A unified approach to the proper use of punctuation in English – Part II

As with all the alphabet-based languages, English is primarily dependent on word choices and their combinations for the successful delivery of ideas. In written form, however, English would be so clunky and insufferably confusing without the benefit of punctuation. Whether short or long, in fact, what makes sentences and expositions in English eminently readable and understandable is their proper use of punctuation marks—whether the comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parenthesis, or period—to clarify meaning and set off boundaries between structural units of the sentence.

But precisely when do we use each of these punctuation marks in our sentences and expositions? And in particular, which of the punctuation marks do we use to set off a parenthetical—by definition, any inserted amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence—from a main sentence?

In “The parenthesis and its uses,” a six-part essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2008, I attempted to come up with a unified answer to all of these questions. I did so in the course of explaining the various grammatical and structural considerations involved in punctuating parentheticals. I posted the first part of those wide-ranging discussions in last week’s edition of the Forum; this time I am posting the second of the three-part series (September 25, 2010).

The parenthesis and its uses: the appositive phrase

We will now discuss the appositive phrase found in the following sentence that I presented for evaluation towards the end of Part I: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” The appositive phrase here is, of course, the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” It’s an added state­ment that gives context and texture to this vague, bare-bones sentence: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

On closer scrutiny, we will find that the appositive phrase is actually a simplified form of the nonrestrictive relative clause in this sentence: “Cleopatra, who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” It is, in fact, originally the relative clause “who was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” but with both the relative pronoun “who” and the linking verb “was” taken out.

That grammatical streamlining process produces a modifier in noun form—“the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later”—that is in apposition or equivalent to the noun form it modifies—“Cleopatra.” Indeed, appositive phrases are a compact and concise way of describing people, places, and things or of qualifying ideas within the same sentence. They allow us to provide more details about a subject without having to start another sentence—a process that sometimes undesirably slows down the pace of an unfolding exposition or narrative.

The use of appositive phrases, we now will probably recall, is also one of the most efficient ways of combining sentences. It allows a related statement from another sentence to be folded into the sen­tence that precedes it. The sentence that we are evaluating now, for instance, has combined these two sentences: “Cleopatra greatly in­fluenced the affairs of the Roman Empire. She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” By making the state­ment in the second sentence an appo­sitive in the first, we get a sentence that’s richer in texture and more interest­ing to read: “Cleo­patra, the le­gendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly in­fluenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

Such constructions also have the added virtue of allowing us to develop the basic statement of a sentence unimpeded. Assume that we have already written this basic statement: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” If we use the appositive phrase “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” to form a new sentence after it, that new sentence would often become a stumbling block to developing the basic statement. Indeed, with a powerful statement like “She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” getting in the way, it won’t be an easy task to go back to the thread of our basic statement and develop it. In contrast, folding that powerful statement into an appositive phrase in the first sentence neatly sidesteps the potential continuity problem while making that first sentence much more readable and interesting.

The appositive phrase we have discussed above is of the non­restrictive type, which means that it isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence even if it adds important additional information to it. Nonrestrictive appositive phrases are parentheticals that, like non­restrictive relative clauses, need a pair of enclosing commas to set them off from the sentence.

But some appositive phrases are of the restrictive type and they don’t need those commas. An example of the restrictive appositive phrase is the phrase “Pliny the Elder” in this sentence: “The Roman scholar and encyclopedist Pliny the Elder distinguished himself as a cavalry commander in Germany and later served as a well-respected procurator in Gaul, Africa, and Spain.”

We must keep in mind, though, that restrictive appositive phrases rarely get much longer than the three-word example—“Pliny the Elder”—given above. This is because long, extended phrases generally don’t function well as restrictive appositives; without the enclosing commas that set off nonrestrictive appositive phrases from a sentence, extended phrases used as restrictive appositives tend to make sentences convoluted and difficult to grasp.

Try reading this sentence, for instance: “The 1965 film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines is about a wacky cross-channel air race that dangled £10,000 in prize money to bring flyers from all over the world.” The restrictive appositive phrase here is the seven-word movie title “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines,” which, if it weren’t italicized or placed within quotes in the sentence, would have made that sentence so difficult to grasp.    

Indeed, what we will encounter more often is the restrictive appositive, which identifies a person, place, or thing more closely by name in just, say, one to three words, like “Regina” and “Jennifer” in this sentence: “My brother-in-law’s sister Regina gave birth to a boy as their sister Jennifer was driving her to the hospital.”

