ILOKANO LINGUISTICS FOR LIBERATION:
PRACTICES FOR A NEW PHILIPPINE LEXICOGRAPHY
Aurelio Solver
Agcaoili
U of Hawaii at Manoa
Preliminaries
Thank
you so much for that kind introduction, Professor Che Suarez. You have given me
complete control of my work, for which reason I am able to continue to honor
our Ilokano people’s heritage, culture, and language through these continuing
dictionary projects.
I
wish to thank Dr Miriam Pascua,
president of the Mariano Marcos State University System, for giving me another
chance to present my work to the Ilokano public through this dictionary launch,
and through this lecture. Let me record my gratitude to her for making it sure
the Nakem Conferences movement will thrive at her university by planting the
first seed of all the Nakem work and engagements at MMSU. That was in 2007 and
today, we have the honor of continually witnessing the fruit of your visionary
leadership to partner with us without any questions.
I
can never forget the generosity of Dr Carmelo Esteban, dean of the MMSU
Graduate School, for always being open to activities like this one, and for
providing support for this launching. Last year, he opened the door of the
graduate school for the launching of the first volume of the dictionary. This
is the second time that he does it, and I hope and pray there will be a third,
a fourth, and a fifth time. Dean Estaban, mahalo nui loa.
I
wish to thank the entire board of the Nakem Conferences Philippines for giving
me this chance to work with them again. In particular, I want to thank Dr
Alegria Tan Visaya, president of Nakem Philippines, for taking up the challenge
of coordinating this event. I am certain that she is one of the gateways to the
reclaiming of our heritage. There have been numerous times that she has
extended her gift of heart and wisdome and knowledge to me. I am sure I can
never pay her back except to say, Agyamanak unay-unay.
The
president of the MMSU Graduate School Student Council, __________________, is
certainly one heck of a guy you can entrust your life with. When Dr Visaya
opened this launching idea to him, he approved right away, and promised to
deliver the goods, and he did. Except that he is busy with his comprehensives,
for which reason he is not with us this morning. Ibagayo koma kenkuana, apo, a
nakautangak kenkuana iti naimbag a nakem. Ti nakem ti puli ti agsubalitto
kenkuana.
I
also wish to thank the MMSU Graduate School professors, such as Dr Lino and
many others, who brought their students to this gathering. I can only thank you
for believing that this event is worth your time and those of your students’.
And
to all our people gathered here, thank you so much for coming.
1.0 Epistemological Challenges in Dictionary
Making
Let me start my talk by asking you to revisit with me the
title of my presentation, and by scrutinizing some of the key concepts and
phrases, that when not clarified, may obscure our conversation.
Let me start with Ilokano linguistics.
What I mean by this is a general conception and practice of
the art and science of comprehending what constitutes the Ilokano language as a
cultural artifact, and as a medium for articulating the vision of a people.
When I say linguistics for liberation, I mean here the
general direction of my lexicographic and critical work on language, culture,
heritage education, and emancipatory education in general.
I look at linguistics as the art and science of
understanding language, but it is the art and science of the constitutive
elements of language, elements that are always-already sited in the narrative
of struggle of a people, a struggle that requires the constancy of articulation
and re-articulation of what human freedom is all about.
In the main, I do not regard linguistics as value-free, or
neutral, but takes it out into the open and permits it to dialogue with the
difficult texts of our lives.
In particular, I frame language as a universal medium of
communication, and thus, any enactments that relate to the communicative power
of language reflects life in the raw, and life as it should be lived.
In fine, I look at life’s narrativity, and establish its
connection with facts; I bring those facts into an ethical mode of inquiry, and
revisit them in the level of the ‘ought’.
Any of these ethical markers should instruct us that to do
linguistics in an environment that is not value-free is to always invite
engagement in cultural criticism, and to deploy the techniques of falling into
the discourse of emancipatory conversation with many other extra-linguistic
factors, such as the factors of social institutions that relate to politics,
economics, and culture.
Here, I am particularly aware that language—our very own
Ilokano language for that matter—has been used against us in order to deprive
us of our political power.
