At the end of the three centuries of Spanish presence in the archipelago, Spanish missionaries had written at least 120 grammars of the native languages spoken in the Philippines. With the wide linguistic diversity they found and the need to transmit the faith in all its purity, the missionary grammarians began analyzing the languages and wrote pedagogical grammars for their confreres to learn them. Initially, only the major languages were studied and learned, using Spanish and Latin models, but eventually minor languages were also added. This study examines eleven representative grammars to determine their general characteristics and, in the process, bring to light some of their authors’ contributions to the history of grammar writing and linguistics in the Philippines. A significant finding is that the linguistic pursuits undertaken in describing the languages and preparing their grammars throughout the entire Spanish colonial period, while being in synch and continuous with the development of modern linguistics in the 17th to the 19th centuries, advanced the scientific study of languages in the country as well as grammar writing involving the native languages.
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the history of grammar writing in the Philippines and thus complement what is currently known about the history of linguistics in the country. While there is a strong interest in the subject, there remains a wide lacuna especially with respect to the Spanish period. And this is easily attributable to a dearth of English-speaking investigators who are adept in the use of Spanish as a research language and the consequent paucity of literature written in English. During the three centuries of Spanish presence in the archipelago, Spanish missionaries authored more than 120 grammars of the Philippine languages, concentrating initially on the nine most commonly spoken of about 130 languages spread all over the archipelago. For this research work, eleven of these grammars had been selected based on certain criteria and a comparison was made to show how their authors treated specific grammatical elements and features at a time when linguistics was gradually developing and when interest in the vernaculars all over the world was on the rise. Given the study’s panoramic nature, this essay simply provides a survey of important features and thus avoids delving into details which must be covered by studies on individual grammars or a set thereof.
Partial or related studies published in English have been made on the subject of grammar writing involving Philippine languages during this period. published an article on the missionaries’ linguistic production in its different genres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their early efforts to teach Spanish to the natives, and the issues they dealt with as they pursued their primary objective. In 1989, a doctoral dissertation presented an analysis of grammars of Philippine languages written during the period in question in German, Russian, Italian, Dutch, and French. It made two important conclusions: one could not speak of a European school in Philippine linguistics, and that the development of comparative linguistics in itself was the greatest contribution made by these linguists. Two years later, the same author published an article on European studies of these languages, extending the period to the 20th century. Her dissertation was eventually published as a book , summarizing studies on Philippine languages made from the sixteenth to the twentieth century by Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish grammarians and linguists. Another dissertation on the same eleven grammars investigated in the present paper was presented with the purpose of looking into the evolution of significant features of these grammatical studies to contribute to the writing of the history of Philippine linguistics.
Meanwhile in Spain a good variety of studies has been emerging over the last twenty years. published an important panoramic study of the general characteristics of the first grammatical descriptions, i.e., 17th century grammars, of a few Philippine languages. Added to these studies that comprise a number of grammars are works on individual grammatical descriptions like those of on the Pampango grammars of Coronel, Benavente, and Bergaño, on Vivar’s (et al.) Ilocano grammar, and on López’s grammar of Pangasinan. Special mention is due to Sueiro Justel and Riveiro Lema’s work which entailed a deep, detailed, and comprehensive study of the elements of Andrés López’s grammar, dwelling on features common to other grammars of other Philippine languages as well as unique ones like the grammarian’s translation principles, which were based on his own experience as a translator. It is hoped that studies of this type will be made of all the other grammars, with particular focus on those that bring out distinctive features. Another type of single-grammar studies which started coming up at the turn of the 20th century is one that leads to the publication of critical editions, e.g., the works by on Blancas de San José’s Tagalog grammar, on López’s grammar of Ilocano, on Totanes’s Tagalog grammar, and on Méntrida’s Hiligaynon grammar.
The authors of these grammars were members of the regular clergy, i.e., ordained ministers or priests from the different religious orders based in Spain. They joined their respective orders’ Philippine mission and were sent to the islands, not infrequently after spending some time in Mexico, entrusted with the charge of preaching the Gospel to the inhabitants. As they were ordered to learn the languages of the natives and become bilinguals, they rose to the challenge and undertook the arduous task of writing pedagogical grammars for their confreres. From the perspective of an outsider living in the present, the enterprise may look very intimidating and hard to realize but, in reality, it was less so, thanks to the fact that the frontline missionaries had previously studied the grammars of Spanish and Latin and used a home-grown language learning method, which consisted in learning Latin from . The grammar writers knew they could use familiar Latin and Spanish examples and terminology—comparing and contrasting, adapting, or substituting, depending on what the situation demanded.
There were two important reasons why the missionary grammarians’ “do-it-yourself” efforts at codifying the native languages were not altogether grueling. As they wrote the grammars, they were guided by the grammatical works of Antonio de Nebrija (+1522), either in their pure state or modified according to rationalist grammatical principles current during the period and they were recipients of the rich experience the Mexican missions gathered and generously shared with their brothers in other missions. Fr. Alonso de Molina (+1579), a Spanish Franciscan missionary in Mexico and author of a Nahuatl grammar and a dictionary, refers to Nebrija (as cited in in his Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana.
Todos los verbos de la lengua se pondran en la primera persona del presente de indicativo [si la tuvieren] y sino enla tercera, porque esta todos los verbos la tienen; u sirue siempre vna mesma para singular y plural, pero el romance delos verbos se pondra en el infinitiuo, como lo pone Antonio de Lebrixa en su vocabulario.
[All the verbs of the language will be rendered in the first person, present indicative (if they have it) or, otherwise, in the third person since all verbs have it, or it has always the same form for the singular and plural; the equivalent in the Romance language, however, will be in the infinitive form as Antonio de Lebrixa (sic) has done it in his vocabulary.]
Perhaps without directly endeavoring to do so, Molina effectively served as the nexus between Nebrija and the first missionary grammarians in Mexico and those analyzing the languages in the Philippines. The first Franciscans who arrived in the archipelago certainly knew of Molina’s work and had learned his methodology. For example, Fr. Juan de Ayora (†1581), author of Mexican and Ilocano grammatical and vocabulary works, who went to Acapulco in 1523 and afterward to Manila in 1577, was one of Molina’s students. Since many of the missionaries who went to the Philippines had spent some time in Mexico to get themselves acquainted with the translation and interpretation works of their fellow missionaries, they would have learned Molina’s methods of language learning and pedagogy.
An authoritative impetus for using the native languages for evangelization came when Bishop Fray Domingo de Salazar (†1594) convoked the first Synod of Manila in 1582. If it were not for this synod, there would probably be very little grammatical and dictionary production in the land. While the synod was mainly concerned about questions of justice and how to administer it, it also dealt with the ways by which the natives could be evangelized more effectively. Doubtless inspired by the swift decision to use Nahuatl in Mexico as the vehicle of communication with the indigenous people, the synod fathers unanimously agreed that the Philippines belonged to the natives and that the Gospel must be preached to them in their languages .
