New book tackles history through language
ONE CAN TRACE the history of a country through the evolution of its language. That is the premise behind the new book by National Artist for Literature Virgilio Almario, Introduksiyon sa Leksikograpiya sa Filipinas.
In the book, Mr. Almario, who is concurrently the chairperson of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and the head of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF), discusses the history and development of lexicography in the Philippines as shaped by sociopolitical forces.
“One of the ways to learn about history is through the dictionaries. The evolution of language is reported and recorded in the dictionaries, from beginning up to present,” he told BusinessWorld in an interview on April 3 at the KWF in San Miguel, Manila.
Mr. Almario pointed to the dictionaries compiled by the Spanish friars at the onset of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines — the first public dictionary was made by a Franciscan missionary in 1613. “They needed the dictionaries for spreading evangelization to Filipinos. Instead of teaching [ religion] in Spanish, they’d do it in a native language like what they did in Peru and Puerto Rico, which was really effective,” he said.
He said that not too many dictionaries from that time have surfaced because they were not mass produced. The Spanish friars only needed a few copies for their seminaries and convents in order to teach the native language to their missionaries.
There were, he pointed out, two stages in the development of dictionaries in the Philippines — first was having Spanish words translated into the native language, then came the translations of native languages into Spanish. The second set of dictionaries were released a century after the first.
“Their problem was that early Filipinos weren’t using the Roman alphabet. We had our own [writing system], the baybayin,” he said. “When they were using the Roman alphabet to approximate the sounds in the native languages, they had problems — like we have the sound of ‘ ng’ that the Spanish doesn’t have.”
Nonetheless, the Spanish friars were able to produce their dictionaries.
The next development came in the 19th century with the advent of privately owned printing presses. The problem of these printing presses, however, was the need for content to print. “So the privately owned printing presses competed with the religious presses. Whatever the religious press were printing, [the privately owned presses] also would [print] — until they decided to print dictionaries as well. They copied and reprinted the dictionaries from 17th century,” Mr. Almario said.
Eventually Filipino scholar Pedro Serrano-Laktaw improved on the missionaries’ work, printing the Diccionario HispanoTagalog in 1889 and Diccionario Tagalog-Hispano in 1914. Later, dictionaries were commercialized and pocket dictionaries became a trend. And the rest, so they say, was history.
“If we think about it, dictionaries are recounting not only the development of the language, but also the development of the consciousness of the educated Filipinos,” said Mr. Almario.
MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARY
One concern he raised is that because of our experience with colonial powers, the tradition of dictionary-making had always been bilingual — translating one language into another.
“We had not developed a monolingual dictionary before, which was supposed to happen because that is the mark of our language. It is only now that we are starting to have monolingual dictionaries — after four centuries have passed,” he said.
One of these monolingual dictionaries is the UP Diksiyonaryong Filipino, released in 2001 and authored by Mr. Almario.
In order to work on Introduksiyon sa Leksikograpiya sa Filipinas, Mr. Almario said he had to read the oldest dictionaries he could find in order to know how the Filipino language evolved. “Words’ meanings change over time. And it has become a habit that almost every morning, I open a dictionary randomly to learn something new about words.”
That is when he discovers the etymology of words. For instance, “art” is not “sining” as “sining” is an old Filipino word which means “to think.” He also said “theater” is not “dula” in Filipino because “dula” is a Cebuano word for the verb “play.” The inhabitants of the Philippines had no dramatic art forms until the Spanish colonizers introduced the komedya, the stylized dramatization of conflicts between Christians and Muslims.
“That is why lexicography is an important tool for people who are interested in our language. And that is what I’m trying to advocate [this]. We give all our energy in studying English. Filipinos now don’t study our language because it’s ours... That is the kind of attitude I don’t want because when it continues, we won’t be able to help to intellectualize our language and serious discourses,” he said.
Introduksiyon sa Leksikograpiya sa Filipinas, which was launched on March 21 at the KWF, is in line with his advocacy to preserve the country’s intangible heritage, which is one of the advocacies pushed by the NCCA. The book is the most recent addition to the KWF Aklat ng Bayan series.
Mr. Almario expects to release the 2nd edition of UP Diskyunaryong Filipino soon.
For more information on the Introduksiyon sa Leksikograpiya sa Filipinas and the Aklat ng Bayan series, contact the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino at 736-2519. —