The continuing discourse of practically all political
matters in two languages that are foreign to the Ilokano people—in English and
in Tagalog—has impacted our current inability to take part in a national
conversation that pertains to the democratization of our collective political
life.
Here, I am particularly aware that language—our very own
Ilokano language for matter—has been used against us in order to deny us of
access to economic stability.
The isomorphism of economic development and the use of
Tagalog and English has led us to disastrous consequences, with us deceived on
a whole-scale way that to leave our Ilokano language behind is the best way for
us to improve our economic lot.
We have left our Ilokano language at home, and we have not
learned much for the last 80 years or so since 1935, and we have proven that
this imbalance in the linguistic and cultural policy of this country has
rendered us ignorant of who we are in our own terms.
We know that ignorance does not exempt us from our responsibilities,
for which reason we must now begin to take action and say to ourselves that the
deception that has happened to us as a people for decades must come to an end.
Here, I am particularly aware that language—the Ilokano
language for that matter—has been used against us to stunt our cultural
development and growth, relegating what we know about ourselves as post-it
notes on a book on what rabid but narrow-minded nationalists call national
culture with a homogenized slant.
Here, I must be very clear in this direction: that I insist
that to form a Philippine national culture can never be done with the hegemonic
center of Manila dictating the terms and conditions of what our ‘national’
culture is supposed to be, with all our other cultural expressions labeled as
exhibits, or as exotic manifestations of the national core.
If we continue to insist on this—on the evolving of a
national culture that valorizes one culture at the expense of another—there
will always be cleavages, chasms, and cracks.
Dissidence—as always has been—will not be hard to come by as
a logical consequence.
I am particularly alarmed in what is happening to the school
system, that social institution that makes it possible for our young people to
be equipped with life-long skills, skills that will prepare them for jobs, but
skills as well that prepare them to become truly human, and to become
productive citizens of their own country.
In this life, it is not only economic productivity that
spells that difference between being educated and being ignorant.
We must be also knowledgeable of all things that matter to
us, in memory as well as in our traditions and heritage.
For to sever ourselves from the significant and meaningful
past as re-inscribed in the present is to sever ourselves from our connection
to the spring of our human knowing, to the very spring of human capacities to
link ourselves back to the source of what we are.
Let us do a guessing game here.
Our Ilokano students know more about English and Tagalog
authors than any of our local authors.
They know more about English and Tagalog poems and songs and
stories than any of the Ilokano poems and songs and stories.
They probably do not even know that many of the better
writers of our own Ilokano language are here in this room, and that the
scientists and artists of this nation are also here.
Such widespread ignorance can never be condoned.
To say the least, it is unconscionable.
To say that we cannot continue doing this is to register a
protest that should have been registered a long time ago.
2. Approaches in
Ilokano Lexicography
To write two dictionaries is not a walk in park.
It is a commitment of a lifetime.
Once it is begun, the work is endless.
The dictionary maker—or sometimes technically referred to as
a lexicographer—realizes that he must come to terms with the infinite
possibilities of articulating a linguistic world, a world that must be
constantly teased out of the innumerable articulations of human experience,
whether significant or not.
Even a native speaker like me has to contend with the
difficulty of coming to terms with the ambiguous and the impossible.
Indeed, the native speaker is not necessarily the best
authority of his language.
One cannot always claim—sometimes we can, but most of the
time we fail—that the speaker of the Ilokano language is the best judge of that
language.
This means that I have to rely on other sources to validate
my analysis, claims, and judgments of the Ilokano language.
In research methodology, we call this the extra-linguistic
proof, or the proof outside the subject matter being studied.
There are two things I used to account the thoughts and
wisdom of the Ilokano people through the twin works I recently wrote: the Contemporary English-Ilokano Dictionary
(2010, 2011) and the Kontemporaneo a
Diksionario nga Ilokano-Ingles (2012).
In embarking on these projects, I faced a fundamental
difficulty: how to be true to the linguistic ways of the Ilokano people, and
how to push those ways to account the complexities of their contemporary life.
I am, of course, using the phrase ‘linguistic ways’
advisedly to account not only what happens in language, but also what a people
can do with their language.
I tried to solve these issues by following two approaches.
The first approach is to describe how the Ilokano people
‘exactly’ use their language everyday given a variety of possibilities.
