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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 ...
Ilokano
(Ilocano)
Some
of Ilocos’ churches
are from early
Spanish colonial times, like this one
in Vigan.
Language information:
Ilocano, which also known as “Ilokano,” “Iluko,” “Iloco” and “Iloko,” is one of the Philippines’s over 170 languages. The names of the language and its speaker community are derived from i- ‘from’ and loök ‘bay,’ thus “People of the Bay.” Ilocano people also refer to themselves and their language as Samtoy, apparently a contraction of sao mi ditoy “our language here.”
Ilocano
is one of the major Philippine languages, being third in rank of number of
speakers. Its home region is Ilocos on the island of Luzon, the Philippines’ northernmost major island, and also on the smaller islands north of Luzon (though
apparently not as far north as the Batanes). Its area is adjacent to and partly overlapping with
those of Pangasian and Bolinao, and most of its speakers are at least somewhat conversant in Filipino, the national language based primarily
on Tagalog.
Like several other
languages of the Philippines, Ilocano
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
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