Unlike in Mexico though where a single language was at least known about throughout the Mexica empire , the linguistic landscape they found was diverse and different ethnic groups were living far apart from one another. It was providential that the civil authorities’ solution to attendant problems such as the provision of assistance to the people, education, and acculturation, eventually facilitated the missionaries’ need for a way to communicate with the natives. That solution, which consisted in unifying the natives into pueblos [towns] and asentamientos [settlements], had had both immediate and lasting effects as history would eventually show. The unification of the natives into towns not only facilitated civil and judicial administration, tribute collection, pastoral and religious administration, but it also expedited the consolidation of specific languages into so-called lenguas generales or major languages . Based on a list of encomiendas and tributes compiled in 1591 , the major linguistic groups in Luzon and the rounded number of speakers were as follows: Tagalog 124,000, Ilocano 75,000, Vicol 77,000, Pangasinan 24,000, Pampanga 75,000, Ibanag 96,000. Visayan, with three major varieties (Hiligaynon, Cebuano, and Waray-waray), was the largest single linguistic group outside Luzon. And so, as good logic would dictate, the first grammars and vocabularies would be those of these languages. Incidentally, all of these languages, save Ibanag, continue to enjoy the status of being major languages of the Philippines up to this day.
In 1594, to cover a specific area of the mission territory and to cope with the wide dispersion of the natives, the archipelago was subdivided among four religious orders; these were the Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans, and the Jesuits. The Augustinians were given the provinces of Pampanga and Ilocos, while the Franciscans received the towns of Camarines. Both the Augustinians and the Franciscans received a big bulk of parishes since they had already been well-established in the islands. Meanwhile, the Dominicans were given the responsibility over the pastoral needs of the Chinese community, and the Jesuits took care of the inhabitants of the Visayan islands, hand in hand with the Augustinians. When the Augustinian Recollects arrived, they were given parishes scattered all over the archipelago. This distribution made it possible for the religious orders to dedicate themselves to learning not more than four different languages.
Based on bibliographical references, a total of 124 grammars and 108 vocabulary works, published and unpublished, were written from the beginning of stable Spanish presence in the archipelago until the end of the 19th century . In comparison, 104 grammars and 108 vocabularies of the Amerindian languages in the American colonies are attested in the literature. Accordingly, while 12% of Philippine languages (i.e., 15 out of about 130) were studied, only 4% of the Amerindian languages (i.e., 32 of more than 800) were covered by the missionaries.
The eleven grammars, representing each major language described and each of the three centuries of Spanish missionary activities, have been grouped in a way that matches up with a periodization based on the stages of Spanish presence in both the Philippines and the Americas. Two periods can be identified: (a) discovery, exploration and conquest, and settlement, 16th -18th c., and (b) colonial stability (or stable coexistence), 19th c. (Sueiro Justel 2002b).
The first group comprises six grammars originally written in the 17th and 18th centuries. Half of them were revised, or re-edited, in the late 19th century.
Arte y Reglas de la Lengua Tagala by .
Arte y Reglas de la Lengua Pampanga by .
Gramática Ilocana: Compuesta por el Padre Predicador Fr. Francisco López Corregida y Aumentada por P. Carro by .
Arte de la Lengua Bisaya-Hiligayna de la Isla de Panay by .
Arte de la Lengua Pampanga by .
Gramática Bisaya-Cebuana by
The second group consists of five grammars originally printed toward the end of the 19th century and at the dawn of the 20th.
Arte de la Lengua Pangasinan o Cabaloan, Corregido, Aumentado y Llevando en si el Mismo Compendio by .
Arte Nuevo de la Lengua Ybanag: Embellecida con un Índice, y Unas Tablas-mapas de los Derivados de los Nombres, y Verbos de Ybanág by .
Arte del Idioma Visaya de Samar y Leite by .
Nueva Gramática Tagalog: Teórico- Práctica by .
Gramática Hispano-Bicol: Según el método Ollendorff by .
Filipino linguist created a comprehensive list of manuscripts on Philippine languages, prepared annotated bibliographies of the published ones, and included a list of such works which could be found in Philippine libraries. The grammars chosen for this study had been taken from her list and all sourced from the National Library of the Philippines located in Manila. All nine major languages have one representative grammar, with an additional grammar each for Tagalog and Pampango. Six of the grammars were first published during the first period; three of which were re-edited during the second period, namely, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Cebuano; and five were originally published in the 19th – 20th century. Table 1 below gives more specific reasons why these grammars had been included in the study.
Table 2 gives specific information about the grammarians based on the scant literature available offline and online. All of them were natives of Spain and, in addition to important administrative functions in their respective religious orders in the majority of cases, they were assigned parishes in Luzon and the Visayas to minister to. Those without administrative assignments were known to be men of impressive human talents. They belonged to three of the four major religious orders to which the entire Philippines was initially entrusted. Lastly, bibliographical references have been found indicating that three of these authors actually spent some time in Mexico before moving to the Philippines.
To meet its objective, this study examined the grammars’ internal structure and the treatment or description of the parts of speech, pronunciation, and syntax. The internal structure follows a very definite outline, i.e., books (called “parts” in the present essay) divided into chapters, which in turn are divided into paragraphs. The parts of speech, based on Spanish tradition, had been either adapted, translated, or replaced with adequate substitutes. What occasioned a major qualitative modification of this imported framework was the presence of grammatical units proper to agglutinative languages as well as their unsurprising absence in Spanish or Latin. These consequently changed the way the grammarians regarded the languages’ structure, the method of description, and the structure of the grammars . Specifically, the missionary grammarians’ identification of words (the basic unit of grammar in the European tradition) and their classification had had important consequences on the internal structure of the grammars, identification of their parts and chapters, and the teaching and learning of the languages .
This present exposition starts with the characterization of the grammars according to the group they fall into. There is a summary at the end, which sorts the characteristics according to the probable reasons why they developed as they did.
The table below reveals different correlations between the grammars’ edition dates, intended users (function), and their internal structure.
Based on this table, all published grammars, i.e., ten out of eleven, had preliminary pages which included prayers, dedication to the missionaries, user instructions, license and approval to print, etc. Almost half had appendices, a list of errata, or epilogues. Since the Pampango-Coronel grammar was either not intended or not prepared for publication, it had neither preliminary pages nor appendices. In terms of length, the grammar with the least number of pages is that of Waray; the longest is that of Tagalog-Coria, with 555 pages.
True to form, all the grammars, regardless of the edition year, were written for the grammarians’ confreres and other missionaries to facilitate their work. Eventually, toward the end of the colonial period, without setting the missionary agenda aside, the authors or editors of four of these grammars diversified their intended users to include lay people, i.e., non-missionaries such as students, teachers, and business people. Such grammars were either published for the first time in the second period (Tagalog-Coria and Bicol) or re-edited at the time (Ilocano and Hiligaynon) to accommodate the needs of the new users.
