Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis

This essay is purely linguistic in character and purpose.

In taking phonetic notes on Tagalog I noticed that the pronunciation of the speaker to whom I was listening, Mr. Alfredo Viola Santiago (at present a student of architectural engineering in the University of Illinois) presented certain features of accentuation not mentioned in the descriptions familiar to me. With the intention of briefly describing these features, I took down more extensive notes and asked Mr. Santiago to tell me in Tagalog the stories of “The Sun” and “The Northwind and the Sun,” used as models by the International Phonetic Association.

The data so obtained showed that the features of accentuation I had observed were in part distinctive (expressive of word-meaning), and, further, that certain other features, which were but imperfectly described in the treatises I knew (so especially the use of the “ligatures”), appeared in Mr. Santiago’s speech in a regular and intelligible manner. A more extensive study was thus indicated.

The results of this study were subject to two obvious limitations. The utterances I had transcribed were either translations or isolated sentences, and I could not determine to what extent the features of Mr. Santiago’s speech which I had observed were general in Tagalog.

The former of these limitations was fully overcome when I asked Mr. Santiago to tell me connected stories. In addition to fortunate endowments of a more general kind Mr. Santiago possesses, as I found, that vivacity of intellect and freedom from irrelevant prepossessions which we seek and so rarely find in people whose language we try to study. This latter quality may be due in part to the fact that, as Mr. Santiago’s education has been carried on entirely in Spanish and English, his speech-feeling for his mother-tongue has not been deflected by the linguistic, or rather pseudo-linguistic training of the schools, so familiar to us. However this may be, I cannot be grateful enough to Mr. Santiago (and I hope that the reader will join me in this feeling) for the intelligence, freshness, and imagination with which he has given us connected narratives in his native language,—stories he heard in childhood and experiences of his own and of his friends. It is to be hoped that some of these will be of interest to students of folk-lore (as, for instance, Nos. 9, 10, 11, the old Hindu fable in No. 4, and the Midas story, much changed, in No. 5); the texts are here given, however, only for their linguistic interest.

The second limitation could not be overcome. As there exists at present no adequate description of the dialectal differentiation of Tagalog, nor even an adequate description of any one form of the language, I can make no definite statement as to the relation of Mr. Santiago’s speech to other forms of Tagalog.

What is here presented is, then, a specimen of the speech of an educated speaker from Mr. Santiago’s home town, San Miguel na Matamés, Bulacán Province, Luzón. It would have been possible to include in the description the speech of at least one other educated Tagalog from a different region (uneducated speakers are unfortunately not within my reach), as well as such data as might be gathered from printed Tagalog books: I have refrained from this extension because, at the present state of our knowledge, a single clearly defined set of data is preferable to a necessarily incomplete attempt at describing the whole language in its local and literary variations. Comparison of literary Tagalog (chiefly the translation of José Rizal’s “Noli me Tangere” by Patricio Mariano, Manila, Morales, 19131) shows that Mr. Santiago’s speech is not far removed from it. In most cases where my results deviate from the statements of the Spanish grammars, the evidence of printed books (and not infrequently the internal evidence of the grammars themselves) shows that the divergence is due not to dialectal differences but to the fact that the grammars are the product of linguistically untrained observers, who heard in terms of Spanish articulations and classified in those of Latin grammar.

This study presents, then, the first Tagalog texts in phonetic transcription and the first scientific analysis of the structure of the language2. Although the nature of the problem forbade the use of any material other than that obtained from Mr. Santiago, I have examined all the treatises on Tagalog accessible to me. No experience could show more clearly than the reading of these books the necessity of linguistic and especially phonetic training for anyone who wishes to describe a language. Not one of the works in the following list3 contains an intelligible description of the pronunciation of Tagalog. The only general work of scientific value is the excellent second volume of P. Serrano Laktaw’s dictionary. Much as one may admire the pioneer courage of Totanes and the originality of Minguella, these venerable men were as little able to describe a language as one untrained in botany is to describe a plant. Among the authors of monographs are several good names and one or two of the greatest in our science: nearly all of these authors mention the difficulty under which they labored for want of an adequate description of the language.