Weather, Time and Days

On an island in the typhoon belt, the weather is not small talk.

The words an island needs

Bagjo is a typhoon — and note the hard J again: BAG-jo. It is a word that children on Siargao learn early and adults track constantly, because the season is real and the island is exposed.

Uyan is rain. If you know any Cebuano you will want ulan, and there is the L-to-Y shift once more, quietly reshaping a word you thought you knew.

Matignaw is cold — a word you will use less often than you expect, and always at sea.

To ask about it at all: Uno may panahon? — what is the weather? And there is the may form again, because weather is something that does rather than something that is.

Three parts to a day

Siargaonon divides the day into buntag (morning), hapon (afternoon) and duyom (evening and night), and every greeting you make will depend on getting the boundary right. Silom is dusk — the specific hour, not the general dark.

Now, and today

Kuman carries both "now" and "today", and context does the rest of the work. Uman na adlaw kuman? — what day is today? — puts uman (uno + man) to work asking what something is, exactly as the rule predicts.

The months arrive from Spanish almost unchanged: Septembre, Oktubre. Three centuries left the calendar behind along with the numbers.

The words themselves — 54 entries