In a recent e-mail conversation about my trip to the Philippines, a friend made a perfectly innocent remark related to linguistics. Any of you that knows me well can imagine that I couldn't NOT respond in detail to his wondering "aloud".
Barry wrote:
I wonder why it is that Philippines is spelled with a "Ph" and double "pp",
but Filipino is spelled with an "F" and a single "p".
I replied:
Philippines (noun form) and philippine (adjective form) look very Anglo to me, while Filipino (masculine adjective) and Filipina (feminine adjective) are clearly Hispanic. In the local Tagalog language, the name of the country is Pilipinas. It's interesting to note how they mix the languages. Spanish had an obvious influence on the language during the ~400 years that the archipelago was a Spanish colony. Common words borrowed from Spanish include "sapatos" from Spanish "zapatos" ("shoes"), "mesa" ("table"), "pero" ("but"), "gwapo" from Spanish "guapo" ("pretty/handsome"), and "kumusta" from Spanish "como está" ("hello" or "how are you"). Code-switching (speaking part of a sentence in one language and part in another) into English is rampant in everyday conversations on the streets of Manila. Tagalog and English often combine more closely still to produce what the locals call Taglish. Tagalog is a Melanesian language (closely related to Malay, Bhasa Indonesia, and Chamorro; less so to Samoan and Hawai'ian; and distantly to Malagasy) and, absent loan words and code-switching, sounds very foreign to me, indeed.
The hybridization of the Philippines' linguistic culture is most obvious in what they call their money. The Tagalog word for their basic monetary unit is "Piso", which divides into 100 "Sentimo". The "English" words for these units are "Peso" and "Centavo", respectively, which are direct borrowings from Spanish. BTW, "Sentimo" looks very much to me like the old French monetary sub-unit, the Centime, 100 of which made 1 Franc.
It's worth noting further that Tagalog is one of about a dozen major languages (of a few hundred in total) spoken in the Philippines. The standardized, national, written language, which is based on Tagalog, is called Filipino. The National Language Institute gave it this name in 1987; before that time, the written language was called Pilipino from 1961 and Tagalog before that. The 1961 name change was owing to continued development of a national language that borrows from a number of indigenous languages.
I heard less Taglish and code-switching in Legaspi City. For example, when Edith, our tour guide, spoke to Joe Joe, our driver, she never said "yes" or "no", she always used the Tagalog or Bikol "oo" and "hindi". By comparison, I never heard "oo" and "hindi" in Manila.
Chris noted the absence of the F and V sounds (voiceless and voiced labio-dental fricatives, respectively, to us linguists) from Filipinos' everyday speech. They use, instead, the P and B sounds (voiceless and voiced bilabial plosives, respectively). Good examples of this phonetic adaptation include two common loan words from English, the Tagalog words "trapik" and "drayber" which correspond respectively to the English words "traffic" and "driver".
And, yes, there are loan words of Filipino origin in English: boondocks, yo-yo, and amok to name a few.
Wikipedia has several articles on which I based much of this entry and that would make good further reading.
Enjoy! :J
3 comments:
I just happen to see your blog while researching about Tagalog language.
Some histroical note: The name Philippines was derived from "Las Islas Filipinas" (Phillip's Islands) which was the name given to the Philippines by Ruy López de Villalobos (a Spanish explorer) who named it after King Philip II of Spain. As a colony of Spain, it is inevitable that some Spanish words became incorporated into the local languange. Spanish rule ended when the country became a colony of U.S. I presume that the Philippines came from the combination of Spanish Filipinas and the English of Philip (which is Felipe in Spanish).
During the Spanish rule, the term Filipino did not exist as the colonized were called indios, illustrados or others according to their social status. The term Filipino is a later development so I presume it is an attempt to give name (which is better than indio) to the people living in the Philippes. The spelling basically fits the traditional Philippine languages (such as Tagalog) which is syllabic in nature. The Tagalog scipt, Baybayin (which means spelling), basically consists of consonant-vowel syllable or vowel syllable. (In order to spell Tagalog words that have a consonant-vowel-consonant ending syllble, the last consonant is not written.)Traditionally, there is no double consonant in the spelling. When the Filipino language became standardized, the letters c, f, j, q, v, x, z and the Spanish letter enye were added to the Philippine alphabet.
Filipino language is generallly a mix of languages as a result of their interaction with foreigners including Chinese, Spanish, Americans and others.
It is also important to note that the term Filipino (person) is NOT a masculine term although Filipina means a Filipino woman because it refers to a nationality (or partly also a race). Even a female native of the Philippines could be considered Filipino. Tagalog language primarily does not care about the gender of persons compared to other languages that has a gender specific article/pronoun. An example of this is the pronoun siya which means either he or she because it does not specify the gender. Although there may be some Filipino terms that are gender specific, these are mainly borrowed words or a result of the foreign influences that were incorporated into the language.
I just happen to see your blog while researching about Tagalog language.
Some histroical note: The name Philippines was derived from "Las Islas Filipinas" (Phillip's Islands) which was the name given to the Philippines by Ruy López de Villalobos (a Spanish explorer) who named it after King Philip II of Spain. As a colony of Spain, it is inevitable that some Spanish words became incorporated into the local languange. Spanish rule ended when the country became a colony of U.S. I presume that the philippines came from the combination of Spanish Filipinas and the English of Philip (which is Felipe in Spanish).
During the Spanish rule, the term Filipino did not exist as the colonized were called indios, illustrados or others according to their social status. The term Filipino is a later development so I presume it is an attempt to give name (which is better than indio) to the people living in the Philippes. The spelling basically fits the traditional Philippine languages (such as Tagalog) which is syllabic in nature. The Tagalog scipt, Baybayin (which means spelling), basically consists of consonant-vowel syllable or vowel syllable. (In order to spell Tagalog words that have a consonant-vowel-consonant ending syllble, the last consonant is not written.)Traditionally, there is no double consonant in the spelling. When the Filipino language became standardized, the letters c, f, j, q, v, x, z and the Spanish letter enye were added to the Philippine alphabet.
Filipino language is generallly a mix of languages as a result of their interaction with foreigners including Chinese, Spanish, Americans and others.
It is also important to note that the term Filipino (person) is NOT a masculine term although Filipina means a Filipino woman because it refers to a nationality (or partly also a race). Even a female native of the Philippines could be considered Filipino. Tagalog language primarily does not care about the gender of persons compared to other languages that has a gender specific article/pronoun. An example of this is the pronoun siya which means either he or she because it does not specify the gender. Although there may be some Filipino terms that are gender specific, these are mainly borrowed words or a result of the foreign influences that were incorporated into the language.
'By comparison, I never heard "oo" and "hindi" in Manila.'
- just one small comment. we usually shorten these to the sounds "o" or "di"/"deh".
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