Effervescent

Hebrew is not at all old-fashioned, but rather modern, effervescent, and fresh.

In the morning of the 23rd of February of 2022, there was a student crowd at the cafe, where I drank my iced black tea. Dirk, a big-bodied man, was there to order coffee and took it to a table outside. At the pizzeria, I had a pesto slice and a clear colorless effervescent drink.

Less than a centimetre of snow layered the grounds of Lulu Island in the sunny morning of the 24th of February of 2022. I took a long route going to the pizzeria, over the vast, whitened school field, which seemed like I was walking on a different moon or planet. I viewed the northern snowcapped bluish mountain range. At the pizzeria, I ate two slices and drank a black effervescent diet drink, whilst I was watching on the big screen the usual morning talk show The View before eleven o'clock. Whoopi Goldberg, who was the mystical black bartender character Guinan in the Star Trek franchise, co-hosted there. Today's guest was Marlee Matlin, a deaf American blonde actress, who knew American Sign Language. She looked like my high school French-language teacher Mrs. Lowry. Meanwhile, in the pizzeria itself, a slender hooded black girl entered to order pizza.

On the 25th of February of 2022, it seemed an uneventful, sleepy day. Before dawn, I had a cold canned Thai tea drink and ketchup potato chips from a corner convenience store. After lunchtime, at the cafe, I had my usual iced black tea. Around there were some black-haired men. At the pizzeria, I had two slices and an iced black effervescent drink.

After lunchtime on the drizzling 28th of February of 2022, walking outside, I saw my corpulent white neighbour in black, as he walked, reminding me of fat Maitreya Buddha. At the main road, my stocky Mediterranean neighbour in jeans hosed his car tire. In the pizzeria, I had mushroom greens chicken pizza and a black effervescent drink. There were many handsome students, with titillating hairy legs.

On the 1st of March of 2022, I went twice to the pizzeria, once in the morning when I had butter chicken pizza and later in the afternoon when I had mushroom spinach pesto cheese chicken pizza, both times in which I drank a black effervescent drink. In the morning, there were two fire trucks illumined at the mall. In the afternoon, there were handsome men. A lady wore a leopard shawl. Two Hispanics entered. Tharsan the Sri Lankan owner was speaking to an advertising agent lady.

Ziri made an effervescent mixture.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Philippine elite started switching from Spanish to English as the archipelagic elitist language, especially in written form, as a consequence of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Meanwhile, indigenous languages have continued to be the aural-oral mainstay, with Spanish loanwords being quite common. In 1937, administration chose Tagalog as the basis of the national language. As time passed, code-switching between English and indigenous languages became more prevalent. As a result, the Philippines is a linguistic hodgepodge. English is like an effervescent pink drink, and Tagalog is a grey shark in the seas. Spanish still rings nostalgically of bygone majestic good ol' days for many Filipinos. Tagalog is still not as fully "intellectualized" as its cousin Indonesian, which Indonesians use in university-level education and has extensive literature.

They looked effervescent in their costumes.

I wonder what would have been, if administrators had chosen Chabacano, Philippine Creole Spanish, as an official language in the Philippines, much as administrators had chosen Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, as an official language in Papua New Guinea. Today, Filipinos wax nostalgic and poetic of the bygone Hispanic Era. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, Puerto Rico retained Spanish, but not the Philippines. Like an effervescent pink drink, English is now the main written language in the Philippines. However, the de facto aural-oral lingua franca in the archipelago is Taglish, the patois of code-switching between the two official languages, Filipino (Tagalog essentially) and English. Chabacano (Chavacano) combines Spanish with native elements. There is in Chabacano no verbal conjugation that does exist in Spanish, Tagalog, and English, which complicates these languages. Native languages in the Philippines have oodles of Spanish-derived words embedded in them. Native languages are of the Austronesian family, said to have originated thousands of years ago in Taiwan. About 200 languages exist in the Philippines. Most of them are of the Austronesian family, whilst Chabacano, an outgrowth of Hispanic colonization, sprouted like mushrooms in various places there.