Palawan-Tagalog-English Dictionary
a Palawan pupuq, a “small bachelor’s or maiden’s house”, serving as a meeting place for unmarried boys and girls. For more information search the dictionary, or search for ‘pupuq’ in the deposit resources to find the full-sized image.. Click on image to access collection.
| Language | Palawan |
| Depositor | Charles Macdonald |
| Affiliation | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| Location | Philippines |
| Collection ID | 0008 |
| Grant ID | FTG0103, FTG0144 |
| Funding Body | ELDP |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/cf5751d1-d05f-4d34-acfe-a07cf48f59c2 |
Summary of the collection
This deposit consists of the first ever dictionary of Palawan, spoken in Palawan Province, Philippines, resulting from fieldwork conducted between July 2008 and March 2009. The dictionary is currently available in PDF, RTF and Toolbox database formats.
Group represented
The Pawalan language is spoken by the Palawan (variously spelled Pälawan, Pelawan, Palaqwan, Pala’wan…) Indigenous Cultural Community, located in the southern part of Palawan Island, Philippines. Numerous other publications, many by this depositor, present aspects of the Palawan culture and society, including oral literature, belief systems, social organization, and material culture (see Macdonald, 2006, Uncultural Behavior. University of Hawaii Press).
Language information
Palawan is an Austronesian language belonging to the meso-Philippine group of Philippine languages (according to Zorc’s 1977 classification). The Palawan language is still alive and fluently spoken in most communities inhabited by a majority or minority of Palawan people. However, in prior observations, this depositor percieved an ongoing transformation of the language as a result of close contact with incoming immigrants, and as a result of the general transformation of Palawan people, from tribal inland shifting agriculturists, to lowland Christian farmers. The depositor has observed that older people (age 50 and above) use a vocabulary that is increasingly obsolete and partly lost to the younger generation. Lexical wealth is thus fast disappearing. As education is done through Filipino and to some extent English, the Palawan language increasingly becomes stigmatitzed and viewed as a sign of backwardness. These and other factors conspire to impoverish, threaten and eventually condemn this language to disappearance.
Special characteristics
This is the first ever extensive compilation in dictionary form of the Palawan language.
Collection contents
The collection comprises over 3400 entries in a Palawan lexicon with Tagalog and English glosses.
Entries include:
- speech part
- dialectal variants
- Tagalog gloss(es)
- English gloss(es)
- affixed forms
- example (a sentence)
- translation of example in English and Tagalog
- synonyms
- ethnographic description.
Collection history
Materials include a previous database of 1200 entries that have been collected through the years from various sources.
They are mostly recordings that have been transcribed and translated with the help of informants: during the period covered by the ELDP project (2006-7) handwritten lists were compiled by native speakers and then checked/rewritten by the depositor with the help of informants/native speakers. Other lists to be included in the dictionary are glossaries and lexicons from various published sources (the depositor’s, Revel’s, SIL primers, etc.).
Other information
Thanks to Ian and Sue McQuay from SIL Philippines the Palawan dictionary is now online in interactive form at https://philippines.sil.org/resources/works_in_progress/palawan.
This is a work in progress, and the author would be extremely grateful for your comments and suggestions in order to improve it, add lexemes (a number of important lexemes are still missing) make corrections, especially to the Tagalog.
To send your comments and suggestions, and to input new entries (words or records), please visit http://palawandictionary.wordpress.com/. Kindly post your messages at this address. In due time your contributions will be inserted in the online version of the dictionary which cannot be changed, but only accessed for consultation and copy.
Acknowledgement and citation
Users are requested to acknowledge the depositor, Charles Macdonald, when citing resources from this collection.
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
Macdonald, Charles. 2008. Palawan-Tagalog-English Dictionary. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/00-0000-0000-0000-F414-7. Accessed on [insert date here].
