Agcaoili, Aurelio Solver. 2011. Contemporary English-Ilokano Dictionary. Quezon City: Cornerstone of Arts and Sciences.
“The author must have also thought of non-Ilokanos who would want to enrich their language skills and feel, as it were, the culture of the people who come from northern Philippines…”
INDUBITABLY.
For a good print dictionary, which allows you, the reader, to linger, explore and truly search for the term being gripped, can help you understand your subject better, improve your communication and improve your grades—if you are in school—by making sure you are using words correctly.
In addition to its basic function of defining words, a dictionary may provide information about their pronunciation, grammatical forms and functions, etymologies, syntactic peculiarities, variant spellings, and antonyms.
With dictionaries, unknown words become solvable mysteries. Why leave them up to guesswork?
Wikipedia and Google answer questions with more questions, opening up pages of information you never asked for. But a dictionary builds on common knowledge, using simple words to explain more complex ones.
Properly, finding words in a print dictionary or thesaurus exercises kids’ minds and helps them develop their problem-solving skills.
To find a word, they have to consider order and sequencing, alphabetization, spelling, context, and much more. Faster isn’t always better when it comes to literacy and learning.
The dictionary encourages them to analyze different meanings of an unknown word with example sentences and understand which one makes the most sense in their context.
The same page also exposes students to many other words they may not know, improving spelling and expanding vocabulary.
One such dictionary that has reached our rack is the 962-page Contemporary English-Ilocano Dictionary by professor and lexicographer Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, the Ilocos Norte-born Program Coordinator of Ilokano at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Honolulu.
It is the only academic program in the world that that offers a bachelor’s degree in the arts with focus on studies of Ilocano language and literature.
Dr. Agcaoili’s is a bilingual dictionary, one that has the word you are looking for translated into your own language, in this case the Ilokano language spoken by 11 percent or 12.5 million—about two million speaking it as a second language—of the country’s population of 114 million.
The Ilocano people are believed to be the third largest ethnolinguistic group in the Philippines after Tagalog and the Cebuan or Sugbuhanon.
Agcaoili admits that his more than 18,000 entries of this perhaps latest dictionary written by an Ilokano “came to light and life sometimes as an apparition or in an apocalypse, sometimes in the sanctity of revelation during my eureka moments.”
We have this stalking soft-heartedness the dictionary has been written primarily for Ilokanos whose first language has been English and are interested and rushing to the authentic stockpile of the lexicon of their ancestors.
And the author must have also thought of non-Ilokanos who would want to enrich their language skills and feel, as it were, the culture of the people who come from northern Philippines.
And some who have migrated to other provinces in the Philippines as in Mindoro and other areas in Mindanao in the far south of the country.
Not to mention those who have become dual citizens in Hawaii and other states in the US mainland, where the elders, whacked by the twang of a foreign tongue including accent and syntax still hold close to their chests the language of their Philippine roots.
Roots resolutely.
I have chosen to approach, the author said, “the Ilokano language following the framework of a repertoire of the language as used by all possible speech communities in their diversity and difference.”
He could not have gone wrong in such motivation.
He adds: “My aim in accounting this repertoire is to celebrate and cerebrate Ilokanoness in all its forms as articulated and rearticulated by the various dialects of this language, dialects that prove that the Ilokano language is alive and its energy able to express the imaginary (sic) of a people employing this language in their own act of self-understanding and self-reflection.”
But—and this is not a jab at the efforts put by Agcaoili and colleagues, researchers and students who assisted him, whose shots we must admit are pretty much praiseworthy for which the generations of Ilokanos must be grateful.
We find chambers for improvement, if only to accept Agcaoili’s “all possible speech communities” to benefit from this much acknowledged volume that definitely can enrich any Ilokano library.
We take, just one word, which is no reflection on the sum total of the endeavor, the word serenade on page 766 which the author translated as, in its noun form, tapat.
While this may be the word used in some Ilocano towns, many others use the term harana, with tapat meaning in the latter going to sing Christmas carols in the neighborhood.
The author could have used harana as a synonym, in much the same way that he used panunot as synonym for isip for thought on page 856. In some Ilokano-speaking towns, panunot is the risen legend.
There also appears an apparent error of fact by identifying Zuni, on page 959, as black people in the eastern part of South Africa, and Zulu, on page 958, as people inhabiting west of New Mexico in the United States.
Zuni, also spelled Zuñi, refer to the North American Indian tribe of what is now west-central New Mexico, on the Arizona border. The Zuni are a Pueblo Indian group and speak a Penutian language and are believed to be descendants of the prehistoric Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi).
On the other hand, the Zulu, a nation of Nguni-speaking people in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, are a branch of the southern Bantu and have close ethnic, linguistic, and cultural ties with the Swazi and Xhosa.
The Zulu are the single largest ethnic group in South Africa and numbered about nine million in the late 20th century.
Here, while not debriefing the inclusion of such ethnic groups overseas, the author could have included as well for breathing backdrop the ethnic groups in the Ilokano nation, the likes of—and not limited to these—the Itnegs or Isnegs, the Ivatans, the Ybanags, the Ibalois or the Majukayongs or Maducayans of Kalinga in northern Philippines, and the Pangasinense.
Perhaps, to break the density of the text, the author in the future could use maps to indicate where Ilokanos come from and where the different Ilokanos have migrated to, not necessarily in color—black and white will suffice.
We agree with the author when he said “this work is not final; at best, it is a work-in-progress, and thus I hope to expand the entries in an upcoming revised edition.”
Dr. Agcaoili is on the right track. He deserves the hand of the Ilokanos.
(The author is a prize-winning orator and debater and used to walk along undergraduate and graduate academic corridors.)