, and coherent set of sentences? As a communications professor, how can he even stand before his students who seem to know better than him?

Check his sentences and you realize he does not deserve to become a communications professor at one of the more prestigious universities in Manila and in the country. It is one of the best universities in Asia, according to some reports as well. And he does not even know how to use the em dash, dear God!

I am not going to itemize his mistakes here. The point is that this man does not know how to communicate his fuzzy ideas. Read him and be the judge:

"At this point, we should be shooting regionalists--who clamor for the death of the national language--pointblank in the head. They are as dangerous as imperialists who wreck havoc on what is left of our wretched motherland. They are traitors and intellectual lightweights who resurrected old debates long ago by the 1987 Constitution. At the very least, they should be expelled from the republic." [Sourced from a screen grab, 5 Jul 2014; cfwww.facebook.com/teacheragca]

Let's leave his grammar. We are all ESL writers anyway. And for as long as we are ESL writers, we will commit these mistakes, and we can forgive him in the way we should forgive ourselves.

However, when he boasts like that, with his ideas going nowhere, we have to check him:

First, regionalists, whoever they are, are not clamoring for the death of the national language. There is no national language. The last time I checked, the national language, named Filipino, has yet to evolve, and the one he has right now, is a dialect of Tagalog. He has illusions, this professor. He has dementia too. That constitution he is talking about is presenting an ideal, and that ideal does not exist: 'the national language of the Philippines is Filipino and as it evolves...'

Second, the threat of 'shooting regionalists pointblank in the head'--is it 'shooting in the head pointblank', or 'shooting pointblank in the head'?--is a threat. We ask all regionalists, whoever they, are to be careful. This man is murderous. He has blood in his hands. He has evil personified in his heart. Given that he does not know his grammar, he might do it. Shooting another person needs the grammar of the fingers, the grammar of gatilio, the grammar of his gun. Shoot with what?

Third, these regionalists are not traitors. The Tagalogistas are. He should read Vicente Albano Pacis who called them 'criminals' of the Constitution. And Pacis referred to the 1935 Constitution that provided the wrong reason for the imposition of a national language, a wrong reason repeated in this academic's Cory Aquino Constitution. He should also read the proceedings of both the 1935 Constitution and the 1987 Constitution so he will learn some more what this 'clamor' of the non-Tagalog peoples is all about. Displaying his ignorance of the context of this fundamental law will not exempt him from his responsibility to be more prudent.

Fourth, the last time I checked, these regionalists are NOT intellectual lightweights. Many of them are scholars, academics like him, creative writers, critics, lexicographers. And many of them are Tagalog speaking people.

Now, I challenge him to rebut these issues as logically as he can.

If he can.