Postby Iversen » Tue May 22, 2018 8:33 am
During my first and so far only trip to the Philippines I bought a small booklet named "Conversational English-Cebuano" by C.S. Canonigo. It is in principle a language guide of the same kind as those from Berlitz, Lonely P and others, but it has one advantage: it gives you a sentence or phrase, and then one more that resembles it, and then a third on etc. This means that you get a chance to make inferences about the mechanics of the language, unlike its competitors, who seem to be determined do make the sentences as different as possible (presumably in an attempt to cover more ground).
For instance "Give me a bit" is rendered as "Tagai ako'g diyutau..". And then the next three entries are "A bit more" (Diyutai pa"), "Bit by bit" and "By bits" (both "Sa tinagidyot"). And "Please, write me" ("Palihug, sulati ako") is followed by "Please, answer my letter" ("Palihug, balusi ang akong sulat"), So now I know that "me" and I" and "my" is "ako" or a variation of it ("Akong", "ako'g") , "Sulat" is letter and "Sulati" is write", "Tagai" is give (and the final -i makes it something like an infinitive, because "sulati" has the same thing).
I bought the book, but didn't go on to actually study the Cebuan language. I did study the formation of verbs in Tagalog, but my tiny Tagalog dictionaries turned out to be insufficient for real studies of the language. However in a bookstore in Manila I also bought - almost by chance - my best English <> Latin dictionary and a good Bahasa Melayu dictionary, and I have since also bought a somewhat larger Tagalog<>English one abroad, so one day I might have a second look at Tagalog - unless of course the English part of speech in the Philippines crowd out the Pilipino part.
1 x