The word ‘exactly’, of course, is not ‘exact’ in all counts.
We need to understand variations of the language here, and
the dialectal possibilities.
In the main, we must understand that in truth and in fact,
language is not the one that is being spoken: the truth of the matter is that
language is a conception, and the one that is being used in our everyday life is
a dialect, not language really.
We must bear in mind that the Ilokano people have moved from
one place to another, have moved out of the Ilocos, and have interacted with
other communities, cultures, and countries.
This interaction has reshaped—re-formed—their language, even as it has reshaped their way of
looking at the world that has become larger, much larger than the Ilocos they
know, or used to know.
There are two movements in this act of describing the
Ilokano language in the attempt to understand what is it all about: one, the
fact of the matter in the field, and two, the changing, almost shifting,
character of the everyday life of the Ilokano in all the times and climes where
he finds himself.
The second approach is how to push that description to
account a renewed vision on how the Ilokano people can fully exploit the
Ilokano language in order to mediate a vision for the evolving of their own
contemporary language that speaks them and speaks about them.
Part of that vision is to make sense of the Ilokano language
as a universal medium for the wording of a world, their own world, the world of
their ever rich and ever-changing Ilokano experience.
It is a vision that is bold and daring—and it must be so.
That vision—a statement of a reality recast in the light of
a present-qua-future—is no longer confined to the declarations and
pronouncements of the Ilokano linguistic police, but assures the speakers of
the Ilokano language recognition of the legitimacy of their speech first and
foremost.
Let me make an aside about the Ilokano linguistic police.
Many of these are writers who are schooled in the age-old
traditions of fossilizing the Ilokano language, and have not had any
substantial access to other bodies of knowledge outside that which is being
provided by their communities, or by their own small circle of acquaintances.
Some members of the Ilokano linguistic police are teachers
like myself, teachers who have not broadened their perspectives about education
and about cultural enhancement, such that what they use as yardstick in the
education of their students is the yellowed-sheet of paper they inherited from
their own old masters and teachers.
So we pass on the same mossy lessons about ourselves,
lessons whose truths are debatable, or at best, unfounded and dubious.
What I then call as Ilokano language as used in these
dictionaries is a form of Ilokano speech, or utterance, used philosophically,
and thus discursively.
It is a speech that is self-reflective, with the capacity to
look at the world with both old and new eyes, with the capacity to rethink of
itself using both old and new categories depending on a variety of situations
and contexts, and with the capacity to reexamine itself, and provide
self-corrective mechanisms for areas where self-correction is necessary.
But it is also a speech that recognizes the fundamental
requisites of education.
Education here is meant a cultivation of the mind, a
bettering of the faculty of thought, a development of the faculty of erudition,
a refining of human consciousness.
In this very act of cultivating the mind, we insist here the
urgency of a discriminating and critical consciousness, a consciousness that is
mindful of the continuum of the time of the Ilokano experience, the time of the
human experience, the time as fused in an ever-continual way, the time as
dialectical and exploratory, the time as a fusion of all the tenses:
past-qua-present, present-qua-present, and present-qua-future all rolled into
one, marking all of the Ilokano words, marking what constitutes the
contemporary Ilokano language.
This means that we locate Ilocano language within the matrix
of this notion of time, a location in a future that is grounded in time as
concrete, and yet time outside Time.
Which leads us to the need to tease out the Ilokano language
from this continuum of time and push it to the limit of that which is possible
so that we can have all the time to make the Ilokano language at the service of
all the Ilokano people everywhere.
There is thus the need to locate the contemporary Ilokano
language within at least these three categories of time.
It cannot be otherwise.
We thus need to wean the Ilokano language away from a
romanticized view of its past, from its fossilized form.
To speak of a language as a gift of the primeval past, as a
gift of the ancestors, as a gift of a historical past with no relation to the
present is to exactly do what we should not do in understanding what the
Ilokano language is and what is it supposed to be.
I have done this in the recasting of the kur-itan, the
Ilokano system of writing it shares with other indigenous cultures of the
Philippines.
I have removed the kur-itan from its ‘old’ syllabary form to
account an alphabet which is less equivocal, and more to the point in terms of
accounting the minutest of all the sound elements of a language.
