This business of studying the Ilokano language has become an obsession in some sort of way.
It has consumed me each day, in wakefulness and in sleep.
Funny that on April 20, I dreamt of the Ilokano language, literally.
It was the break of dawn, at about three, when the world that was previously in stillness mode, began to produce those stirrings that indicated the coming to life of a new day.
Here was a dream: An Ilokano sentence that has made full use of all the letters of the new Ilokano alphabet that I have proposed in order to bring this language into a discursive mode. I cannot fully remember what the sentence was, but in there are the new letters I have introduced in the dictionaries I have had the pleasure to write.
I have been a proponent of a new Ilokano language that should be open to accepted the letters that were not previously used in the older orthographic forms, a proposal that builds upon what we have got in the past and makes full use of the promise of an intellectualized discourse for the Ilokano people.
There was no way we could do that with the structural limitations of the (a) old writing system as preserved by the Doctrina Cristiana of 1620; (b) the Hispanic form that has lasted for almost 400 years now; and (c) the Tagalog/Lope K Santos form that Bannawag uses. No can, these.
We cannot develop a highly intellectualized language by being trapped in these forms even if some of them are popular, too popular that many of those Ilokano intellectuals do not even know how to begin to question the beginning of things but only swallow hook, like, and sinker what has been received by them, or what has been passed on to them.
Ah, the dream.
Ah, a dream about the Ilokano language.
Hon, HI
April 21, 2013
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