The first-period grammars had no standard way of dividing the grammars into predetermined or conventional sections. In its place was a conceptual grouping of lessons into arte and reglas for which a variety of labels had been substituted, e.g., libro [book], and parte [part], whose contents were, to a large extent, similar across the different grammars. Blancas de San José divides his grammar into two parts. He calls the first part Arte Tagala [literally, the Tagalog Art] in which he makes a formal and functional description of the parts of speech in six lessons: the declension, cases, and number of nouns; personal pronouns; demonstrative pronouns; the substantive verb sum es fui (i.e., the verb “to be”); and a general orientation about verbs and their different forms. The second part, the Libro de las Reglas [the Book of Rules], is made up of twenty chapters which contain instructions on using affixes and reduplicating syllables to create nouns, verbs, and adverbs. Specifically, the Libro de las Reglascovers the active verb forms (um and mag); the passive verb forms (y, yn, and an); the causative verb form facere facere; roots that begin with P; the different Tagalog affixes; syllable reduplication in nouns, verbs, and adverbs; numerals; and the particles may and wala (equivalent to English there is and its negation), ligatures, pronunciation, etc.
Developments in philosophies and styles of grammar writing had been occurring in Spain which extended to the archipelago such that the authors of the second-period grammars had become aware that they had to structure their work in a certain way, following certain standards. Three of the grammars that were either written or re-edited in the late 19th century until the beginning of the 20th made use of a predetermined four-part structure, which the Royal Spanish Academy had prescribed for formal grammars. Fr. Cipriano Marcilla, editor of the 1895 edition of López’s Ilocano grammar, divides the original two-part work into four parts or books that modern linguistics called for, asserting that the Royal Academy concludes its introduction to the (Spanish) grammar with the following words:
Cuatro partes corresponden á los cuatro indicados fines: de conocer (Analogía), ordenar (Sintáxis), pronunciar (Prosodia) y escribir correctamente (Ortografía).
[Four parts correspond to the four identified ends: of knowing (Analogy), ordering (Syntax), enunciating (Prosody), and writing correctly (Orthography).]
At this time, modern linguistics was already developing in full speed, and lay (Spanish) people had discovered a more secular use for the native languages. Regardless, it is clear that the presence of unique grammatical units, e.g., the root, affixes, and ligatures, shaped the configuration of these grammars as it did those belonging to the first group. Rationalist ideas, which influenced grammars written in Spain beginning the 16th century and those of the archipelago that came after Blancas de San José’s Arte could be clearly seen manifested in the configuration of the missionary grammars. After teaching the composition of verbs and nouns, the grammarians would normally include preliminary explanations to explain unique items, e.g., the roots, affixes, or vowels and consonants not found in Spanish or Latin, and even at times establishing the languages’ phonological system. , for example, shows the equivalence of Spanish and Visayan sounds, including sounds that do not exist in one or the other. In addition, the grammars would include short treatises on figures of speech, poetry and meter, modes of counting, and translation, which correspond to the rationalist’s ordo naturalis as opposed to the humanist’s ordo grammaticalis .
As to the standard or recurring grammar lessons, the following are identifiable across the grammars regardless of the period they belong to: pronunciation, the substantive verb “to be”, nouns and pronouns together with their cases and the corresponding markers for nouns, composition of verbs by affixation and reduplication of the syllables of root words, formation and use of active and passive verbs, ligatures to connect words into phrases, adjectives, adverbs, numerals.
Table 4 below shows the basis of the grammars’ internal division (structure) and whether or not the inclusion of an inventory of the parts of speech was a function of their publication data.
It appears that the first grammarians never thought that making an exhaustive list of the different parts of speech, in the fashion of Antonio de Nebrija, was essential to their work of writing language-learning grammars. This was a significant deviation from Nebrija’s Gramática de la Lengua Castellana whose third book begins with a chapter called De las Diez Partes de la Oración que Tiene la Lengua Castellana [About the Ten Parts of Speech of the Castilian Language] where the author catalogs the ten parts of speech of Spanish . Nevertheless, the grammarians began with the assumption of finding the eight classical parts of speech and along the way, the different sentence parts, which they adapted to the languages being described, are introduced together with descriptions of how they are formed and used in sentences to construct meaningful utterances and enable the users to engage in productive discourse . This was the case of the first Tagalog grammar and the two grammars of Pampango. Even while Blancas de San José, Coronel, and Bergaño speak of and describe the structure and functions of the various parts of speech used in these two languages, they seemed unable to care less about giving a complete list. Note that Blancas de San José opens the Arte immediately with a description of properties, rather than a list and a formal definition. Below is an illustration.
Todos los nombres vniversalmẽte son inuariables en la voz: de manera que la misma voz es para singular y plural, y para todos los casos. Empero quanto a los casos se varian cõ vnas preposiciones que se les anteponen.
[The forms of all nouns are universally unchanging in such a way that the same form is used for both singular and plural and for all cases. The cases of nouns are indicated by the markers that are placed before them.]
Likewise and begin their respective artes with a discussion on the unchanging noun forms notwithstanding changes in case and the articles that mark such changes. In the same league is Hiligaynon grammar, which opens the grammar with a discussion of the declension of proper nouns and the articles for indicating case. Similarly, nowhere in the grammar will one find adverbs, interjections, conjunctions, nouns, adjectives, verbs, and pronouns placed under one list. This grammar was originally published in the first period and re-edited in the second, but unlike the two other re-edited grammars, it did not adopt the Academy’s quadripartite structure.
Contrariwise, the authors of the re-edited grammars that followed the prescriptions of the Spanish Royal Academy, i.e., López and Encina, made it a point to enumerate the parts of speech before proceeding to any functional or structural descriptions and explanations. The editor of the grammar originally written by López gives the ten parts of speech of Ilocano and their formal definitions. In like manner, or the editor of the 1885 version, names eleven parts of speech, which include the ten from López’s grammar and an extra one, i.e., the linker or ligature. The Ilocano grammar opens the Parte Primera: Analogía [Part 1: Analogy] by defining analogy in general, followed by the parts of speech.
Conocida la definición de la Analogía y su acepción gramatical, pasemos al examen de las partes de la oración. Estas, según la Real Academia, se reducen a diez clases, a saber: articulo, nombre sustantivo, nombre adjetivo, pronombre, verbo, participio, adverbio, preposición, conjunción, é interjección, las cuales examinaremos, dando principio por el articulo que es el método observado por la Real Academia y distinguidos gramáticos.
Having learned the definition of Analogy and its grammatical sense, let us move on to the study of the parts of speech. According to the Royal Academy, these are reduced to ten classes: article, noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, participle, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection, which we will examine beginning with the article, which is the method used by the Royal Academy as well as distinguished grammarians.
