A Wikipedian living in Manila informed me that I was quoted in the March 2007 issue of YES! Magazine concerning the use of the word Pinoy. Luckily, my grandma buys an issue for herself at the local Filipino store every month, so I went to her house after she told me that she did have a copy. In any case, I made a scan of the article in question. Click to enlarge. Mr. Lacaba apparently used this post where I mentioned my debate between Guillermo R. Gómez and his son Guillermo O. Gómez concerning the origin of Pinoy.
So yeah, it's kind of exciting and weird at the same time that my blog has been getting this attention lately! And I thought that people in general believe that Philippine languages weren't interesting. ;-)
3 comments:
Cool! It's one of my showbiz-freak wife's favorite mags. I'll look for that Lacaba article.
Nakatira ako sa Switzerland (the French part) - all the prompts on blogger.com here are in German, und ich verstehe nicht Deutsch. Je comprends seulement le francais. Is this the right place for this comment? Anyways, amerikano ako -- the "Am" half of a Fil-am couple.
I'm impressed by your scholarly approach to the "Pinoy" issue, and sad that Mr. Gomez bases most of his arguments on pride and ideology, and is seemingly impervious to logic.
I grew up in L.A. and lived there from the 1950's to 1990's. I never heard the word "Pinoy" until I met my wife in 1977 and got better acquainted with the California Filipino community (friends, Fil-am newspapers, and Filipino TV). I never heard it used by Americans.
I agree that it's giving us Americans too much credit to know enough Tagalog to construct such a term. Hindi kami marunong. (tama ba ang aking word order?)
Americans scarcely have diminuitives or many other words ending in -oy or -ay, while the Filipino languages have such words and nicknames in great number (e.g. nanay, tatay, Nonoy, Cocoy, Totoy, tisoy ...).
The Pilipinong Unggoy theory doesn't hold water from either basic plausibility (from my admittedly biased WASP viewpoint AND personal experience having lived in L.A. in the 70's) or real research. Apologies to Mr. Gomez, who may be right regarding many of the injustices inflicted by my people on his, which I can't defend, but that doesn't make his theory correct.
For the record, my favorite language, and the first foreign language I studied, is Spanish.
If you don't mind my adding -- if Americans want to make a nickname or contraction of Philippine or Filipino, it will start with Phil- or Fil-. It is much more common for speakers of Tagalog or other Filipino languages to make nicknames like Carding for Ricardo (rather than Ric or Rick), Esing or Ising for Moises(not Moe), Lita for Estrellita, Eling for Jose, etc.
Rare would be the American who abbreviate Filipino as "Pino."
Tell me if I'm way off base. Again, thanks for the good work.
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