Place-holder on the New Filipino Spelling

I'm copy pasting from Joe Padre's blog on the new Filipino spelling -- my only gripe is with General Rule V -- the use of letters F, J, V, and Z for borrowed words -- we freely exchange them with P, Dy, B and S -- "Siryusli -- yu dyast kant du dat -- piling biktoryus end weyb it in prant op mai peys."

Here are sample new spellings:

fiesta - fyesta
affix - afiks
brief - brif
photo - foto
cough - kaf
gem - jem
jacket - jaket
soldier - soljer
Vacation - vekayshun
Value - valyu
zone - zon
cruz - kruz
zoo - zo
xylophone - zaylofon
czar - zar
scissors - sizors

Sounds like the planners stopped at a beauty parlor on their way to presenting the draft in Congress.

Their main contention is that "you can plan language." Wrong. Lasting language use comes from the bottom-up -- what people see as ok, is valuable, will allow them to lift up their current stations in life -- that's what they are gonna use (and the spellings that go with it). I'm going to update an old article and post it here...

Comments

Eric said…

Hehehe...I was about to post a blog like this. Good thing you made one for us. The article I did in VSU (of the same content but of different approach) had been misplaced. It's all about Filipino and its glaring orthographic form. Sad thing is after lengthy of musing you felt like being robbed the chance to have a fair game.

What is this rhetoric for? One might question. When all the things you fought against had been hastily approved already (without popular support) now mandated by the CHED to all schools around the country. All done impulsively to the glory of the paper-pushing CFL (Commission on Filipino Language) boys. So again what is this for? It's like throwing a stone against a heavily guarded fortress. A linguistic juggernaut!

Unless, however, by taking every stone together and make a bigger boulder one can barely encroach and make history.Ha,ha. Highly unlikely. But it can possibly happen. Not now. Maybe the in the years to come after one can realize its gross effect. When one can't stomach for insensitivity as well as the bad implication it could inflict on us.

They shouldn't have sodomized our language. Such acts could have amounted to striking a lightning for that brazen sacrilege.

OK. I'll just leave you at that while I grit my teeth in utter disgust.

4:06 PM

Create 'Fake Identity Generator'-style email addresses and passwords in Excel

Last week I needed to compile a list of several hundred fake customer names with fake (but verifiable) email addresses and passwords to test a client's eCommerce site. Fake data generators At that time, I knew of only two online identity generators: Fake Identity Generator (FIG) and GenerateData.com (GD). By accepting three user-specified parameters (country, gender, age range) FIG outputs a lot of nice fake data, including disposable (but accessible) YopMail email addresses and relatively easy-to-remember passwords. However FIG doesn't provide free bulk identity generation so I had to generate and copy-paste identities one at a time – a very slow process – along with manually creating accounts using these fake identities at the client site (I had no access to the client content management system so I couldn't bulk register the fake identities). On the other hand, GD allows bulk generation of identities (up to 100 at a time) for free (and with more paramete

Make a quick-&-dirty repeating pattern in Inkscape (using hexagon base)

[Note: This was first published as a Facebook Note on January 29, 2016 . I am making it available here to add to the Inkscape pattern tutorials.] This is based on a tutorial for making hexagonal tiles for David White’s “The Battle for Wesnoth”, but you can skip the 72×72-pixel requirement. You can make your base hexagon in any size that looks good at 100% zoom. First, make a hexagon using the “Create stars and polygons” tool. Press the CTRL key while you’re dragging the cursor to make a proportioned hexagon like this: You may have to move the cursor around to have the hexagon lie on its side. Next, with the hexagon selected, remove the outline by holding SHIFT and left-clicking the ‘X’ swatch in the color palette: Replace the hexagon’s color with what you want by left-clicking the color swatches in the color palette – almost black, in this case: Next, add your main decoration. I just dropped-in a dragon I found at Wikimedia Commons: Group the hexagon and the object (selec

Quick AdWords keyword match formatting in Google Docs and Excel

If you often work on AdWords text ads, you'll like this little spreadsheet that will make the keyword matching tags automatically for you. As you know, the matching convention for keywords is: Exact Match Phrase Match Modified Broad Match [this is a keyword] "this is a keyword" +this +is +a +keyword Imagine how tiresome doing this would be, for every word, if you have hundreds of keywords (or search terms). Here's a Google spreadsheet that will do this for you: Keyword Match Tagger . You just paste your search terms (one search term per line) on the "Keyword" column, and the other columns will populate with the keyword matching tags which you can then copy to your own spreadsheet. If you pasted in keywords with duplicates, those will be highlighted in red. Since modified broad match does not consider the order of the words in a search term, the "MMB Duplicate Detector" column will rearrange the words alphabetically in a search term and highl

Man On A Street

Search This Blog