Among the grammars published originally in the second period, only Nueva Gramática, lists the parts of speech. This is not very surprising since, as noted earlier, it forms a group with López’s and Encina’s grammars for having followed the Spanish Royal Academy, which appears to have also required giving definitions for the parts of speech. Instead of an exhaustive list, second-period grammars, except Vera’s, give formal definitions of the parts of speech. Vera’s grammar can be exempted from this generalization since his grammar was intended for those who wanted to learn the language mainly for communication, which makes it similar to the older grammars with a purely missionary purpose.
To recapitulate, even if the grammars of the second group do not conform to the four-part division expected of a “modern” grammar, they at least observe the convention of defining the parts of speech. The grammars that belong to the first group, as a rule, neither provide a list nor give definitions except the two re-edited ones which give both, making them similar to the second-period grammars. As an illustration, below is the definition of adjectives found in the Waray grammar:
Se denominan Adjetivos los nombres, que se juntan á los sustantivos para modificarlos, calificarlos, ó caracterizarlos.
Words that are joined to nouns in order to modify, qualify, or describe them are called Adjectives.
In all cases, whether the complete inventory of the parts of speech is present or not, either the noun or its markers (artículos) are always the first to be discussed. For example, the first three sections of the Analogy part of grammar, after defining the concept of analogy, carry the following headings: Del artículo, Declinación de los artículos, Del nombre [On the article, Declension of articles, On nouns]. Most, if not all, of the features of the noun mentioned or described in the grammars are already found in Blancas de San José’s Arte. Specific examples are even recycled in the majority of cases, and this holds for other parts of speech as well. For instance, the following illustration appears frequently across the grammars mutatis mutandis:
Las quales en los nombres proprios son estas. Nom. Si Pedro: Pedro. Gen. ni Pedro: de Pedro. Dat. cay Pedro: a Pedro. Voc. ay Pedro, o Pedro. Abl. cay Pedro: de Pedro. )
The [articles] for proper nouns are these: Nominative. si Pedro: Peter. Genitive. ni Pedro: Peter’s. Dative. cay Pedro: to Peter. Vocative. ay Pedro, Oh Peter. Ablative. cay Pedro: from Peter.
Below are the other significant features of nouns as identified in the different grammars.
A standard lesson in all the grammars is the use of linguistic devices that perform the functions of the Latin substantive verb “to be” in the Philippine languages. What is notable is the fact that, right from the beginning, the grammarians had realized that the substantive verb did not exist in any of these languages. In a study of six Tagalog grammars, it was found that only one of them viewed the Tagalog inversion marker ay as its exact equivalent (correspondencia mutua) and the rest identified mere substitutes (suplentes), i.e., the ay as an attributive connector, some clitics, and specific adverbs .
Blancas de San José, for example, takes this up not in the Libro de las Reglas where the regular verbs are discussed, but in the Arte Tagala, i.e., in the grammar’s shorter introductory part, which effectively gives it greater prominence. No expert explanation is given except that the substantive verb in Latin is substituted by (le suple) or is intuitively understood (subintelectamente se entiende) when the other parts (or grammatical elements) of the sentence, e.g., moods and tenses, etc., are at work. Credit must be given to him for cautioning Tagalog learners against regarding the inversion marker ay as a substantive or linking verb. He says,
Podria offrecer se le a alguno que se suple cõ esta particula, ay, como dizjẽdo, si Pedro, ay, matapang: pero no es assi, por q̃ esta particula, ay, no es sino vn sõsonete y gracia q̃ ponẽ en medio quando precede el sujeto de quien dizẽ algo: y sino bueluan al reues aquella misma oraciõ, si Pedro, ay, matapang, diziendo, matapang si Pedro; la qual esta muy buena y perfecta, y vease donde esta el, ay, q̃ supla el sum es fui.
[It may seem to some that the particle ay substitutes for it, e.g., si Pedro, ay, matapang (Peter is brave), but it is not so because this particle, ay, is nothing but a tapping and grace placed in the middle of the sentence when the subject about whom something is said takes the first position. Otherwise, the sentence si Pedro, ay, matapang is said in reverse, i.e., matapang si Pedro, which sounds very good and perfect, and thus one sees where the ay that substitutes sum es fui lies.]
While the Tagalog grammarian did not venture into identifying what he perceived to be adequate substitutes for the verb, the other grammarians beginning with Bergaño were more forthright. For , the equivalent expressions were identified by way of the Spanish equivalents, i.e., ser, estar [to be] and tener/haber [to have], both of which translate to the Latin verb sum es fui. As they attempted to look for the counterparts or substitutes of these Spanish verbs, the other grammarians discovered particles, irregular verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, word order, and the mere employment of the nominative case and an adjective. This is particularly true of the Cebuano grammarian who says,
Este verbo en sus tres propiedades de Ser. Estár, y Haber se espresa por medio de partículas, verbos defectivos, adverbios, y conjunciones, y por sola la colocación del nominativo y adjetivo.
[In its three qualities of “to be,” “to be in,” and “to have,” this verb is expressed by means of particles, irregular verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions, and by means of the location of the nominative and the adjective.]
Since Philippine languages are agglutinative, the construction or derivation of verbs based on roots and affixes, concerning tense, aspect, voice, and mood, naturally constitutes the most extensive part of the grammars. Included here is the composition of the active and passive verbs. As years went by, it could be seen that the appreciation of the passive voice and consequently its description evolved since the time first described it in the following terms: Toda la machina principal desta lengua, estriva sobre las tres pasivas... [the fundamental structure of the Tagalog language rests on the three passive forms]. It is evident that the grammarians progressively understood that the affixes encode such meanings as voice, mood, and what contemporary linguists would call “focus,” i.e., the nominal that is being given emphasis in a sentence or phrase. The first three grammars (of Blancas de San José, Coronel, and López) describe the active and the passive verbs in terms of the definiteness and specificity of the noun spoken about. The active verb is commonly used when one speaks of something indefinite and in general, which is recognizable in Spanish by the absence of the articles el, la, lo [the]. puts it this way:
De l[a] activa pues vsamos quando se habla de alguna cosa en general con modo no determinado, lo qual se conozera en ver que en nuestro español no tiene aquel articulo el, la, lo; pero al reves, de la passiva se vsa quando se habla de alguna cosa señalada y con modo determinado, v.g. para dezir trae agua, trae de comer, trae pan, etc., no se ha de desir con mung danom, pingan, tinapay prque esso no quiere dezir sino trae el agua, trae el plato, y trae la comida, todas cosas señaladas, y que ellos entre si entienden, y assi dira coma can danum, coma can pingan, coma can canan. Pero para cosa señalada, v.g. mata las gallinas, asa aquel capon, y assi en los demas, se a de vsar forzosamente de la passiva diziendo, patayan mo nang manuc, patayan metang capon. (p. 62)
[We use the active when we speak of something in general in an indefinite way, which is recognizable in Spanish by the absence of the article el, la, or lo. On the other hand, the passive is used when we speak of something determined and definite, e.g., in order to say “bring water,” “bring something to eat,” “bring bread,” etc., one should not say con mung danom, pingan, tinapay because it means “bring the water,” “bring the plate,” and “bring the food,” which are all determined (specific). They understand one another and thus you will say coma can danum, coma can pingan, coma can canan. But for something determined, e.g., kill the chicken, roast the castrated rooster, as in all the rest, one necessarily has to use the passive saying patayan mo nang manuc, patayan metang capon.]
