It takes more than a language to unify a nation

[Benjamin Barrett]

Laurence Horn wrote:
> At 12:29 AM -0800 2/25/07, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>
>> The language is officially called Filipino, a language based on Tagalog.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_language. BB
>>
>
> Sorry, but I don't understand that claim. If Filipino is based on
> Tagalog, it's (at least by implication) not identical to it.  What
> would it mean to say that "the language" (presumably Tagalog) is
> offically called Filipino, which is then identified as a language
> based on Tagalog?
>
> LH
>

I have never studied Tagalog, Pilipino, or Filipino or their histories,
so I was trying to be vague to avoid being misleading. Since that didn't
work <g>, here is my understanding from multiple tangential encounters
with it. Tagalog is the ethnolocal language of Manila. It was adopted as
a lingua franca for the country, and became known as Pilipino after
undergoing modifications in the adoption process. Further orthographic
changes have been introduced, and whether those have accompanied other
modifications or not, the result was that Pilipino evolved into
Filipino. (I'm pretty sure that Tagalog and probably Pilipino do not
have an "f" sound, so something phonetic likely occurred between the
Pilipino and Filipino stages.)

I am confident about the orthographic changes because I was once stuck
in the middle between an immigrant editor and university-educated people
still in the home country who were arguing about the correct spelling of
the word borrowed from English for diabetes. The difference came down to
the fact that the editor had immigrated before the Pilipino orthography
had been adopted.

BB

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