By: Jun Mar V. Martisano
Everyone has noticed the way in which the Times choose to spell the word “diocese;” it always spells it diocess, deriving it, I suppose, from Zeus and census. The Journal des Débats might just as well write “diocess” instead of “diocese,” but imagine the Journal des Débats doing so! Imagine an educated Frenchman indulging himself in an orthographical antic of this sort, in face of the grave respect with which the Academy and its dictionary invest the French language! Some people will say these are little things; they are not; they are of bad example. They tend to spread the baneful notion that there is no such thing as a high, correct standard in intellectual matters; that every one may as well take his own way; they are at variance with the severe discipline necessary for all real culture; they confirm us in habits of wilfulness and eccentricity, which hurt our minds, and damage our credit with serious people. (Matthew Arnold in “The Literary Influence of Academies,” 1865.)
In this fast changing world, a lot of things changed even the people’s way of communication. Little by little the way talk and the way we use our grammar is somehow declining in the sense that we don’t mind on the usage of it because for now what matters most is how it sounds like. When we complicate our grammar and when it sounds so good we immediately conclude it’s right we don’t even evaluate first and check whether it is right or wrong. That’s the most common problem among Filipinos who use English language. We are fond of playing with our grammar and ignoring the view of the fact that sometimes it may lead to confusion.
There are a lot of factors to be considered on this erratic problem. Media, technology and even the people that surround us contribute on this decline of grammar. If we are bent on finding a decline in standards, the place to look is not in the language itself but in the way it is talked about. What is largely missing is the idea that there is any pleasure or instruction to be derived from considering what makes good usage good. Rather, grammar comes increasingly to be regarded as a mandarin code that requires only ritual justification.
Grammar is declining due to cultural changes. Some may alter the way it should be to make it fit for their own taste without following the rules of international linguistics convention. But the question that runs in my mind now are that is it really declining or is it just evolving?
I believe that in the next decades English will surely survive whatever “abuses” its current critic complain of; meaning to say not just the people will go on using English and its descendants in their daily commerce but that they will continue to make art with it as well.
exegesis 