The passive, on the other hand, is used in the exact opposite case. gives the following examples: mang̃asáso caniác [me llama de perro] [he calls me by a dog’s name] (active) and saplítem dayta ubíng͂ [azota á ese muchacho] [beat up this boy] (passive). The rest of the grammarians formulated rules or borrowed them from other grammars to further elaborate the use of both the active and the passive, including when exceptions occur.
The Cebuano grammar, re-edited by González in 1885, lists five specific rules on the use of the active and passive verbs . These were later adapted by Aparicio to describe the passive in Hiligaynon in his 1894 edition of grammar. Also, Aparicio borrowed and adjusted the three stanzas of Latin verses that had been used by many grammarians of other Philippine languages to summarize the rules governing the passive. These Latin verses were first seen in , and subsequently used by Totanes (1745), , , , , and among others. Here are the Latin verses, as they appear in the Hiligaynon grammar:
Verba loquendi, similandi atque docendi,
Narrandi, imitandi atque etiam referendi,
Commodandi, verba dandi, atque vendendi:
Et quocumque modo rem extra mitendi.
Tempus et causa, instrumentum et quasi,
I passivum petunt, semperque anteponitur illis.
[Verbs used for speaking, comparing, and teaching; (verbs) of narration, imitation, and also of reference; verbs to mean accommodating, giving, and selling, and whichever manner of sending out a thing. Time, cause, instrument, and the like require the I-passive which is always placed before them.]
Verba motum aliquem in subjecto faciendi,
Escam quamcumque, potumque sumendi
Aliquem vocandi, aliquidque quarendi.
Onus portandi, aliquidque petendi,
Verba destruendi, modoque particulari aspiciendi,
On pasivum petunt, quibus secandi junges.
Omnia quaecumque ad se atraherit homo.
Sit alliciendo, emendo, sitque venando,
Actaque ex tribus potentiis orta:
Materia vel quasi ex qua res aliqua fit;
Quod suum facit homo, id tale habet, vultque fieri et habere,
Gaudent on passivum cum metiendi verbis.
[Verbs that create some movement in the subject, indicate taking of food and drink, used for calling someone or asking for something, used for carrying a burden, and requesting something. Verbs that mean to destroy, and to look at something in a particular way, the on- passive is needed for verbs that mean to cut, etc. Verbs to mean carrying something toward man by removing, getting, or hunting it, and the outward acts rising from the potencies (i.e., internal senses). Verbs to refer to the material or anything similar from which something is made, to indicate what man does by himself, what he actually has, or he would rather do and have, and verbs to indicate weight, measure, count, etc.]
Persona cui datur, ex quaque tollitur aliquid
sit nunc res, sit nunc persona, cum loci teneant rationem
Semper petunt an, extremoque addere puta.
[The person to whom something is given, from whom something is taken. or, the place where something comes from or sent to, always demands the -an to be added at the end.]
Throughout the different grammars’ treatment of the subject of the passive verb, one can already visualize the embryonic concept of noun topicalization which, in simple language, refers to the phenomenon whereby specific nouns (the topic or focus) are emphasized by using determined linguistic devices such as preposing them at the beginning of the sentence or clause and employing specific affixes for the verbs and markers for nouns. The phenomenon had been observed, but its description employs the linguistic terminology current at the time, i.e., in terms of the noun cases, e.g., nominative and accusative, while already employing words, e.g., agent and patient, that future linguists would also use to label semantic roles (of nominals). Upon the identification of the different nouns that can take the nominative case, e.g., place, cause, and motive, the grammarians managed to demote the agent (actor) in a sentence and promote other nouns which fulfill other roles in the sentence, which is the essence of the passive voice. The author of the Ibanag grammar makes a clear break off from the traditional Western concept of the passive voice as the promotion of the object of the verb to the subject role, i.e., as a noun “implied” by the verb, by specifying five types of “accommodated” (“improper” or “new) passives whose promoted objects are not the object of the verb: the passive of participation, involving a person or thing that participates in the performance of an act, passive of acquisition, which supposes a person or thing for which the action is executed, passive of location, implying the place where the activity takes place, passive of instrument, which is implied by the tool used to perform an operation, and passive of movement referring to the objects carried or brought by the movement of the agents. He gives the following definition:
Verbo pasivo, generalmente hablando, es aquel, que supone por el objeto de su accion, ó, lo que es lo mismo, es aquel, cuyo supuesto es su mismo objeto: v.g. Amaris: es pasivo, porque supone por Tu: y, Tu, es cabalmente el objeto Amado: ó, el que padece la accion del sugeto, Amante: Si hubiésemos de seguir esta difinicion (sic), y lo mismo que dicta la razon, sería muy facil entender los verbos pasivos de Ybanág; pero ya el uso de hablar de nuestros pasados, ha hecho, que se llamen verbos pasivos, en lengua Ybanág, todos aquellos que suponen por alguna cosa singular, determinada, y decidida, é individua, sea ó no sea objeto, de la accion, la tal cosa: v.g El cuchillo, con que lo hirió, &c. es instrumento (como es claro), y no objeto, que este es solo el herido: Pero como en Ybanág el verbo hirió, de esta oracion, debe precisamente suponer por el cuchillo, que por consiguiente será su nominativo, se ha creído que el verbo Ynibigád, que supone por el instrumento, con que lo hirió, es verbo pasivo.
[The passive verb, generally speaking, is that which is supposed (or implied) by the object of its action or, phrased differently, that which supposes its own object, e.g., the Latin verb amaris “you are loved” is passive because it is supposed by Tu “you” (sg), and tu is exactly the object which is loved or that which suffers (or receives) the action of the subject, amante “the lover.” If we would have to follow this definition, as dictated by logic, it would be very easy to understand the Ibanag passive verbs, but our predecessors’ usage has made it necessary that they be called passive verbs in the Ibanag language all those that are supposed by anything singular, definite, determined, and individual, whether such thing is the object or not of the action. For example, el cuchillo, con que lo hirió, &c. “the knife with which he wounded him, etc.” is the instrument (as it is clear), and not the object since the object is the wounded person. But since in Ibanag, the verb wounded in this sentence precisely has to be supposed by the knife, which consequently will be in the nominative case, it has been accepted that the verb ynibigád (from the root “to wound”), which is supposed by the instrument, with which someone was wounded, is a passive verb.]
