Kinaray-a & Ilocano

This is one of the three articles I moved from my now-defunct blog, Hiligaynon kag Kinaray-a. I decided to delete the blog and focus on this blog. It doesn't really matter that the topics contained in this blog are now a little too different from each other. I can categorize the different articles anyway. Anyway, here are the links to the other articles.

Some things about Kinaray-a
Kinaray-a & Hiligaynon

My first language is Kinaray-a. But I can also speak Hiligaynon, Tagalog and English. I also understand Aklanon, Cebuano, and little bit of Waray. I've been studying Ilocano for a little more than five months now and I think I’m doing just fine. Thanks to Izanor Lyn Javier of Nadsaag in San Juan, La Union for patiently teaching me her language.

Some time ago, I wrote that the middle sound in Ilocano and Kinaray-a are the same. (Click here to see the article.) Wen, the same. But well, the similarity between the two languages doesn't end there.

I first encountered Ilocano when I was in kindergarten. Actually, I didn't know it was Ilocano until I was 22, when I was told that it was actually, uhm, Ilocano. We had this presentation at school and we sang songs and danced dances and wore things that, if only we had better minds then, we'd never think of wearing. I wore this blue-and-green checkered pair of polo and pants (which were more like pyjamas, it made me look like I was going to sleep) and my partner wore baro't saya. For our props, they put up this front part of a nipa hut. When I think of now, it makes me realize that our teacher (Ma’am Carol Aligarbes) must have really exerted great effort for our presentation to be good. My partner was "inside" the "nipa house" for our number, and she opened the window when I sang to her my Manang Biday song. I still have pictures of this at home (and I think I look quite cute in there) so maybe I could post them here in my blog next time. I can't really remember if I pronounced my words correctly then, or if I was told the meaning of the song (I have such poor memory), but I know that I really enjoyed our presentation.

But going back to our topic here, I just noticed a very striking similarity between Kinaray-a and Ilocano aside from the middle sound. Kinaray-a shares most of its vocabulary with Hiligaynon, but there is this group of words -- pronouns actually, though I’m not sure if they’re in the ablative case - which is more similar to Ilocano than to Hiligaynon. I wonder why the similarity, and why specifically in this group of words.

Here, in the chart, I included Hiligaynon and Tagalog for comparison. Hiligaynon, Tagalog, and Kinaray-a all belong to the Central Philippine branch of the Meso-Philippine group of Philippine languages, while Ilocano belongs to the Northern Luzon branch of the Northern Philippine group of Philippine languages.

Kinaray-a	Ilocano	Hiligaynon	Tagalog
kanaken	kanyak	sa akun	sa akin
kanimu	kanyam	sa imu	sa iyo
kaninyu	kanyayo / kadakayo	sa inyu	sa inyo
kana	kanyana	sa iya	sa kanya
kananda	kanyada	sa ila	sa kanila
kanamen	kanyamin	sa amun	sa amin
kanaten	kadatayo	sa atun	sa atin

Know any explanation for this? I don't know yet. But I'm really tempted to think that maybe we need to look at the possibility of truth in H. Othley Beyer's Waves of Migration Theory again.

(Originally published on October 26, 2005)

Kinaray-a & Hiligaynon

This is one of the three articles I moved from my now-defunct blog, Hiligaynon kag Kinaray-a. I decided to delete the blog and focus on this blog. It doesn't really matter that the topics contained in this blog are now a little too different from each other. I can categorize the different articles anyway. Anyway, here are the links to the other articles.

Some things about Kinaray-a
Kinaray-a & Ilocano

For quite a long time now, some local academicians have been spreading the idea that Hiligaynon traces its origin to Kinaray-a. Even Aklanon, they say, comes from Kinaray-a. "The mother language of West Visayas is Kinaray-a or Hiraya," says Dr. Leoncio P. Deriada. How true is this?

If this claim is to be believed, they very much go against the researches done by linguists several years back. Those researches resulted to classifications and groupings of the different languages in the Philippines. According to those, Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a both belong to the Bisayan branch of the Central Philippines subgroup of the large Meso-Philippines language group. However, if we go further, Kinaray-a is found to belong to the West sub-branch of the Bisayan language sub-sub-grouping (where it joins Aklanon, Malaynon, Kinaray-a, Cuyonon, Inonhan, and Caluyanun), while Hiligaynon belongs to the Central sub-branch of the Bisayan language sub-sub-grouping. (Please check the whole Philippine language tree in Carl Rubino's website. A similar tree can be found in Jessie Grace Rubrico's website.)