Here, the appositives “Regina” and “Jennifer” aren’t set off by commas because both are restrictive—they can’t be omitted from the sentence without affecting its basic meaning. They serve to make it clear that the speaker’s brother-in-law has at least two sisters—the one who gave birth and the other who drove her to the hospital. Without those restrictive appositives, in fact, the sentence becomes incoherent: “My brother-in-law’s sister gave birth to a boy as their sister was driving her to the hospital.”

But this question will obviously linger in our minds: What if we supply the enclosing commas and make those two appositives nonrestrictive instead, as in this construction: “My brother-in-law’s sister, Regina, gave birth to a boy as their sister, Jennifer, was driving her to the hospital”? The answer, as I will now explain, is a categorical “no.”

In its nonrestrictive form (with the enclosing commas), the appositive “Regina” implies that the speaker’s brother-in-law has only one sister whose name happens to be Regina. However, the other nonrestrictive appositive, “Jennifer,” also implies that both the speaker’s brother-in-law and his sister Regina have only one sister whose name happens to be Jennifer.

This, of course, contradicts the earlier implication that the speaker’s brother-in-law has only one sister, Regina. Indeed, he has at least two sisters, Regina and Jennifer. This is why it isn’t advisable to put what should logically be a restrictive appositive into a nonrestrictive form, for these two forms are neither grammatically and semantically equivalent nor interchangeable.

Even if there’s no possibility of an identity mix-up, the restrictive appositive form is often preferable to the nonrestrictive form if the appositive and the word it identifies are so closely related, as in this example: “Her husband Alfredo is trying his luck as an overseas foreign worker.” Here, it can be argued that commas should set off “Alfredo” because this name isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence, thus making it a nonrestrictive appositive. However, the nouns “her husband” and “Alfredo” are so closely related that they can logically be considered a single noun phrase, “her husband Alfredo.” The commas then become superfluous, making “Alfredo” a restrictive appositive.   

We will take up the parenthesis by dashes and the parenthesis by parentheses next week in the third and last part of this series.

Next Week: The parenthesis by dashes and the parenthesis by parentheses

-------

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, January 25 and February 2, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

A unified approach to the proper use of punctuation in English

As with all the alphabet-based languages, English is primarily dependent on word choices and their combinations for the successful delivery of ideas. In written form, however, English would be so clunky and insufferably confusing without the benefit of punctuation. Whether short or long, in fact, what makes sentences and expositions in English eminently readable and understandable is their proper use of punctuation marks—whether the comma, semicolon, colon, semicolon, dash, parenthesis, or period—to clarify meaning and set off boundaries between structural units of the sentence.

Punctuation marks, of course, usually serve the basic purpose of providing desired pauses and stops within a sentence, as in this sentence from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” Here, we have the commas providing short pauses, the semicolons, longer pauses; and the period, a full stop. Then here’s a sentence that uses a colon to formally and emphatically introduce something: “This is what he always watched for in his business: the bottom line.” And finally, from a short-story by a friend of mine, Palanca Awards Hall of Famer Ed Maranan, here’s a sentence that uses a pair of dashes to set off a parenthetical remark from the main sentence: “Those words seemed to have an effect on the boy, whose interest in his little birthday gift—and yes, pride in his grandpa—was growing by the minute.” (Click this link to read my discussions with Ed about the punctuation of this sentence.)

This brings us to the big question regarding these punctuation marks: Precisely when do we use each of them in our sentences and expositions? And in particular, which of the punctuation marks do we use to set off a parenthetical—by definition, any inserted amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence—from a main sentence?

In “The parenthesis and its uses,” a six-part essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2008, I attempted to come up with a unified answer to all of these questions. I did so in the course of explaining the various grammatical and structural considerations involved in punctuating parentheticals. I would like to share the wide-ranging discussions in those six essays with Forum members, so I have reconstituted them into three parts for consecutive posting in the Forum.

Here now is the first of those three parts (September 18, 2010):

The parenthesis and its uses - I

We are all familiar with the two curved marks that we know as the parenthesis ( ), but what some of us may not know is that in English grammar, the parenthesis is actually any amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence that’s set off from a sentence or passage by some form of punctuation. That punctuation can be those two curved marks, of course, but depending on the importance of the inserted information and the writer’s intention, it can also be a pair of enclosing commas or a pair of enclosing dashes.

Let’s take a look at the following forms of the parenthesis along with examples of each:

(1) Parenthesis by comma: (a) “Ferdinand Magellan, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” (b) “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”

(2) Parenthesis by dashes: “Their kindly uncle was terminally ill—they said they didn’t know it then—but his nephews and nieces just went on their merry ways.”