The Latin word facere means to make or do. Based on this, facere facere would mean “make somebody do something.” In actual fact, this term or its abbreviation ff refers to the causative verbal mode found in any human language and expressible in different ways. In Philippine languages, the causative mode is expressed through affixation, or the use of specific affixes, rather than a direct order using words equivalent to the Spanish word mandar [to command]. In Tagalog, this affix is pa- as in magpasulat [make someone write something]. This mechanism, which all the grammarians found in their respective target languages, enables one to command someone else to do something without even mentioning words equivalent to “command.” In the words of Blancas de San José,
Digo pues que para dezir en esta lengua el mandar hazer algo … no es menester vsar del termino q̃ corresponde a este Español, mandar; porque tiene otro camino esta lengua, y es esta particula, Pa, …
So I say that in order to express the command to do something in this language … it is not necessary to make use of the term that corresponds to the Spanish, command; because this language has another way, and this is this prefix, Pa, …
As what happened in the case of the substantive verb, the passive, and other grammatical items and features, the appreciation and description of the causative improved through time. For example, in clarifying the facere facere in Pampango, introduces a similar concept which he calls the facere fieri, i.e., Latin for “make something happen or be done,” which indicates that an agent causes something to become another or an event or action to happen. Subsequently he corrects the mistaken idea that there was such a thing as a double facere facere called refacere facere or, more briefly, the reff composition . He reanalyzes it and concludes that it is a refacere fieri, which is not double but only one-and-a-half, e.g., papayaus me quing fiscal itang sacristan [manda al fiscal que llame aquel sacristan] [ask the prosecutor to ask for that sexton]. Pellicer introduces yet another variant of the causative verb, which he calls facere pati, i.e., to do something so that another may receive some form of change or modification, e.g., pandámaěn tacán bíliněn [haré que seas muchas veces aconsejado por mi] [I will do something so that you may be advised by me many times].
The second-period grammars all included lessons on the causative verb. uses all the three variants, i.e., facere facere, facere pati, facere fieri, to illustrate the different focused nouns a sentence can have. treats the causative under the topic of imperative verbs, i.e., as a specific type of Ibanag imperative verbs. On the other hand, Figueroa, Coria, and Vera no longer considered this type of verb as special; hence, the term is not even mentioned or, whenever mentioned, no special treatment is given to it. In the causative verbs and other parts of speech or elements of the language, e.g., the substantive verb sum es fui, the sentence-construction perspective is always patent, i.e., the explanation always involves the function of the element in constructing sentences.
Likewise, the description of vowels and consonants and stress patterns can be seen to have improved from the earliest grammars to the most modern ones. Toward the 19th century, phonetics or the science of speech sounds and the contrastive approach in language description already appear to have considerably developed, and thus could serve as important instruments for language teaching and learning.
As it is in the previous features, our baseline data come from , particularly from Chapter 20, Rule 4 of his Libro de las Reglas where he comments on certain letters (speech sounds) which differ in one way or another from those used in Spanish or Latin, or which do not exist in their inventory. In the same chapter, the grammarian talks about the stress patterns of Tagalog but apologizes for not having given concrete rules averring that he finds stating rules in writing extremely difficult because there are plenty of unfamiliar pronunciations. He declares:
Veniendo a los acentos para mi lo hallo por dificultosissimo el declarar algo por escrito, porque es comunissima en esta lengua una pronunciaciõ q̃ ni es penultima producta ni penultima correpta, ni claramente en la vltima; sino tiene vn apresuramiento q̃ dexa indiferente el acento y no es claramente alguno que nosotros sabemos y usamos.
[Regarding the accents, I find it extremely difficult to state anything in writing because it is very common in this language to have a pronunciation which is neither penultima producta (i.e., the syllable that precedes the last would be long and spacious) nor penultima correpta (the accent is not placed on the penultimate but on the antepenultimate syllable.), nor clearly with an accent on the last syllable, but it has a kind of haste which leaves the accent irrelevant and clearly it is not one that we know and use.]
The next grammarians succeeded in varying degrees in giving descriptions of vowels and consonants and in trying to formulate rules on stress patterns, using the terms and concepts they have gotten accustomed to when they studied Latin, Spanish, and most likely Tagalog. As could be expected, there is very little similarity in this regard among the different Philippine languages since speech sounds, in general, are the first and fastest to vary from one language or dialect to another. What is constant is the use of the terms penúltima producta and penúltima correpta, most probably coined by Blancas de San José, to refer to types of accents in the different languages.
meticulously describes three main accents used in Pampango. devotes an entire section on prosody in which the speech sounds represented by the Ilocano alphabet are scientifically described. In this grammar, stress patterns are also discussed: there are two kinds of accents, i.e., radical and accidental . The first refers to the accent that root words have before they are combined with affixes. The second refers to the accent after the roots combined with affixes. Prior to these two types, however, are the two basic accents, namely, (a) penúltima producta in which the penultimate vowel of the word is stressed and lengthened, and (b) penúltima correpta in which the last vowel is lengthened and stressed. Finally, specific rules governing accidental accents are given.
includes instructions on how to articulate Cebuano vowels and consonants, with emphasis on their peculiarities. The section on prosody includes a discussion of word stress . Disyllabic words have three types of accent, namely, (a) accent on the final syllable, (b) accent on the first syllable, and (c) accent on both syllables, indicated by the circumflex accent. Another kind of accent is possible for two-syllable words, i.e., one that consists in slightly tightening up or holding one’s breath over the consonant that precedes the second vowel and releasing the vowel without affecting (or being assimilated by) the preceding consonant. On the other hand, trisyllable words have the stress on the penultimate syllable.
In the case of Hiligaynon, three types of stress are identified: breve (short), agudo (acute), and circunflejo (circumflex) . A list of Hiligaynon consonants and vowels is given in the preliminary pages, each one with adequate descriptions of how they are pronounced . Later grammarians would be doing the same.
This study will not be complete without including at least a short discussion on how syntax or sentence formation is treated in the different grammars. Without belaboring the topic either —since the discussion on verb formation above already constitutes a major part of grammar— the following general observations can still be stated.
The three grammars of Tagalog and Pampango, exemplars of the first-period grammars, do not include any separate section on syntax. What makes up for this absence is the preponderance of lessons on verb formation, which in the end implicates whole sentence construction. Incidentally they touch upon important topics like topicalization or focus, using the system of cases for nouns and pronouns, as mentioned in the discussion on the passive verb above. Another aspect that the grammarians deal with is the use of connectors, i.e., conjunctions and ligatures or linkers, such as a, ng, na in masanting a tavo [a good-looking man] in Pampango.
All the re-edited grammars, i.e., Ilocano, Cebuano, and Hiligaynon, make a formal and separate treatment of syntax, which is classified as either figurative or regular. Regular syntax deals with the rules of agreement, government, and construction. Figurative syntax, on the other hand, is all about the different figures of speech that allow violations of the rules imposed by regular syntax to attain greater sentence strength and elegance. The grammars of the second period talk about the same morphosyntactic elements found in the grammars of the first period, with the difference that the former have a more formal, even separate, treatment of syntax albeit only Coria calls it overtly as syntax. Like what happens in the re-edited grammars, construction, government, and agreement are taken up, and the difference between regular and figurative syntax is also mentioned and illustrated. points out the rationalist tendency of providing explanations in the grammarians’ treatment of morphology as part of syntax, i.e., the study of morphology as a function of syntax, and of grammar itself as an instrument to teach how to construct correct sentences.
