Additional information
by Jean-Paul Potet (Author)
While English is the official language of the Philippines, Tagalog (Tagálog) has been its national language since 1937, and as such is called Filipino in Spanish and English, but Pilipíno in Tagalog because the phone [f] does not exist in this language. Tagalog is an Austronesian language of the VSO type, whose main syntactic feature is focalization, whereby one of the arguments of the verb is selected as the focus of the clause, which determines the form of the verb and the nominal markers of its arguments. For instance, to the English sentence "the fisherman gave a/the lobster to the neighbour" correspond three Tagalog sentences depending on whether the focus is the fisherman (nagbigáy ang mangingisdâ nang uláng sa kapitbáhay), the lobster (ibinigáy nang mangingisdâ ang uláng sa kapitbáhay) or the neighbour (binigyán nang mangingisdâ nang uláng ang kapitbáhay). This grammar book is an opportunity to introduce the rare or new concepts of actuated mood, unactuated mood, aggregative noun, duplicand, immediacy, imperation, inclusory group, phonotagm, topization and transference. All the examples are translated, and indices indicate the equivalents between the two languages. The abbreviation ng for nang "of" and mga for mangá (plural marker) are replaced by the full words. Stress is indicated by the acute accent, and the final glottal stop by the grave accent. The final consonants replaced by clitics are memorized as silent diacritics on the latter. Finally, a phonetic transcription is supplied whenever necessary.
