I was having my Japanese class last Monday while I and my sensei were discussing how the Japanese innovated the Chinese Kanji into the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana, I also came into thinking of the innovation of the Filipino language. When I thought about it, I can't think of any. Filipino is made up of Spanish, English, Malay, Indonesian plus a mix of other dialects. With this realization I also asked myself, do we really have our own identity. Furthermore, do we, as a nation, have the culture of creating our own things, our own language, and lastly our own technology? Or are we just stuck in becoming workers in our own land and abroad who simply follow what the innovators of different nationalities tell us to do?
To know someone's culture is to know their language. The Japanese have the culture of innovation which they call Kaizen. It means continuous improvement. While in the Filipino language I couldn't think of any and so I googled the translation of "innovation" to Tagalog. In Tagalog innovation is translated to "pagbabago" which we all clearly understand as renewal. It does not have the same impact that the word innovation conveys. Does this mean that the Filipino culture, as a nation, does not have the culture to innovate, to create and to bring in new things and call it as their own?
It might feel right and true that it wasn't in our collective Filipino culture to innovate but let us not forget that culture evolves. "Cultures evolve. In one sense, this is a truism; in other senses, it asserts one or another controversial, speculative, unconfirmed theory of culture. Consider a cultural inventory of some culture at some time--say 1900AD. It should include all the languages, practices, ceremonies, edifices, methods, tools, myths, music, art, and so forth, that compose that culture. Over time, that inventory changes. Today, a hundred years later, some items will have disappeared, some multiplied, some merged, some changed, and many new elements will appear for the first time" (Dennet, 1999, par. 2). Culture evolves and Filipinos will have a culture of innovation. It will become a nation of inventors, innovators, artists, and alchemists. A nation that makes other nations dream come true. Let us start it with us the early adopters, the believers who never stopped playing with technology.
Reference:
(Dennet, D., 1999) Edge. The Evolution of Culture taken from: https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-evolution-of-culture