(3) Parenthesis by parentheses: “While I was driving it out of the used-car dealer’s yard, the nicely refurbished 1994 sedan (the dealer assured me its engine had just been overhauled) busted one of its pistons.”

In each of the three examples above, the information set off by the punctuation marks—whether by commas, dashes, or parentheses—is called a parenthetical, and its distinguishing characteristic is that the sentence remains grammatically correct even without it. A parenthetical is basically added information; however, it isn’t necessarily optional or semantically expendable. It may be needed to put the statement in a desired context, to establish the logic of the sentence, or to convey a particular tone or mood for the statement. In fact, the punctuation chosen for a parenthetical largely determines its optionality or importance to the statement.

So the big question about parentheticals is really this: Under what circumstances do we use commas, dashes, or parentheses to punctuate or set off a parenthetical from a sentence?

In Example 1(a) above, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” is what’s known as a nonrestrictive relative clause. A nonrestrictive relative clause is a parenthetical that provides information that’s not absolutely needed to understand the sentence; in other words, it is nondefining information. The sentence will thus remain grammatically and semantically intact without it: “Ferdinand Magellan was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Without the nonrestrictive relative clause, however, the sentence loses a lot of valuable information about its subject, “Ferdinand Magellan”; in fact, the intended context for the statement disappears completely.

For such type of parenthetical, the most appropriate choice of punctuation is a pair of enclosing commas, as was used in the original sentence. It won’t do to punctuate a nonrestrictive relative clause with dashes or parentheses, for either of them would render the information optional, as we can see in these two versions of that sentence:

“Ferdinand Magellan—who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521—was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

“Ferdinand Magellan (who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521) was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

Both of these sentence constructions run counter to the writer’s original intention.

We must keep in mind, though, that the same parenthetical—“who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521”—would have become a restrictive relative clause had the subject been a generic noun like, say, “the explorer,” in which case the pair of enclosing commas would have been rendered unnecessary: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The absence of the enclosing commas indicates that the nonrestrictive relative clause has become a restrictive one.

Obviously, the following questions will come to mind when that happens: Why not leave those enclosing commas alone? What difference does it make if we let those commas stay even after changing “Ferdinand Magellan” to “the explorer”?

The reason lies in the basic grammatical difference between a proper noun and a generic noun. We will recall that a proper noun is one that designates a particular being or thing, and that as a rule in English, a proper noun is capitalized to indicate this fact. A proper noun, moreover, has this important characteristic: it generally won’t accept a limiting or restrictive relative modifier to define it. By its very name, a proper noun is supposed to have already defined itself, making it one of a kind.

Now, we need to recall at this point that a relative clause or a “who”-parenthetical that comes after a proper noun—“Ferdinand Magellan” in this case—becomes a restrictive clause or limiting modifier when it’s not enclosed by a pair of commas. It is therefore grammatically incorrect for the subject “Ferdinand Magellan” to be followed by a relative clause that’s not enclosed by commas, as in this erroneous construction: “Ferdinand Magellan who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” Indeed, the parenthetical “who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521” will always need the pair of enclosing commas in such cases.

It’s an altogether different thing when we replace a proper noun with a generic noun in such sentence constructions. We will then have two grammatical choices. If our intention is to, say, make “the explorer” specifically refer to “Ferdinand Magellan” and to no other person, then we need to modify it with a restrictive relative clause—one without the enclosing commas, as was done previously: “The explorer who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521 was actually a Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.”

On the other hand, if by “the explorer” we mean any explorer at all who had claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown, we would need to modify that generic noun with a nonrestrictive clause or nonlimiting modifier instead: “The explorer, who claimed the Philippine islands for the Spanish crown in 1521, was not the same Portuguese whose native name was Fernão Magalhães.” The enclosing commas—along with the mandatory conversion of the predicate of the sentence into a negative form—indicate that the person referred to isn’t unique but one of a number who made the claim; he could not have been the same Ferdinand Magellan referred to in the sentence with the restrictive relative clause.

Now let’s evaluate the second sentence that I gave earlier as an example of parenthesis by comma: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.” Here, the parenthe­tical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later” is what is known as the appositive phrase. It is a statement that serves to explain or identify the noun or pronoun that comes before or after it.

The appositive phrase is an extremely useful grammatical device for giving context and texture to what otherwise might be very bland or uninformative sentences. We will continue this discussion in next week’s edition of the Forum.