It has been shown how the different grammars treated the parts of speech, i.e., the nouns and their markers, the substantive or copulative verb “to be”, the active and passive verbs, the causative verbal mode; the pronunciation of words in each of the languages; and the construction of sentences and phrases. Prior to that, the exposition gives an idea of how the grammars are internally structured in terms of sections or parts and what elements constitute the different lessons.
At this point, a summary can be made of the important characteristics of the eleven representative grammars of the nine Philippine languages. This shall be done by naming three key factors that can in all probability explain why the descriptions of the specific linguistic features and devices reported in this study turned up and evolved the way they did. These three factors refer to (1) motivation and purpose, (2) the contrastive approach to language learning and teaching, and (3) the genetic affinity of the native languages.
The 1582 Synod of Manila gave a strong impetus to the writing of native language grammars as the Synod fathers decided that the natives were going to be evangelized in their languages. Notwithstanding the added business or educational purposes which the grammars eventually took on, this missionary motivation remained strong until the end of Spanish presence in the country.
The specific purpose of the grammars was to teach the native languages to the missionaries in order to produce bilinguals capable of communicating the most sublime theological concepts in the languages of the natives, i.e., the grammars were intended to be essentially pedagogical and to ensure a steady supply of adult bilinguals as evangelization work progressed. With this end clear in their minds, the grammarians conceived of the structure and planned the lessons based on what was practicable, useful, and beautiful, while giving careful attention to the peculiarities of the languages. During the second period, when enough knowledge about the native languages had been collectively attained, the grammars became more explicit in teaching the complete set of language skills, i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and not just the most basic ones —a clear manifestation of the changing concept and functions of the grammars throughout the period parallel to the developments that were taking place in Spain.
Meanwhile, a non-ecclesiastical authority, the Royal Spanish Academy, began formulating rules for spelling, writing grammars and dictionaries, etc. The re-edited Ilocano, Hiligaynon, and Cebuano grammars followed the prescriptions of the Academy, albeit not completely, in what referred to their internal structure. Accordingly, a grammar should consist of four parts, i.e., analogy, syntax, prosody, and orthography, which corresponded to the four ends of Grammar, i.e., knowledge, order, pronunciation, and correct writing, respectively. By this time, while evangelization was still the primary reason for writing grammars, it was no longer its one and only purpose. New grammars were written and old ones were reedited because of an expanded functionality or user base: they were also needed by foreign scholars, local teachers and young students, and lay Spaniards who came to the territory for commercial and other purposes. This new interest in learning the vernaculars on the part of the civilians was brought about in part by the economic boom experienced in the colony and the substantial improvements in maritime travel attained at the time .
With this expansion in scope and a more systematic treatment of the lessons, the formal grammars of Philippine languages, written by Filipinos in the early 20th century, naturally emerged. An example of such a grammar is Mamerto , which was first published in 1910, with the following parts: (1) Pagbigkás ó Prosodia [prosody] (2) Pagkilala ó Analogía [analogy], (3) Paglalakip ó Sintaxis [syntax], and (4) Pagsulat ó Ortografía [ortography]. Another example is , with the following parts: (1) Palásurian [analogy], (2) Paláugnayan [syntax], (3) Palábigkasan [prosody], and (4) Palátitikan [orthography].
As mentioned, the Spanish grammarians were not exactly attempting a herculean feat since they all came equipped with their knowledge of Latin and Spanish, not to mention the information and skills that they gathered from the Mexican experience and their long tradition of learning a second language. They had had very good previous training in the formal grammar of Latin and presumably Spanish as well. Given their context, the grammarians approached the languages using what later on would be more commonly referred to as the contrastive method. The starting point for their analysis and description was their knowledge of the Romance languages, together with their respective grammars. They looked for direct equivalents of what they found in the native languages in those they were familiar with and when no direct counterparts were available, they used substitutes. When neither equivalents nor substitutes could be found, the grammarians embarked on their original description, or improved the analysis made by previous grammarians, by using classical categories and terminology. Whenever this was resorted to, they pointed out the novelty of the phenomenon.
The missionaries’ knowledge of Latin and Spanish enabled them to see the big difference which existed between these two, on the one hand, and the native languages, on the other. Thus, they were cautious not to apply what they knew lock, stock, and barrel. In other words, no rule imposition had occurred in the process of analyzing the languages. One important reason why such imposition did not happen was the awareness that the languages being compared, i.e., Latin and Spanish on the one hand and the Philippine languages on the other, were typologically distinct from one another.
Between 1778 and 1787, Spanish Jesuit and renowned philologist, , published the encyclopedic work Idea dell’ Universo. Among the important contributions of this work is the determination of kinship or affinity relationships existing among languages of the world, including those of the Philippines and group them in families . However, based on observed similarities, there already was a firm consciousness among the missionary grammarians that these native languages were typologically interrelated . Thus, they realized early on that rules formulated for one language were generalizable or applicable to others, mutatis mutandis. Occasionally, the grammarians were more explicit in saying that these languages were related to each other. For instance, the section on syntax of the Ilocano grammar declares the following in its prefatory notes:
En esta lengua ilocana, como también en todas las de estas Islas Filipinas, por ser de un jaez, se ahorra muy gran parte trabajo de lo que se pasa en aprender la latina…
[In this Ilocano language, as what happens in all the languages of these Philippine Islands on account of their belonging to the same kind, one saves a big part of the work that one does in learning the Latin language…]
Bergaño, on the other hand, had this to say in his introduction to the affix pa- where he states that the ff can be found in other native languages:
Esta famosa composición, juzgo no sin gran fundamento, es transcendente a todas las lenguas circunvecinas.
[This famous construction—I judge not without strong basis—transcends linguistic boundaries and is found in the neighboring languages.]
This also explains why there are repetitive chapters and sections, not only in terms of titles but, more significantly, contents, e.g., the search for the substitutes for the substantive verb, the Latin verses that state the usage of the three types of passive, the facere facere, and many others. , as cited in , said that the missionaries, regardless of their religious order, were aware that these native languages were typologically similar and that each one knew of the grammars written by the others, especially those who came before them. As a result, there was a high degree of uniformity in the general structure of the grammars, the metalanguage used, and the examples they chose.
Throughout the discussion of the elements and features of the different Philippine languages, as the missionary linguists described and recorded them, one sees significant breakthroughs that have served to advance the scientific study of languages in the Philippines. Grammar writing, regardless of its purpose, includes language description which, in the case of the missionary linguists, involved the analysis of grammatical features which they had encountered for the very first time. There is no doubt that these descriptions reached a high level of accuracy notwithstanding the techniques available at the time.
