“‘Words, those guardians of meaning, are not immortal, they are not invulnerable,’ wrote Adamov in his notebook for 1938; ‘some may survive, others are incurable.’ When war came, he added: ‘Worn, threadbare, filed down, words have become the carcass of words, phantom words; everyone drearily chews and regurgitates the sound of them between their jaws.’”(Excerpt From After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation by George Steiner)

Ko is a what not a who. 

Ko is a Cebuano pronoun meaning I or me. 

Moadto ko sa merkado. I am going to the market. 

That is how we “normally” write the pronoun ko, separate from the preposition sa or “to” in English. I enclosed normally in quotation marks in the previous sentence because these days what is normal for most people I know is to type or write kos instead of ko sa, hence Moadto kos merkado. 

Ko is a shortened form of ako (I). These days you seldom hear native speakers of Cebuano, except for the septuagenarians and older, use ako in such a sentence as Moadto ako sa merkado. Everyone will understand what the sentence means, but young people would surely think you’re old if you speak like this. I, sometimes write like this when I write poetry in Cebuano, simply because I like the sound of it. 

And I want to keep ko separate from sa. I want it to survive as a living reminder of ako. 

This may seem a futile attempt as language is always changing. As George Steiner quoted the French playwright Arthur Adamov, “Words are not immortal.”

In the same chapter in his book, After Babel, Steiner also quoted Leonard Bloomfield who said “linguistic change is far more rapid than biological change.” Indeed there are times when the changes take place rapidly, and here Steiner mentions the German language of the 1820s being a different language from that of 1770s and early 1780s. 

In Cebuano, as well, I noticed the dialect spoken by the twenty-something in my class group chat in 2021, was different from the dialect I grew up speaking and hearing. Many times I had to ask what certain slang they were using meant. And it was not just vocabulary, but spelling as well. 

Indeed young people and especially with their use of social media these days, can hasten language change, but as Steiner noted, languages can also be “strongly conservative,” and he gave as an example the French Romantics casting their plays in “traditional alexandrines and hardly modified the armature of French prose”; in the 1760s English prose “extended its authority over much of poetic practice,” and the Chinese language deliberately retained the archaic. 

Steiner further noted that “At most stages in the history of a language…innovative and conservative tendencies coexist. Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Dryden were contemporaries. In his ‘old-fashionedness’ Robert Frost drew on currents of speech as vital as those enlisted, or newly tapped, by Allen Ginsberg.”

It seems my insistence on writing ko sa instead of kos has a chance of assuring the survival of ko. 

There is hope for ko’s freedom. 

It does not have to be bound to sa.

Both of them can be free.