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.)