An observation worth mentioning is the fact that the descriptions are not unorthodox, i.e., they are not multiple times removed from mainstream linguistics despite the consequences implied by the languages’ agglutinative character. The chain formed by the missionary linguists with Antonio de Nebrija, either directly or by way of Alonso de Molina, is a veritable umbilical cord that attaches local grammatical or linguistic activity to that of Europe, where modern linguistics was born. During the second period, the grammarians continued using European models and even “swore allegiance” to the Spanish Royal Academy by following its prescriptions for writing grammars and vocabulary.
Finally, perhaps as a fitting conclusion, the author of Nueva Gramática Tagalog which was published in Madrid in 1872, Joaquín de Coria, became a professor of Tagalog at the Central University of Madrid, where he was offered a Professorial Chair for the same language. No testament is probably more powerful in showing the continuity between Philippine and European linguistics and the intrinsic value of the languages described in the grammars, than the fact that one of these major languages was taught, studied, and became the title of a professorial chair in one of the oldest universities in the world.
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[2] , having studied missionary activities in Latin America (e.g., Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala), states that whenever a Christian mission to pagan lands was organized, the first move would be to analyze language. Thus, Artes of the native languages in Spanish, usually accompanied by Spanish-native language vocabularios, bilingual Doctrina christianas for ecclesiastical use written in the vernaculars, bilingual catecismos and confesionarios (handbook for confessors) were usually the first products of the printing press across the mission lands.
[3] The Spanish penetration of Mexico in the 16th century paved the way for the three centuries of prolific linguistic production related to the Christianization of the Americas, Asia, and Africa by Christian missionaries (cf. . The Mexican missionary experience eventually shaped the work of evangelization with its concomitant linguistic activities which would be carried out in Latin America and the Philippines.
[4] Antonio Nebrija is hailed as the father of Spanish philology. He published a Latin Grammar in 1481, the first Spanish grammar in 1492, and the first Spanish dictionary in 1495. While initial investigations refer to a monolithic Nebrijan influence on grammarians of Philippine languages, recent studies show that in some grammarians, this influence had been complemented by grammatical principles inspired by rationalist grammarians either directly through commentaries on Introductiones Latinae or by way of Juan Luis de la Cerda, author of De Institutione grammatica libri quinque (1601) who made use of ideas borrowed from rationalists such as Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, author of Minerva sive de causis linguae latinae (1587) and Manuel Álvares, writer of De Institutione grammatica libri tres (1572) .
[6] , while admitting that Sueiro Justel’s estimates are realistic, would propose a lower number of dictionaries.
[7] For this study, the periodization put forward by , based on the stability of Spanish presence in the colonies, is a convenient way to group the grammars written of Philippine languages. subdivides Sueiro’s first period into four, namely, (a) the inauspicious start of linguistic studies, 1565-1593; (b) the pioneer period in linguistic studies, 1593-1648; (c) a general decline in the second half of the 17th c.; and (d) filling of the gaps of the first-half century, 18th c. Other scholars have proposed other ways to periodize this era. Spiecker-Salazar (1992) puts forward four stages of European (not only Spanish) studies: (a) Early Contact: Pragmatic Linguistics (1521-1767), (b) Studies from Afar: From Philology to Comparative Linguistics (1767-1861), (c) Malayo-Polynesian Comparative Studies (1861-1925), and (d) Comparison versus Description (since 1925). proposes a three-phase periodization of lexicographical production (not of grammars) in the Philippines within the period 1613-1910. The first two phases correspond to Sueiro’s first period and the third to Sueiro’s second.
[8] The oldest extant Pangasinan grammar was Andrés López’s Arte de la Lengua Pangasinan (1690). Since there is no copy in Philippine libraries and thus not included in the Cubar list, this grammar was not included in the study.
[9] Méntrida wrote a grammar for a language he had called Visaya-Hiligayna, which is actually known as Hiligaynon, one of the languages spoken in Panay. Hiligaynon belongs to the Bisayan family of languages. While historically the term “Visayan” was applied to the people of Panay, it is currently used to refer to the Cebuano language. Thus, Encina’s Gramática Bisaya-Cebuana is the grammar of Cebuano and Figueroa’s Arte del Idioma Visaya de Samar y Leite is the grammar of the language used in Samar and Leyte, i.e., Waray-Waray or simply Waray. See also on the use of the term “bisaya” or “visaya.”
[10] describes the structure of these grammars as having an opening section (preliminaries) where the reason for writing the grammar is declared, a short introduction to phonology and orthography, a long section on morphology where the parts of speech are tackled one after another, and a final section (appendices) which at times deal with syntax, word lists, and useful phrases.
[11] Agglutinative languages are those languages that form words by stringing morphemes together, i.e., stems and affixes, or the smallest meaningful units of a language. An affix generally has one grammatical category.
[12] , analyzing the grammatical units (words or morphemes) that do not exist in the reference languages and their relationship with the traditional parts of speech, highlights the power of affixes (or particles) to assign a specific value (i.e., a part of speech) to roots, and produce in them specific pragmatic meanings (e.g., the causative mood, respect for the other interlocutor). In the same work, the traditional parts of speech are described as they were adapted by the grammarians.
[13] Natural gender is based on sex as a binary classification, i.e., male or female. Grammatical gender is a way to categorize nouns not in any correlation with natural sex distinctions.
[14] The grammarians used different terms to refer to these affixes: párticulas, preposiciones, conjunciones, afijos, etc., .
[15] cites Totanes’s explanation on the use of the nominative case to mark the focus of a Tagalog sentence thereby illustrating the grammarians’ perceived obligation to explain the pragmatic orientation of discourse structure in these languages.
[16] Semantic roles indicate the function of a participant (noun or nominal) in a clause with respect to the main verb.
[17] One criterion for determining whether a sentence is passive (or not) is whether the agent or actor is relegated to the periphery, i.e., it is not a core argument and is marked by a non-core case, in which case the construction is passive.
[18] presented a good study on the subject of causative constructions in Philippine languages as described in these grammars.
[19] counts speech acts among lessons included in the grammars, which are imparted through the multiple examples the missionaries, e.g., Andrés López, gathered to show acceptable usage rather than through theoretical explanations.
[20] Topicalization or focus is a system of laying emphasis on a noun or nominal in a clause. In his essay, says that the missionaries made use of three grammatical devices to show the focus of a sentence: (a) the nominal/pronominal cases, (b) the verbal voices, and (c) markers that somehow correspond to the Latin and Spanish inflections.
[21] made an excellent study on ligatures as the missionaries painstakingly categorized and classified them in eleven 17th century grammars of Philippine languages which, because of their typological similarities, would exhibit stark commonalities as regards this functional morpheme (which does not exist in Latin or Spanish). The grammarians described the form and function of the different ligatures, identified their syntactic distribution, and contrasted them with specific Spanish syntactic constructions that perform the same function but are not exact equivalents.
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