In preparing the list of words for these dictionaries, I
have been guided by this respect for the past.
And yet, I have been drawn into a powerful idea about what
can be done to the Ilokano language to serve as a springboard—a platform
indeed—for the production of a liberating consciousness for the Ilokano people
all over the world.
There are several things that must be underscored here—and
these are all in keeping with the ambivalent nature of being a speaker of one’s
own language, especially when in that act of speaking, the speaker has been
bombarded with official acts of non-recognition of your own speech, relegating
your word—and thus, your language—to the margins, to the shadows, to the
periphery.
When you live in a country that has committed all acts of
cultural and linguistic injustice against its own people, when you have been
practically banned to use your language in your public, or official life, you
act like a thief.
You have to learn to act like a thief.
You snatch a second you can snatch to make you utter just
one word of the language whose truths, music, cadence, and power you were
accustomed to when younger but now have to push it to a space-time where there
is safety because there, in the hidden recesses of the private life where your
language has been relegated, you have not broken the rules of an internally
colonized Philippine world.
For the lexicographer of the Ilokano language, this is a
difficult reality.
It is also ugly—as it is raw and bloody.
The rawness and blood in this unjust linguistic situation
marked by cultural tyranny and fascism is not literal, at least not yet, unlike
in other languages and cultures where the very act of martyrdom is intertwined
with the act of insisting that one’s language ought to be used in life and in
the world of dreams, fantasia, imagination, creation, self-creation, and
communal creativeness.
The blood is symbolic, but its power is beyond the sounds of
the language.
Thus, language in general, and the Ilokano language in
particular, reframes our view of the world, our view of reality, our sense of
what makes sense, our sense of what is meaningful.
All these relate to the very act of knowing—and the urgency
of this act.
This sense of urgency is dictated by the need to know in
order to live the good life—and the need to survive, to exist, to thrive.
When I was drawing up my research design for these
dictionaries, I had my own self-doubts.
First of my self-doubts is how to fight back—fight back more
than 400 years of conditioning about what the Ilokano language is all about,
and how is it constituted, and how it ought to be constituted.
Second is how to correct misconceptions—there are a lot of
these—an act of the level of the ‘ought’ to finally put an end to speculations
that are not based on the logic of facts, but based largely on the logic of
convenience and comfort.
For instance, one of the funny examples about the Ilokano
language is the insistent—but otherwise largely ignorant view about whether
Ilokano is written with a ‘k’ or with a ‘c’.
The Internet alone is replete with this insidious tactic of
the 1960s mindset of pulp writers writing largely for a popular magazine and
catering to readers who, pitifully, did not have access to other perspectives.
Such a group of writers, for instance, even came up with the
illogical formulation—a blatant one at that—that ‘Iluko’ is the language, while
‘Ilokano’ is the people.
This counterproductive hair-splitting technique lacks the
subtlety of the reality of the field.
It has no basis.
The utterance of the Ilokano people says otherwise: that
there is no distinction, but both relate to the same reality.
To check: our people did not do this hair-splitting, but
only some of the old Ilokano writers following the logic of patriarchal
knowledge.
In fact, the number one aberration—an anomaly if you wish—is
the very word Ilokano.
Coming from a template such as Hispano, or Mexicano, the
people of the ‘lukong’, once this term became a denonym, followed the aberrant
route of ‘Iluko/Ilukong’ and accepting an unnecessary and repetitious suffix
‘ano’, to eventually form the word ‘Ilokano.’
We note here that from a morphophonemic sense, the ‘i’ in
the ‘lukong’ functions in the same way as the ‘ano’.
Let me cite another example, also aberrant, but has since
become normalized—and thus naturalized in Ilokano speech, and mindset, for that
matter.
There are several theories on the origin of the word Ilocos,
and its other derivatives, such as Ilokano, whether written with a ‘c’ or a
‘k’.
We now know that the orthographic rendition of either of
these letters is a result of the long history of colonization of the Ilokano
people since 1872 by the Spaniards whose practice is to render as ‘c’ any of
the hard sounds of ‘k’ and to render the ‘k’ sounds as ‘qu’.
