Being in Filipino

GRP has claimed Tagalog or Filipino has no words of substance (link). Based on Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” allegedly not being translatable. It is translatable as “umiral o hindi”. This is without my knowing the Hamlet translation of Professor Rolando Tinio which Manong Sonny once watched. Unreliable sources have given me elementary school test papers of Karl Garcia. He translated it into “tutubi or not tutubi”, meaning “bee or not”. According to more reliable sources it became “Jolibee or not” when Karl was in high school. But let us be serious once more like Senator Sotto.

While “being” in English, “ser” in Spanish, “sein” in German, “essere” in Latin which are all Indo-European languages have a sense of permanence to them, “pag-iral” has a sense of struggle to it. Being in Filipino seems to be something you have to fight for, attaining permanence and stability hard. What is also true is that while especially German is a language of nouns (Substantive), Filipino is a language of verbs. In German everything IS while in Filipino everything is on the move. Language is culture. Culture is formed from people’s experience. Why did it become like that?

The Philippines is a land of earthquakes, volcanos and typhoons. The province of Albay where my father’s people come from is a place where this holds true the most. Life in such place is struggle. Maybe the sense of being that Filipinos express through their language reflects this sense of vulnerability. Indo-European peoples on the other hand are continental in origin.

The Indo-European peoples

It is not clear where the original speakers of Indo-European languages originated from. There are several hypotheses (link) and even the crazy mythology of the “Aryans” which is what the Nazis called them. Aryans are in reality the people of both Iran and Northern India who are also Indo-European. What is quite clear though is that they had agriculture and raised livestock. And they tamed horses just like many other inhabitants of Eurasia (Huns and Mongols for example) which allowed them to travel far and secure territory, the Hittites being among the most warlike.

Such people may have developed BEING as something permanent, as a claim to status and territory. Not only the Indo-European peoples, all the people of the Eurasian continent that tamed horses were conquerors, the wars for the fertile peninsula that is Europe are millenia of history. Whenever they took new territories I guess the word was: I AM HERE, WE ARE HERE.

The Austronesian peoples

The Filipino would say NARITO AKO, NARITO KAMI, NARITO TAYO. The word being is only implicit and does not necessarily mean permanence. Where the Austronesian peoples (link) originated from is also controversial, but they are the people that populate Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, East Timor and the entire Pacific. They did not have horses, they had boats.

One could say generally speaking that while Indo-Europeans secured and conquered, the Austronesian has always moved and migrated. 10% of the Filipino population is abroad today.

Clashes of attitudes

There are Filipino anthropologists who have said that most things – even morality – in the Philippines are situational. Or to put it in the words of Erap: “weder-weder lang iyan” – like the weather. Binay wanted to change the rules of the debate and took “documents” to the front when not allowed to take notes with him. Poe wanted a vote to have the rules changed to allow Binay and Duterte to pitch in when it was clearly a one-on-one between her and Mar Roxas. The latter was very “Western” in his insistence on the rules being adhered to, even if Duterte is the true “saloon cowboy”.

The attitude of squatters is: if nobody is using the land, let us just put our makeshift houses there. Discussions on the interpretation of the Philippine Constitution are often situational, not based on the principle meant by the words of the Constitution but based on the situation and especially on WHO it is to apply to. The main frame of reference of Austronesians has always been their barangay, boat and village at the same time, and the people in it. For Indo-Europeans it was first the land, then formal rules to minimize feuding between groups and wars between nations.

Cultures and Thrones

Before the Spanish and then the Americans came, the culture that influenced the Philippines was Malay. This cultural area was first influenced by Hindus, but by all indications so far not Aryans but Tamils – the old Filipino writing called Baybayin which is similar to Southern Indian writing is an indication of this. Then by Semites, meaning Arab traders who brought Islam to the region. The Tamils were not a horseback culture bent on conquest. The Arabs were originally not a horseback culture, but the influence of Hittites brought the culture of conquest into the Middle East.

In the original culture of Filipino tribes, whether you were wrong or right most probably depended on your status within the community. To some extent this is also true for Gulf Arabs I heard. There WHO says something allegedly matters more than whether it is right. Similar to the face and power interaction in the Philippines that Joe America so keenly observed (link). Europeans had to develop a framework of right and wrong (link) to prevent total mayhem in their fertile peninsula of Eurasia.  For centuries the history here was something like the Game of Thrones series.

Let it be

Back to being. Umiral can roughly mean be, but is closer to prevail in meaning. To BE in the Philippines you have to prevail. It is easier to BE in places where the definition of right and wrong has been worked on in the culture for centuries. There is a foundation of cultural consensus one stands on. The hardheadedness of many Filipinos might be due to shifting ground they still stand on. So much energy expended just on prevailing instead of building more. Barangays and people fighting to exist (zero-sum games) instead of finding ways to co-exist (win-win). To live and let live.

Irineo B. R. Salazar, München, 23 March 2016