I am not very familiar with how this tree (I mean the whole language tree) has been arrived at, but I'm working on it right now. I need to know how the researchers did it, what methods they used, etc. Rubrico included her references in her website, but I don't know where I can download copies of those articles, manuscripts, etc.

But if ever I find them, the readings, I'm sure it will solve the conflict between the two claims. So is Kinaray-a the mother of Western Visayan languages? I'll tell you about it next time.

(Originally published on October 26, 2005)

Some things about Kinaray-a

This is one of the three articles I moved from my now-defunct blog, Hiligaynon kag Kinaray-a. I decided to delete the blog and focus on this blog. It doesn't really matter that the topics contained in this blog are now a little too different from each other. I can categorize the different articles anyway. Anyway, here are the links to the other articles:

Kinaray-a & Hiligaynon
Kinaray-a & Ilocano

(This article is in reaction to Chris Sundita's Hear me speak Kinaray-a! article.)

It seems to me that more and more people now start to think that Kinaray-a is an Antique language. It is not. I mean it's an Iloilo language, too. More people in Antique speak Kinaray-a than in Iloilo, but Kinaray-a is not the only language spoken in Antique. There are others. Call them dialects if you like. But I'm straying away from this a little.

Several towns in Iloilo are Kinaray-a speaking. Among these are Miagao, Tigbauan, San Joaquin, Tubungan, Alimodian, Leon, and several others. These towns are in the southern part of Iloilo, near the borders of Antique. The Kinaray-a spoken in these towns, however, are not (very much) the same as that (or those) in Antique. The trend is that (as is the tendency for every language) the nearer the towns are to each other (e.g., San Joaquin and Miagao, Leon and Tubungan), the more similar their Kinaray-a are. (Maybe Chris Sundita can discuss a little about isoglosses in his blog.)

Iloilo towns farther and farther from the Kinaray-a speaking towns speak more and more Ilonggo/Hiligaynon until the very Hiligaynon parts of Iloilo near the city are reached. But it can also be said this way: towns farther from Iloilo City are less and less Hiligaynon. Towns in between the "more Kinaray-a" ones and the "more Hiligaynon" ones speak a mixture, in different degrees, of Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a.

The same thing is true in Antique. Different Antique towns speak different Kinaray-as. I am not sure which language/s (aside from Hiligaynon and Aklanon) they share their vocabulary with (maybe Cuyunon and other Palawan languages?), but the trend is that the nearer the Antique town is to the north (which is where Aklan is), the more different (i.e., more Aklanon) it is from the Kinaray-a spoken in the south. Maybe the notion that Antique is an ALL KINARAY-A speaking province will be clarified if the Aklanons talked more about their language.

Now, with regard to the schwa problem, I find no difference between the Ilocano middle sound (as in "wen", yes) and the Kinaray-a middle sound (as in "hu-ud", or as Chris suggested it spelled, "he-ed", also yes).

I really think that the letter "e" would be the better graphic representation for that middle sound. Ernesto Constantino, in fact, did just that in his Kinaray-a Dictionary (I found a copy of it in the Center for West Visayan Studies in UP Iloilo City).

But why hasn't it caught Kinaray-a writers? I can only think of one explanation: Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a share a very large amount of vocabulary. But it is always the case that when a word is similar to the two languages, the schwa sound in the Kinaray-a would be transformed to /u/ in Hiligaynon.

Kin.: aken (mine)
Hil.: akun (mine)

Kin.: he-e(d) (yes)
Hil.: hu-u (yes)

Kin.: bedlay (difficult)
Hil.: budlay (difficult)

To change the "o" or "u" (as graphic representation for the schwa sound) to "e" would be difficult for Kinaray-a writers because it would "cut" the easy link between Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a. Yes, it may just be a matter of being used to it, but it will take quite some time before Kinaray-a writers used "e" for the schwa sound, if ever they will.

(Originally published on September 15, 2005.)