This leads us to: i + loc + ano, or its roots, i + locos.
One theory talks of ‘locos’ as a metathesis of the Tagalog
‘looc’, which takes its roots from a more primeval Austronesian root, which
means cove.
Another extraneous theory is the story of an imposed naming
of a place from an outsider’s perspective, which leads us to the ‘iloc’, which
means ‘river’ (in Tagalog), with the explanation that the terminal ‘g’ is not
found in the Spanish language, and is replaced with a ‘c’ for phonological
reasons.
Still another is a Calip theory that talked about a
‘liu-kiu’ or ‘riu-kiu’ in the Chinese language.
The word meant ‘the island adjacent to the mainland’, which
suggests a relationship existing between the Chinese mainland, and the island,
probably Luzon, below it.
To account the Ilokano experience as comprising all of Luzon
is something glorifying for the Ilokano people and their civilization.
But to believe that that is so is to make whole scale the
Luzon experience as practically a history and civilization of the Ilokano
people, with the equation in the end that Ilocos is equal to Luzon, no more, no
less.
Even if it has been proven that the Ilokano language—with
its orientation from the south of Formosa, now called south of Taiwan—is the
source of practically the roots of the many Indo-Pacific languages and cultures
from Guam to Rapa Nui (or sometimes called the Easter Islands) of Chile, and unless
proved by further analysis, we cannot make a grandiose claim that the Ilocos is
the mother of all Luzon cultures and languages.
Today, we cannot prove this.
At least, not yet.
A claim to the contrary is simply superfluous unless the
evidences are put in place.
What we can bring into the discussion is that there was a
Kingdom of Ryu-Kyu, which up to the late 19th century was a
self-sustaining and prosperous kingdom popularly called Okinawa.
Ryu-Kyu entered into a treaty with a young country at that
time, the United States of American, prior to the kingdom’s gobbling up by the
Japanese.
Still a contentious history, with Ryu-Kyu now practically
non-existent but exists only as a nostalgic reference to Okinawa in the
cultural and linguistic representation of the Japanese political imagination,
this Ryu-Kyu could have been the Riu-kiu or Liu-kiu referred to in the Chinese
account of the ‘island adjacent to the mainland.’
3. Solving the
Lexical Puzzles, Solving the Cultural Puzzles
How did I solve a contentious issue such as this one?
What techniques were available to me in accounting all the
possible gauzy, fuzzy, and ambiguous experiences of the Ilokanos?
What criteria should be used to provide an explicandum to
these explicans needing resolving once and for all?
Where are the areas where theory can come in with
plausibility so that unless another theory comes in and offers a stronger set
of logical arguments, that theory can hold water in the meantime?
All these questions need to be asked.
A lexicographer—or a dictionary writer or maker—is not
simply a person who lists words that he hears.
A lexicographer must be discriminating.
He must know where language ends so that a dialect can
begin, or dialects can be inaugurated and celebrated in a more honest
accounting of the experiences of a people, a community, a time, and an epoch.
At the same time, a lexicographer must be steeped in a
vision about what a language can do, about the power of language, and about how
human freedom germinates within the very corm of a language.
Let me go back to the issue of the genesis of the word
Ilocos.
In this dictionary, I insisted a strong position for the
virtue of self-naming.
When a people names itself, that people have taken up the
cudgels of resorting to their power of self-identification, a power rooted in
the self, a power from within, and a power that summons the collective strength
of a community.
We have seen this in the account of Biag ni Lam-ang.
We all know that story clearly: As soon as Lam-ang was able
to speak, he announced to his own mother that his name should be Lam-ang.
Lam-ang did not wait for another to name him: he named
himself.
This leads me to the dynamic of naming one’s own place of
residence, one of the few principles involved in accounting a people’s name:
where they come from.
They call this the dialectic of the toponym.
The dynamic of a people’s self-identification by resorting
to their use of their place of origin continues up until today, to wit,
Kavintaran in Nueva Vizcaya for a community peopled by farmers originally from
Vintar, Ilocos Norte.
This is not an isolated case, but a pattern in other places
outside Luzon.
And it can be the reverse.
In Quirino, for instance, there is a barrio in Diffun town
called Aklan.