Next Week: The nonrestrictive appositive phrase

-------

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, January 12 and 18, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

A potent tool for whittling down complex sentences into simple ones

Along with clarity, conciseness is a hallmark of good writing. The astute writer knows that in written exposition, what ultimately matters isn’t the flurry of words he or she is capable of generating but the elimination of every word that’s not absolutely necessary to the successfully delivery of the idea. One of the potent grammatical tools for this whittling down process is the so-called reduction of adjective clauses, which involves the conversion of adjective clauses in complex sentences into structurally simpler, more concise adjective phrases. When done just right, this process neatly does away with the subordinating conjunction and the passive verb form that links the subordinate clause to the main clause, and voila! what emerges is a compact, smoother single-clause sentence that’s much easier to read both silently and aloud.

In an essay I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2004, “Reducing adjective clauses for conciseness,” I discussed this sentence-simplification tool in some detail. I am now posting that essay in this week’s edition of the Forum in the hope that you’ll find its prescriptions helpful in making your own sentences and expositions more concise and more readable. (September 10, 2010)

Reducing adjective clauses for conciseness

The mark of fluent English-language writers or speakers is the way they effortlessly do away with words that, although mandated by formal grammar, only slow down the delivery of their ideas. Nonnative users of English, on the other hand, often stick to the grammar protocols tenaciously, leaving no grammatical gaps in their sentences that might betray their less than perfect proficiency in the language. As might be expected, of course, this desire to treat syntax and semantics with mathematical precision achieves the exact opposite. It results in stiff, unidiomatic English that clearly identifies the users as nonnative ones trying mighty hard not to be perceived as such.

One aspect of English where exactitude in syntax clearly doesn’t pay is in the use of adjective clauses. Recall that adjective clauses are those extended modifiers that give more details about nouns to put them in better perspective. Adjective clauses, we will also remember, are normally introduced by the relative pronouns “that,” “which,” “who,” “whom,” “whose,” and “where,” which link the additional ideas to the main (and independent) clause.

Let’s see how this relative linking mechanism works by examining the following sentences: “The plane that is flying over the village right now is a Boeing 747.” “An old bidding strategy, which is rarely used these days, won them the lucrative contract.” “The woman who was looking for me this morning is my fiancée.” “The street where she passes every night is always well-lighted.” “The caretaker to whom she entrusted her house proved untrustworthy.” “That candidate whose English is so atrociously bad might just win the election.”

Most nonnative speakers of English, not yet wise to the highly idiomatic character of the language, will often write or articulate those adjective-clause-bearing sentences above in exactly the way they are shown. Native speakers, however, routinely shortcut the construction of such sentences; they get rid of words not essential to conveying their meaning. Their usual targets are the subordinating conjunction and the passive verb form that links the subordinate clause to the main clause. This technique, when done successfully without materially changing the meaning of the sentence, is called the reduction of adjective clauses. The simple, forthright process converts the adjective clauses into structurally simpler, more concise adjective phrases.

See what happens to the six sentences when this reduction technique is done just right (bracketed are the words that have been knocked off without changing the meaning of the sentence): “The plane [that is] flying over the village right now is a Boeing 757.” “An old bidding strategy [which is] rarely used these days won them the lucrative contract.” “The woman [who was] looking for me this morning is my fiancée.” “The street [where] she passes every night is always well-lighted.” “The caretaker [to whom] he entrusted her house with proved untrustworthy.” “That candidate [whose English is] with the atrociously bad English might just win the election.”

The adjective reduction process is simplicity itself when the relative pronoun is followed by “be” in any of its forms. In the case of the first four adjective-clause-bearing sentences above, all of which use “be,” we simply drop the linking phrases “that is,” “which was,” “who was,” and “where” and do absolutely nothing else. The meanings remain the same. But with sentences that use verbs other than “be,” the reduction often calls for a minor revision of the adjective clause to keep their meanings intact. See, for instance, how confusing the fifth sentence becomes when it simply drops “to whom” and leaves it at that: “The caretaker she entrusted her house during her absence proved untrustworthy.” Converting the relative clause into a prepositional noun phrase using “with” restores the meaning: “The caretaker she entrusted her house with during her absence proved untrustworthy.”

Reduction is also possible when what follows the relative pronoun is an active verb. The relative pronoun can then be dropped and the verb changed to its –ing form. In this way, a sentence like “Her allergy is a rabid type that arises from childhood trauma” reduces to “Her allergy is a rabid type arising from childhood trauma.” The adjective clause morphs into an adverb phrase. 

Not all sentences with adjective clauses can be reduced meaningfully, however. In particular, reduction fails when a sentence contains the modal auxiliary verbs “should,” “may,” “can,” or “must.” The element of conditionality provided by these words gets lost in the reduction, distorting the meaning of the sentence. Consider this example: “This uniform, which should be worn at all times during regular working days, will be provided free to all personnel.” Its mandatory tone vanishes in this wrongful reduction: “This uniform, worn at all times during regular working days, will be provided free to all personnel.”

