Tagalog, spoken in Manila and the surrounding provinces, Luzon, Philippines, is a major language of the western branch of the Austronesian family. The bulk of this book is devoted to parallel words also found in Malay, a member of the same branch. These words are either cognates descending from Proto-Austronesian or borrowings from the same foreign languages. Other cognates were found in Javanese, Malagasy, Tahitian and even Siamese. The last third of the book deals with Sanskrit, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and English loanwords.

No doubt this book will meet the demand of historians, linguists, mathematicians, numismatists, philippinologists and tagalists as well as all the readers interested in the unusual. Like the 1992 article on which it is based, this book is the first one in English to broach the difficult subject of numeral expressions in Old Tagalog and the various concepts and measures associated with them. The book is about ten times as long as the article because it comprises a lexicon that deals with gold, money, taxes, usury, units of measurement, etc. Examples are numerous and generally drawn from such classics as the grammar of San Joseph (1610), Pinpin's manual (1610), the dictionaries of San Buenaventura (1613) and Noceda & Sanlucar (1754, 1860). Differently from the majority of publications on Tagalog, all the terms and examples are fully accented according to a precise system developed by the author, and explained in an appendix.

What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited. This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.

This is a study of the coinages propounded for the development of Tagalog / Pilipino / Filipino in the scientific fields and the humanities.

English competes with Tagalog and Taglish, a mixture of English and Tagalog, for the affections of Filipinos. To understand the competing ideologies that underlie this switching between languages, this book looks at the language situation from multiple perspectives. Part A reviews the social and political forces that have propelled English through its life cycle in the Philippines from the 1898 arrival of Admiral Dewey to the 1998 election of Joseph Estrada. Part B looks at the social support for English in Metro Manila and the provinces with a focus on English teachers and their personal and public use of English. Part C examines the language of television sport broadcasts, commercials, interviews, sitcoms, and movies, and the language of newspapers from various linguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural perspectives. The results put into perspective the short-lived language revolution that took place at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Percival Stuffington, nicknamed ?Stuffie?, is a good-for-nothing, a womanizer and a crook. He belongs to the theatre of the grotesque. His ignorance and dishonesty is exposed when he poses as a teacher of English to foreign students in a London private school. He flies to California, where he tries to pass as a golf instructor. Finally he plans to extort money from a former fellow student by poisoning him, and promising the quick delivery of the antidote against a staggering sum.

A promising teenage British athlete with a weird sense of humour, admired for his strength, his handsomeness and the beauty of his face, becomes a hoodlum against all expectations.

When the Spaniards conquered the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571), they noticed several of its nations had a writing system of their own, called Baybáyin in Tagalog. It was a king of short-hand that did not make it possible to record closing consonants; thus i-lu in Baybáyin could represent í-log "river", i-lóng "nose" or it-lóg "egg", so much so that, while easy to write, it was difficult to read. Because of this shortcoming, it gave way to the Latin alphabet in the course of the 17th century. Nowadays Filipino graphic artists are reviving Baybáyin to express their philippineness.

This book is a provisional essay, followed by a vocabulary and an index, on the Tagalogs' world view in the Sixteenth Century. It is mainly based on the entries of the earliest dictionaries of the Tagalog language. These were written by Spanish lexicographers about half-a-century after the conquest of the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571). Additional data are drawn from Spanish chronicles. Many of the recorded beliefs and customs were already obsolete at the turn of the Seventeenth Century. Some are extremely surprising, starting from the primeval myth according to which the world had no solid land at its beginning, but only two fluids, water and air.

This book is the list of printed documents I have collected about the Philippines in general and the Tagalog language in particular. The entries are followed by an index of the themes involved.