That place is people by farmers from Aklan in the Visayas
who came all the way from the far reaches of that island group to eke out a new
life in that Ilokanized place in the Cagayan Valley Region.
If the terrain of a community speaks well of a people, their
character, their history, their comportment, their culture, and thus, their
self-identification, then the idea of Ilocos as coming from the root ‘lukong’
comes close.
Luko, or lukong, in this dictionary, is a depression of a
land.
It is a large swath of earth that caves in from the
mountains or hills, and from there, leads to a large body of water, such as the
sea.
In the case of the Ilocos, it is the West Philippine Sea
awaiting this depression from the Cordilleras.
From on top, we see this clearly: the land depressing into
what is called a lukong from the Cordilleras, and that depression, magnificent
in some ways, while depressive in some others, is exactly what the Ilocos is
all about: a depressed land, a piece of earth under the sun announcing its
presence between a body of water and the gigantic mountain ranges.
Following this logic, we can dismiss the first three
theories and say that when the Ilocanos began to become aware of themselves,
they eventually resorted to their land and their environment to account who
they are.
The logic of this approach is plausible.
The tentative binary was in operation here: i + lukong as
opposed to i + gulod/gulot/golot: the people of the plains (or depressed
portion of a bigger area) and the people of the mountains, or the upland
people.
We must, of course, be aware that this binary must be used
only as a tactic of analysis, or as a heuristics.
For there is certain porousness between these two cultures
that we have yet to bring to the surface in order to prove that the division
between the upland cultures and lowland cultures is not fixed and permanent.
Our sense of direction, for instance, underscores the
cosmological grounding of our terminologies.
The wind is summoned, and that wind becomes a geographic
point such that ‘amian’ or its derivative ‘amianan’ talks of where the wind
comes from, from the north, in much the same that the ‘abagat’ refers to
another wind, and finally fixing that to the south.
Daya is where the ‘raya’—the rays of the sun—comes off
streaking through the trees and mountains in the early morning hours.
Laud, where the sun figuratively sets and hides, is where
the sea is, the ‘laot’ of old, the laot of an older, more primeval Austronesian
root.
These are not innocent terms.
These are terms imbued with a people’s deep knowledge of
themselves, their experiences, and their own physical world.
The clue here is the relational—and no less.
4. Lessons in
Appropriation
In the philosophy of culture and language, and in the
reality involved in language contact, there is the reality of appropriation,
otherwise also known as borrowing from a source culture and language.
But it is not borrowing per se.
It is borrowing with the intention of not returning it.
The beauty of languages and cultures is that they are not
confined to a place and time, as in the case of the confinement we find in
material objects we borrow.
When segments, or aspects, of a language or culture is
borrowed by another, the borrower makes his language or culture richer, not
poorer.
The surprise here is the enchantment that happens when the
meaning and the world of the borrowing culture expands in a concentric circle,
the expansion coming in as a result, inaugurating a new truth, and accounting a
new way of looking at reality, even if this was an old reality.
Take the case of the word ‘marunggay’.
Or the case of the Ilokano word ‘arak’.
The first term—marunggay—is not indigenous to the Ilokano
language, but eventually naturalized, and thus, indigenized, by that language.
It is Tamil.
This suggests that marunggay must have been endemic to the
Tamil regions of India, and then was brought here a long time ago, indigenized,
acculturated, acclimatized, naturalized, and appropriated to the full, until we
can no longer recognize that originally it was alien to the Ilokano language
and people centuries ago.
The second term, arak, comes from Sanskrit, and Arabic.
Spelled ‘aracq’ when it was borrowed, it now has dropped all
the references to its foreign source such that we now have a ‘k’ for the
terminal consonantal sound, with the ‘r’ retained by the Ilokano language, but
substituted with an ‘l’ by the Tagalog language.