Adjective clause reduction definitely makes sentences compact and smoother, but we should be careful in doing it to avoid mangling our intended ideas. (February 18, 2004)

-------

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, February 18, 2004, © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. This piece subsequently appeared as Chapter 100 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

When it greatly matters what English accent we’ve acquired

Does it really matter what English accent we’ve acquired? For our day-to-day spoken communication with our own countrymen, not really that much. It’s anything goes for everybody, from primary-school teachers all the way to the movers and shakers in the corporate world, in the halls of Congress, and in the higher echelons of government. We all can get by with our own variety of Taglish, Ilocano English, Bicol English, or Visayan English in the same way that many Chinese get by with their Chinglish, the Japanese with their Japlish, the Singaporeans with their Singlish, and the South Koreans with their Konglish.

In the more demanding outsourced call-center services industry, however, great premium is placed on what’s called “USA 101” for the North American market and “Aussie 101” for the Australian market. Both require a clear, neutral English accent, which means none of—or the ruthless elimination of—the distracting peculiarities of the nonnative spoken Englishes I enumerated earlier.

Indeed, the accent-neutralization of one’s English is the hefty price of acceptance to a call-center job, and in the following essay that I wrote for my English-usage column in The Manila Times in 2008, I describe what it takes to acquire a globally understandable, acceptable, and bankable spoken English. (September 4, 2010) 

 

On English accents and globalization

I recently mentioned in my column in The Manila Times that prospective Filipino call-center agents are trained to acquire a neutral American English accent to communicate more effectively with the North Americans they have to deal with over the phone. In response, a US-based reader, Celso Madarang, wrote me that he couldn’t imagine how a school or a seminar can teach people a particular English accent.

He might find it surprising, I told Celso, that there are now a good number of language institutes in the Philippines that specialize in teaching people how to acquire a desired English accent. In addition, most of the call centers themselves have in-house accent training departments that drill prospective call-center agents on the English accent the call center specifically needs.

In fact, my eldest son Eduardo underwent one such English accent training the other year when, on a lark, he tried applying for a call-center job. He got accepted and worked as a call-center agent for two months. He eventually quit because as a working student, he couldn’t take the “graveyard shift” from 10:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m. anymore, but the accent training certainly gave him a very pleasant American English accent. It served him very well in his job as part-time instructor in computer basics and web programming in a leading Metro Manila computer school (and, if I may add as a postscript, in his current job as a call-center technical support representative).

I also told Celso that lately, I had also been pleasantly surprised to learn that American English accent training is being taught in an even more massive way in India, particularly in Bangalore. India, having been colonized by the British for almost 200 years, has a strong English-language heritage like the Philippines, but most people in India happen to have such a pronounced natural singsong accent when speaking in English. That accent therefore needs to be neutralized for globalization’s sake, and I told Celso that I had come across a detailed account of how this is being done. This was in an early chapter of Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book on globalization, The World is Flat, that I am currently reading.

Friedman recounts that English-language trainers drill the Indians with stupendously complicated English-language phonetic drills. Among them is this mean tongue-twister: “Thirty little turtles in a bottle of bottled water. A bottle of bottled water held thirty little turtles. It didn’t matter that each turtle has to rattle a metal ladle in order to get a little bit of noodles.” Indeed, when I tried enunciating this particular phonetic drill, my tongue got so hopelessly tangled inside my mouth. I suppose, though, that the drills are doing wonders to the Indians, for I understand there are now tens of thousands of them serving as call-center agents for North American target markets.

These thoughts that I shared with Celso drew the following rejoinder from him:

“About my interest in how someone develops accents, I want to tell you about an experience I had when I was in Sydney, Australia, in 1966 when the ship I was with was on rest and recreation after a three-month tour in the Tongkin Gulf war zone in Vietnam. For the two weeks that the ship was in port, it was designated as a visiting ship. This meant that civilians could come on board to mingle with the crew and see how the sailors lived; our living quarters, of course, were understandably off-limits.

“Anyway, a group of Filipinos came on board one day. We got into conversations that alternated between Tagalog and English. In one of those conversations, a female Australian among the ship’s crew told me that I had ‘such a beautiful accent.’ Now, that remark really surprised me because I knew I didn’t have an accent; indeed, it was she and the others who had an accent—an Australian one—that they seemed not to be even aware they had. Isn’t that funny?”(August 09, 2008)

-------

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 9, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.