A Reflection

 On Assisted Living 

I tried to get out of a place with hospitality

The American English with a Filipino Accent: A Debate

 " Language is not the measure of intelligence, and accent is not the measure of truth: what matters is not how we sound but how we reasound, how we respond to the most urgent call of our time - the survival of our planet. "
This is about a debate, how Filipinos have always been under-estimated on the world stage, and yet time and time again, they have risen from the battlefield to the boardroom, from music stages, to hospitals abroad. Filipinos have been mocked, doubted, and dismissed, only to stand taller after the doors settle. The debate was just a mirror of that larger truth.
Back in that hall, Miguel's teammates - Anna and Joseph - watched with a new energy. They, too, had felt the sting of mockery. Joseph, whose father worked overseas as a seaman, had been teased by foreingers for the way Filipinos said certain English words. Anna, who dreamed of becoming a lawyer, had once been told
by a visiting professor who said so,  that Filipinos could never match Western debaters in logic.
But here, in this moment, watching Miguel turn redicule into strength shifts something inside them. They were no longer defending themselves as students. They were carrying the pride of their country.
      The opponent was so confident at first, but began to frown, and their smirks faded. One leaned back,  crossing his arms so suddenly aware that the Filipino team wasn't there to play the role of comic relief. They were there to win.And as Miguel closed his opening with the words- we are not here to imitate, we are here to reason, and our Filipino voice will be heard.
      The hall erupted in applause. That applause was not just for Miguel. It was for every Filipino who had ever been mocked for their English. It was for every overseas worker, correcting foreigners silently in their heads, every nurse in New York speaking clearly despite patients asking Where are you from really.
       It was for every Filipino child who had been laughed at for pronouncing the word comfortable so differently, for saying open the lights instead of turn on the lights.
       There was applause that carried the weight of a people who had long been told they were less but who had always been more. This was just the beginning. The real test was yet to come. As the debate moved into a fiery exchange of rebuttals where wit and logic collide, but in that first moment when laughter turned into silence something unforgettable happened - a shift, a recognition, a crack in the wall of prejudice, and from that crack a Filipino voice  began to rise.

The River of Life

 The Flow of Communications 

The Alphabet comes from the Greek words Alpha and Beta, which influenced the Roman Latin Alphabet. Because of this, the English Alphabet is known as the Latin Alphabet or Roman Alphabet. No one person or group of people created the English Alphabet.

Who invented the Alphabet - A to Z?
The Phoenicians' alphabetical order makes it easier to learn and share with others. But the Phoenicians and Egyptians used only consonants, as people began to write more and more, and more words were needed to be created to describe different things.

The Greeks accepted vowels: 
Vowels, consonants, and the letter "J"
      The most important traders were from the Phoenicians - known today as Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.
They spread the alphabet to the towns and villages that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea.
       The Greek Alphabet looks a lot like ours, but our letters took their final form in Italy. First, the Etruscan people, and then the Romans, adapted Greek letters to fit their language. The Romans spread their language and its alphabet all over modern Europe, the Near East, and North Africa. The earliest example of the Latin alphabet in use is called the duenos inscription and comes from the sixth century BCE, 2,500 years ago. Even then, the Alphabet was still incomplete because Latin didn't have all the sounds that are common today. The most obvious is the letter J, even though the first letter of the first month of the Roman calendar was January.