Being a Tagalog speaker and a language learner, I’ve always been interested in etymology of Tagalog words. The obvious influences are Spanish and English, but there’s also a lot from Hokkien and Malay.
Today I’m going to list out some words that I find interesting:
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Linggo (Sunday; week) - All the days in Tagalog are directly borrowed from Spanish one to one, except for Sunday (domingo). Apparently it could be from Malay minggu which came from Portuguese domingo. Of course, both of those could be traced to Latin, and Portuguese and Spanish are pretty close to each other. I just find it interesting that we get to the same word in a pretty roundabout way.
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dolyar (dollar), gorilya (gorilla) - These two exhibit the same phenomenon, which is called a pseudo-loan. We borrowed them from English, but pronounce the ll like it’s from Spanish. In Spanish, they’re pronounced with a regular l (dólar and gorila).
While eating adobong sitaw for dinner, I realized that it’s a type of bean that ends in “taw”. Then it reminded me of a time my uncle mentioned tawsi which more obviously sounds like dau6 si6 (douchi) in Cantonese.
- All the bean loanwords that have Hokkien 豆 (tāu):
EDIT: I came across a list of loanwords in Tagalog and I was surprised by some of them. I knew of some loanwords that originated from Sanskrit like agham (science) from आगम (āgama) and mukha (face) from मुख (mukha), but there are actually a lot more, especially abstract concepts.
Makes me wonder how people even spoke Tagalog before any outside influence, if it even existed then. Somehow I feel less repulsion towards Taglish now. “Pure” Tagalog before English influence was mostly Spanish-influenced, and “pure” Tagalog before Spanish influence was mostly Indian and Chinese-influenced. You’d have to go very far back to remove all outside influences. And for what? Just speak the natural progression of Tagalog.