Food and Eating

You will be fed on Siargao whether you asked to be or not. These are the words for what happens next.

A meal becomes a verb

Siargaonon does something quietly elegant with meals. Breakfast is pamahaw. Lunch is paniudto. Supper is panihapon. Now change the pa- to a ma-, and the meal turns into the act of eating it: mamahaw — to have breakfast. Maniudto — to have lunch.

The pattern is regular and it costs you nothing. Learn three nouns, receive three verbs.

Eating itself is kaon; kaonon is what will be eaten. Drinking is inom, and inomon is what will be drunk. That -on ending is a whole tense hiding in a suffix.

The coconut has two names, and neither is "buko"

Most of the Philippines says buko for the young green coconut you drink from. That word is Tagalog. On Siargao, the young coconut is botong, and the mature brown one you cook with is nijog — two different things, two different words, and a visitor who uses buko is marking themselves as a visitor with every sip.

There is no single word for the tree itself. You build it: kapun-an nan nijog — the tree of the coconut. On an island covered in them, the coconut tree is still described rather than named.

Being fed, and surviving it

Mangaon ta! — let's eat — is less an invitation than an announcement. When the food is good, Grabi kalami! is the thing to say, and you should say it loudly.

When you have had enough, busog na ako means "I'm full already." It will not stop anyone from putting more rice on your plate. Say it anyway; it is the form the ritual takes.

The words themselves — 29 entries