We see here the connections and interconnections, and when
possible, I showed these sources in this dictionary. Some of these sources—more
than a hundred of them—are:
Akk, Akkadian
Akl, Aklanon
Ap, Apayao
Ar, Aramaic
Arb, Arabic
Arw, Arawakan (of the Carribbean; rel. to Taino)
Aus, Australian (English)
AusA, Australian aboriginal
Az, Aztec
Bag, Bagobo
Bgo, Bago
Bik, Bikol
Blt, Balti (a Tibetan language)
Bal, Balinese
Bor, Borneo
Ber, Berber
Bol, Bolinao
Bon, Bontoc
Cant, Cantonese
CenAm, Central American variety of Spanish; cf. Mex
Cham, Chamorro
Chav, Chavacano
Chk, Chuukese
Chn, Chinese
Crb, Caribe
Czk, Czech
Dyk, Dyak (of Borneo)
Dch, Dutch
Egp, Egyptian
Eng, English
Esp, Esperanto
Eth, Ethiopian
Ew, Ewe
Fij, Fiji
Fn, Fon
Fr, French
Fuk, Fukien, or Fukien Chinese
Gad, Gaddang
Gal, Galician
Ger, Germanic
Grk, Greek
Haw, Hawaiian
HaP, Hawaii Ilokano/Ilokano Pidgin
Heb, Hebrew
HGer, High German
Hil, Hiligayon
Hok, Hokkien
Hnd, Hindi
Ib, Ibanag
Iba, Ibaloi
If, Ifugao
Igb, Igbo
Ika, Ikalahan, or Kalanguya
Ilg, Ilonggo
Ilk, Old Ilokano
Ind, Indonesian
Ir, Iranian
Itn, Itneg
Is, Isinay
It, Itawis
Ital, Italian
Ivt, Ivatan
Jap, Japanese
Jav, Javanese
Kag, Kagayanon
Kal, Kalinga
Kly, Kalanguya
Kan, Kankanaey
Kap, Kapampangan, or Pampanga
Kin, Kinaray-a
Kor, Korean
Kuy, Kuyunon
L, Latin
Lao, Laotian
Mag, Maguindanao
Mal, Malay
Malb, Malabar, or Malayalam
Man, Manobo
Mng, Mongolian
Mang, Mangyan
Mao, Maori (refers to Cook
Islands, unless specified)
Mar, Marshallese
Marq, Marquesas
Maw, Maranao
May, Mayan
Mex, Mexican variety of
Spanish
Nhl, Nahuatl, or Aztec
OFr, Old French
Pal, Palauan
Palw, Palawanon, a dialect cluster of Palawan
PEP, Proto-East-Polynesian
Per, Persian
Ph, Phoenician
PhE, Philippine English
PMP, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian
Png, Pangasinan
Prt, Portuguese
PrtB, Portuguese Brazilian
PrP, Proto-Polynesian
Rot, Rotuman
Rus, Russian
Sata, Satawalese
Sam, Sambali
Samo, Samoan
SCre, Santiago Creole
Sin, Sinhalese
Sk, Sanskrit
SLt, Samar-Leyte (syn. Waray): Samar-Leyte is used in this
dictionary
Sub, Subanen
Sul, Sulu
Sum, Sumerian
Sur, Surigaonon
Sp, Spanish
Swed, Swedish
Tag, Tagalog
Tgbn, Tagbanua
Tah, Tahitian
Tai, Taino
Tam, Tamil
Th, Thai
Tgn, Tingguian
Tib, Tibetan
Tibo, Tiboli
Tong, Tongan
Trk, Turkish
Tsw, Tswana (or Setswana)
Urd, Urdu
Viet, Vietnamese
Vis, Visayan, Bisayan, Sebuano, or Cebuano Visayan
Yak, Yakan
Yap, Yapese
Yid, Yiddish
Yor, Yoruba
Zam, Zambali
5. Contemporizing the
Alphabet
When I contemporized the Ilokano alphabets, I followed the
following principles: (1) the principle of description; (2) the principle of
resistance; and (3) the principle of insistence.
Let me explain what these things are.
In describing the Ilokano language, I attempted to draw up a
picture of it using a variety of sources, both domestically and
internationally.
In the Philippines, I travelled all over Ilocos, and checked
and rechecked terms deployed in a variety of areas, in a variety of occasions,
usually communal, some festive, some more formal such as in meetings, or
conferences.
I also travelled to places in the Ilokanized regions of the
North, in the Visayas where some prominent people speak Ilokano (and Visayan at
the same time), and in Mindanao where communities of Ilokanos (usually
landowners) have been formed.
