Animals, Colours and the Body

Some of these words are thriving. Some of them are already going, and it is worth knowing which.

The colours are quietly disappearing

Here is an honest thing that a phrasebook would not tell you: most Siargaonon speakers, especially younger ones, simply use the English colour words. Red, blue, green. The native and Spanish-rooted words below are still understood — but they are heard less every year.

They are recorded here anyway, and that is rather the point. This is what language loss actually looks like from the inside: not a dramatic silencing, but a slow, entirely reasonable substitution, one word at a time, by people with no intention of losing anything.

The body, and the sound shift again

Head is uyo. Not ulo — uyo. This is the L-to-Y shift, and the body is where it is most visible, because these are words a learner arrives already half-knowing from another Philippine language and therefore gets wrong with total confidence.

Talinga is ear. Tijan is stomach — hard J, TI-jan. Dubdub is chest.

The coconut, again, because it cannot be avoided

Nijog is the mature coconut; botong is the young one you drink. Kahoy is wood or a tree in general, and tanom is a plant. To say "coconut tree" you assemble it: kapun-an nan nijog.

How you feel, at the end of a long day

Kahawoy — I'm tired. Tag-tuyog — sleepy. Ka-aya — bored, or boring, depending which end of it you are on. Kataw-anan — funny.

These are the words that get used, constantly, by everyone, and they are exactly the ones a formal course would leave until Chapter Nine.

The words themselves — 53 entries