FAMILIA WENNO PAMILIA AND THE USE OF “BORROWED” LETTERS

 I just ended a call from a friend who is writing an Ilokano learning material for MTBMLE in partial requirement for her MA. She told me that her adviser and validators have different opinions on the use of “borrowed” letters such as f, v, z, and q and she doesn’t know now who to follow.

Here’s my response (warning: I am rude and frank):

For Pete’s sake, why do we still have such teachers who are teaching c, f, v, z as borrowed letters? Think: You have a child named Frestelyn in your class. You will tell her that the first letter of her name is borrowed from the letters of the Filipins’ former colonizer. What ideology are you teaching? You want the child to think that her language is so disabled that it cannot provide a first letter for her name, so her parents borrowed from Kastiloy?

Think: this xenophobic and racist way of teaching letters is teaching children to hate their language. 

Instead: teach letters as an evidence of our rich cultural and linguistic encounters and our use of language today as a product of these encounters. 

She asked me: so, what will I use: familia or pamilia?

I answered: teach both. Why limit the child in using a specific spelling if both spelling mean the same? If you limit the child in this case, you also limit his imagination to think and to trace the beginning or history of different words hidden in their spelling.

So, what do you suggest?

She asked moi.

You want a smooth path to graduation, follow your adviser.

You want to experience the rigor of doing a graduate research that will provide real, well-thought of, and novel output, walk through your adviser to understand your idea.

(Below: kape. Or kafe. It's the same by the way. But I am now closer to approaching it's Spanish, cafe, Turkish kahveh, Arabic qahwa, and Dutch koffie)

(Addition: kapi. I experienced this in my class. A child said: ta kapi kuna met ni lolok (because lolo pronounce it kapi. We must lay all these cards to our learners. If the child is a keen observer, this differences in pronunciation, spelling, may lead him towards investigation of dialects)