Note 1: I’m starting a new series—or rather, resuming an old series—on Tagalog. I dedicate this series to my increasing number of foreign friends who want to learn, are starting to learn, or have acquired some fluency in, Tagalog. It’s also for my fellow Filipinos who want to refresh and deepen their knowledge of the language. I decided to resume this series (I started it in 2001, through an e-group named Wika) because I wanted to explore novel and more interesting ways of learning it than the usual boring lectures and drills.
Note 2: Take notice that I call the language Tagalog, not Filipino or Pilipino. For hundreds of years, the people speaking it as native tongue were called Tagalog. At present, the Philippines has more than a hundred languages, from Ivatan to Tausug. Thus I prefer to talk about Philippine languages (in the plural) rather than the Philippine language (in the singular). We do have an officially-proclaimed and widely-accepted language called Pilipino or Filipino, but it’s nothing more than modernized Tagalog. Call it Pilipino (or Filipino) if you will, but I’m calling it Tagalog. That doesn’t make me less patriotic than you. Gets? Continue reading “Wika Notes 01a”