Abroad, I have had the chance to hear Ilokano being spoken
in a number of states, including the State of Hawaii where about 90% of the
roughly one-fourth of the total statewide population is of Philippine descent.
Other personal experiences colored my lexicographic work,
including teaching the Ilokano language in the university; teaching computer
fundamentals using the Ilokano language; being an examiner in licensure
examinations in interpretation in Ilokano; being an examiner in oral
proficiency in Ilokano for a variety of clients, both government and
non-government all over the United States; my mass media practice in television
and radio production as announcer, and host and producer of my own public
television program; my work as an editor-in-chief of two newspapers circulated
in the United States; my work as translator of literary works; my work as
translator of policy papers and public service texts for the government and the
private sector; my work as a playwright and stage director using the Ilokano
language as a tool for community education of issues important to the Ilokano
people in the diaspora, particularly in Hawaii; and my own literary practice.
Given these variety of situations that I have had to deal
with, I realized more and more the infecundity of approaching the Ilokano
language from its fossilized form.
Instead, I have recast that language to account all the
sounds that have been operative in that language in its contemporary form.
In my view, the contemporary Ilokano language is made up of
30 letters and no less.
These 30 letters form part of the body of sounds—sounds that
eventually form part of the body of words—of this language.
The sounds are: a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll,
m, n, ñ, ng, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, r, z.
At day-end, I wanted to assure our young people that they
can write their name, or the place where they come from, with these letters
that we have.
If one were coming from Vigan, that ‘v’ must be in the
Ilokano language.
If one were coming from Barangay Quezon, that ‘q’ must be in
there, and so on.
If one were named Ferdinand, or Francine, that letter ‘f’
must be there.
And if one were named Victor, or surnamed Llanes or Quiñones, those ‘v’ and ‘ll’ and ‘ñ’
must be there.
The lesson I learned is this: to deny the legitimacy of the
basic sounds of one’s own name, or the place one comes from, and to insist on
an alphabet that does not recognize you is to permit a particular language to
become a tool of deprivation and exploitation.
Here is where resistance, and its twin, insistence, come
into the picture.
We resist the onslaught of language loss, marginalization,
and education without a vision for the protection of a people’s right to their
language and culture.
We insist upon the need for the Philippines to start
honoring its own people, to start recognizing the diversity of its communities,
and to account the plurality of the lives and cultural experiences of its
citizens.
We are going to do this with the Ilokano language in our
attempt at making it more contemporary.
We make the Ilokano language critically reflective of
current situation, and yet also able to articulate our visions, dreams, and
aspirations.
In the case of the flora and fauna, I attempted to take an
interlingual direction, in the hope of coming up with a dictionary of Ilokano
plants and animals, but with a cross-reference to other Philippine languages,
preferably with a distribution and representation in the three big island
groups, the Visayas and Mindanao.
Whenever possible, I put in the scientifc name, and marked
it as ‘s. n.’ in order to introduce to the students of the need to evolve a
scientific knowledge for our people.
6. Implications in
Research and Emancipatory Education
All these approaches are by no means definitive and final.
I have always looked at human knowledge, following a
hermeneutic tradition, that holds that human knowledge is not value-free, and
that it is never neutral nor objective.
Human knowledge is always-already implicated in tradition,
culture, and history—and thus, implicated by human language.
It is implicated precisely because it is mediated by human
language.
My principal aim was to explore—or to show the way to
exploring—the Ilokano language, and discover its beauty, its magic, and its
promise of liberatory human knowledge for the Ilokano people of today, and for
the Ilokano people of tomorrow.
There is so much to learn from our language, from our
culture, from our people.
We have not learned enough.
We have not researched enough about ourselves.
I have always dreamed that one-day soon, many researches,
masters’ thesis, and doctoral dissertations shall be written in Ilokano.
When that happens, that will be my happiest moment.
That will be the glorious moment of the Ilokano people. -30-
Talked delivered at the MMSU Graduate School, Laoag City, during the launching of the Kontemporaneo a Diksionario nga Ilokano-Ingles, Agosto 11, 2012
