The TAGALOG Facts

The TAGALOG is the official language of the Filipinos. Pero, naitanong niyo na ba sa inyo mga sarili kung saan at paano nabuo ang TAGALOG? Tuklasan!

In the case of the Philippines, colonialism added another dimension to language, the dominant cultures bringing in or even imposing new words.

Let your imagination run wild now. Think how 16th century Tagalogs would have expressed their sorrow over a shattered relationship.

A commoner would have sighed, "Kay lungkot!"--lungkot being a hoi-polloi Kapampangan-Tagalog word. A datu’s daughter would have etched out a poem on bamboo, expressing her sorrow in Malay-tinged Tagalog: "O dusa! O dukha! O dalita! O dalamhati!"--all four words derived from Malay.

A datu’s daughter could have visited Brunei, with which Manila’s aristocracy had close ties, and picked up words from Malay, considered a high-status language at that time. "Dalamhati" was only one example, the intensity of sadness expressed by two Malay words: dalam (inside) and hati (heart, although it can also mean liver).

Note that luwalhati, a feeling of euphoria, is generated from the Malay luwar (outside) and again, hati.

Words have a life of their own, sometimes changing meanings as they move from one culture to another.

"Dalita" was originally derived from the Sanskrit dhrta (borne), becoming the Malay derita (to endure) and dalita in Tagalog, where it means great suffering.

The association with suffering produced extended meanings in Tagalog: dalita and dukha, both Malay-Sanskrit words for suffering, are also used to refer to poverty and the poor.

The Malay and Sanskrit words that entered Tagalog related to philosophy and religion. They were also languages of learning, as we see in the borrowing of the numerical terms I mentioned earlier.

Terms like lacsa and yota suggest that we conducted a lot of trading with our neighbors in what are today Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia.

Later, Arabic traders entered the region, bringing in not just material goods but also Islam, and new words. To give just one example, aqala, Arabic for intelligence, was transformed in Tagalog into "a concept, a notion, a hunch."

Curiously, some Arabic words may have come to us from the Spaniards, who themselves were once colonized by the Arabs.
Thus, the Arabic kafir, for an unbeliever, became the Spanish cafre for a savage and eventually became kapre, a mythical giant.

The Hokkien Chinese, who didn’t just come in as itinerant traders but often stayed on, introduced hundreds of other terms into Tagalog covering more mundane items and activities from food (siopao, tokwa, petsay) to household products (bakya, siyansi) to gambling (huweteng) and trading (suki, pakyaw).

Under colonial rule of the Spaniards and the Americans, Tagalog went through even more modifications. Hundreds of Spanish words entered Tagalog, their system of counting (uno, dos, tres, as revived recently by singer Ricky Martin) often displacing the earlier Tagalog system.

Some Spanish words we adapted as is but many others mutated, both in form and in meaning. Como esta became kumusta; hacer caso (de), to pay attention to, became asikaso.

We borrowed the Spanish pobre, meaning poor, but spinned off another word, pulubi, to mean a beggar, to whom we give alms or limos, originally alimos in Spanish.

Then there’s English, which we’ve been using in the last 100 years because of the American colonial period and, today, because it is a new global prestige language.

Listen to people speaking Tagalog in the streets and you’ll hear many English connectors--"so," "but" "and then"--as well as the occasional "shit" (or "syet") when discussing our senators’ latest "gimik."

People sometimes complain that we are captives of a colonial mentality, relying too much on English. But another perspective, often expressed with alarm by Americans and English, is that we’re colonizing the Queen’s English, gobbling up words and regurgitating them in new forms.

Just look at how English nouns have been transformed into Tagalog verbs, complete with conjugation (nag-text, mag-che-chess, makikipag-Internet).

Languages evolve because of cultural contacts, people meeting as tourists, traders, teachers, whatever. It’s not just a matter of the Tagalog language borrowing words from the world. You just wait and see.

Courtesy of the many Filipina yayas caring for the children of the world, someday we just might hear a British prime minister ordering Parliament to come to "votation"--but only after very properly offering a 10-minute break for people to go to the ‘‘See Ah.’’