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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Pangasinan
Province—one of the Philipines’ favorite
vacationers’ regions
Language information:
Pangasinan, also known as Pangasinense, is one of the Philippines’s over 170
languages. In terms of number of speakers (ca. 1,540,000) it is currently eighth
among these
languages.
It
is used almost exclusively in Pangasinan province in the Ilocos region of the
island of Luzon. Its area is adjacent to and partly overlapping with those
of Ilocano and Bolinao, and most of its speakers are conversant in Filipino,
the national language based primarily on Tagalog. The Pangasinense people and
their language are often referred to as “Pangalatok” by other Filipinos, but
they themselves perceive this name as inappropriate and offensive. Despite
its fairly large number of speakers, Pangasinan is the language of relatively
few publications, and most of these are Christian missions’ publications. The
main reason for this is that speakers of Pangasinan tend to be multilingual,
most of them knowing and being able to read Ilocano, Filipino and English. However, currently there appear to be language assertion
movements, including those that promote Pangasinan literature.
Like several other
languages of the Philippines, Pangasinan used to be written with the Baybayin script (which is more popularly
known
as
Alibata),
one of several syllabaries used on the Philippine Islands
since pre-colonial times. Its closest relative appears to be the Tagbanwa script
of the Philippines’ Palawan
Island. These scripts appear to be at least partly derived from the Jawi script
of Java, Bali and Sumatra, which is derived from the Brahmi-derived
Pallava script of Southern India. Even now, some Baybayin letters resemble letters
in other Filipino and Indonesian scripts, in the Lao, Khmer and Cham scripts
as well as in South Indic scripts such as the ones used for Malayalam, Telugu
and Kannada. In its pre-colonial form, the Baybayin script omits all syllable-final
consonants. The colonial Spanish administration introduced a revised version
that sought to remedy this. Though there are people who wish to continue the
Baybayin tradition, the script is now practically defunct and is used mostly
for decorative
purposes.
Genealogy: Austronesian > Malayo-Polynesian > Western > Philippines > North > South Cordilleran
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