Pilipino, Tagalog, Ilocano

Pilipino - The National Language of the Philippines

Notes

• Tagalog has absorbed many Spanish and some English words over the centuries. When foreign words enter Tagalog, the spelling is changed to reflect Tagalog Orthography... which turns out to be quite pleasing to the Englishspeaker's eye. Spanish words are spelt as a native English speaker might (mis)spell them...

• The names of months and days come from Spanish. Observe Tagalog Orthography at work! The only oddity is the word for Sunday; linggó (week) is capitalized and used for the name of that day...

• Although Pilipino has words for numbers, the Spanish words are commonly used, particularly for casual monetary transactions...

• Pilipino is pretty easygoing when it comes to plurals. If there's a number or pluralized adjective or article modifying the noun, you don't need to pluralize the noun. If the noun is plural, you don't need to pluralize the adjective. If the noun is pluralized, you don't need to pluralize the verb, and vice versa. Repetition of the root word is one of the methods of pluralization. A one- or two-syllable word is repeated; in longer words, only the first two syllables are repeated. Halo is a mixture. A popular dessert in the Philippines is halu-halo, a mixture of ice, sugar, chunks of fruit, and milk. (Tagalog doesn't like two os in sequence, so wherever they might appear, the first becomes u.) The plural of kaníno (whose) is kaní-kaníno. And when speaking English, a Filipino will often say Thank you thank you!, carrying this same idea over into English.

• Pilipino does not distinguish gender in third person pronouns. Siya is the English he/she, kaniya(preposed)/niya(postposed) the English his/her, and sa kaniya the English him/her.

• Whereas English uses stress to emphasize a word in a sentence, Tagalog indicates emphasis by making the emphasized word the subject of the sentence. Each kind of subject requires a unique verbal affix, making Tagalog verbs quite difficult for the student. On the other hand...

• Tagalog and several other Philippine languages have a very (perhaps overly!) powerful preposition: sa. It is used for the English in, to, into, from, on, for, through, at... and others! This is troublesome for Filipino students of English.

• The words ang (singular) and ang mga (plural) are subject markers for things and places; si (singular) and sina (plural) are markers for names of people, whether subject or predicate. Mga is the Tagalog pluralizer for names of things and places. The normal sentence structure is Predicate-Subject. When this order is reversed, the position marker ay is used to mark the end of the Subject and the beginning of the Predicate.

  For example, The house (bahay) is big (malakí)...

  • Malakí ang bahay.

  • Ang bahay ay malakí.

  Another example, William and (at) Mary are children (batà)....

  • Mga batà sina William at Mary.

  • Sina William at Mary ay mga batà.

• It is possible to use any part of speech as a noun, simply by putting an article in front of it.

• The Adverb of Negation (That capitalization was my own doing; somehow, the phrase just demands capitalization!) is hindî. Sometimes hindî is used as is; sometimes it is shortened to dî; but most often it is used as a prefix and attached to the word with a hyphen. For example, The child (batà) is not good (mabaít)...

  • Ang batà ay hindî mabaít.

  • Ang batà ay dî mabaít.

  • Ang batà ay di-mabaít.

• The unit of currency in the Philippines is the piso, pronounced like pesso (that's how it sounded to me anyway), and called the peso by many outsiders. Its symbol is an uppercase P with two horizontal lines crossing the bumpy bit. The piso is divided into 100 sentimos, or pera.

• Don't let me give you the wrong impression; most Pilipino doesn't look or sound anything at all like Spanish or English! My initial reason for investigating Pilipino was simply that a business trip took me to Las Piñas City, and language being a hobby of mine, the National Book Store was naturally one of my first recreational stops. I purchased a textbook (Basic Tagalog) and several dictionaries of Ilocano, Tagalog, and Pilipino. I found the isolating and agglutinative aspects of the grammar particularly interesting. At the same time, though, the frequent Spanish and occasional English sounds kept catching my ear... words like adyós, asúl, bentiladór, bérde, diksiyunaryo, Estados Unidos, gústo, kálye, karné, kastányas, mésa, orkésta, otél, patátas, piso, rádyo, sapátos, serbésa, sigarílyo, sílya, telebisyón, wíski. Las Piñas City! Kumustá ka? I suspect that the presence of so many true friends (as opposed to faux amis) would make foreigners much more comfortable with the language than they would be otherwise, since the words which are unlike Spanish and English (and that's most of them) are like nothing else I've ever studied!