Philosophy in... Kinaray’A

I – Languages of the Ocean

II - Gender and the Soul

III - God and Creation

“A very popular idea among Karay’a is that the first two humans were created from sand left over from when the tide retreats.”

Hello and welcome back to another episode of "Philosophising in…" the podcast about philosophy in lesser studied languages. Today is a very exciting day in that we're going to be talking about by far the least widely spoken language that we've featured so far, the Kinaray’A language of the Philippines. Our guest today is Abbie Lorenzo from King's College London. How are you doing Abbie?

Hi, thanks for having me.

We're really glad to have you. So, Kinaray’A, is a language that I expect very few of our listeners will have heard of before. To begin, could you tell us a little bit just about the language itself and its speakers?

Of course. So, we are a very small community. There are around a million of us, maybe a bit less - localized almost entirely around the province of Antique on the island of Panay in the southwestern Visayas in the Philippines. There are some smaller isolated communities of Kinaray’A speakers across the country, from migrations that have happened in the precolonial times such as on the island of Palawan and in some other parts of Panay, especially Iloilo which is the largest settlement on the Island.

Kinaray'A is an Austronesian language. It can sound pretty similar to languages like Malay and Hawaiian because we share history and language family with them. And we have been almost entirely until now, non literate.              

Children with a caribou, a kind of water buffalo used as a work animal in the Philippines  

We did not write anything down, as is very common in minority languages in the Philippines and Southeast Asia in general. All of our literature is oral – that is how we have historically passed down information from generations.

Fantastic. That is a really nice overview: how many people do you think roughly speak Kinaray’A?

It's kind of hard to know exactly because recording statistics in the Philippines can be a bit less centralised. I believe around about a million, maybe less, with about 10,000 of us living abroad, including myself and my family.

I - Languages of the Ocean

So you'd mention that it's an Austronesian language, making it part of one of the most incredibly geographically dispersed as a language families, being spoken from south-east Asia to Madagascar, New Zealand and across the Pacific. And you also mentioned that it can sound to outsiders a little like Malay or Indonesian, while not being mutually intelligible with either of them – could you tell us a little about its closer relatives? What is the more local context within the Philippines?

So we have three main local languages to our island, which would be Kinaray’A, Aklanon, and the most widely spoken, Hiligaynon which is centered around Ilo-Ilo City, which is the most popular area.

People tend to say Kinaray’A is one of the more complex, or  difficult to learn in the Philippines in general. It's the least intelligible to the others. Usually we have an okay time understanding Hiligaynon, but they struggle a bit with our language. Kinaray’a is not intelligible at all to Tagalog, which is the largest ethnolinguistic group and the ethnicity of most Filipino immigrants that you will meet.

Sure, and I remember you telling me once that there's a wonderful time that the Tagalog speakers have for Kinaray’A.

Oh yes, Malalim. Which I’m told means something like “messy” or “complicated”. I wouldn’t quite know as I don’t speak Tagalog.

And you'd also mentioned that this accusation of being difficult or messy is slightly ironic comment coming from Tagalog speakers? Why is that?

Yes. The conjugations. Oh, 55 per verb in Tagalog, which is why I don't speak it. But no, I think my family over the years has had a bit of a hard time with Tagalog because the two languages are so different, so I guess the term is warranted.

Languages in Panay and surrounding islands

Could you say a little more about the significance of contact between Kinaray’A and more 'major' languages, like Tagalog and Spanish: Tagalog being the main language of the Philippines, Spanish being the language of the earliest European colonization, the language of Christianization of the Philippines in general. And later the advent of English coming with the Americans. Can you tell us a little bit about how contact with these majority languages has influenced Kinaray’A? Do we have loan words?

Definitely. Spanish is probably the biggest influence because it was one of the earliest and most important political contacts. Besides, I've studied Spanish for a long time, so I kind of see it everywhere. And one of the most important words in Kinaray’A is Kanta, which is song in Spanish. We thus have a Spanish word for perhaps the main way we pass down information from generation to generation - though song and oral poems. There is probably a word that's more original to the language, but I've never heard it. So Spanish is an incredibly influential. A native word for God, which is of course an important concept is Gino’o. And the concept of beauty is Gwapa, which is the same in Spanish. Although when you see these words written, Kinaray’A speakers will change the spelling to fit our pronunciation.

19th century map of the Philippine archipelago

So if you were going to say philosophy, for example, Pilosopía, you would kind of change out the F sounds, the P sounds because like Tagalog, we don't really have those strong fricatives. And yeah, virtually every concept that wasn't that isn't local to the region was brought into us by the Spanish.

So with the example that you gave for the word ‘God’, could you remind me what the Kinaray’A? Do Gino’o and Dios, have slightly different semantic fields – can they be used interchangeably?

It's hard to discuss this sort of thing with Kinaray’A because the language is so decentralized. How I speak it with my family in quite an isolated, immigrant, context is going to be very different to how people in Iloilo or who live around exclusively Kinaray’A speakers use the words. For me, Gino’o can't help but feel more like an older concept to us for God. So perhaps like our kind of pre-Christian version of monotheism which is a little bit hard to explain and definitely not agreed upon between different groups of Karay’A. And of course, Dios is kind of more evocative of the Christian God that the Spanish brought over and that remains dominant today.

So with the arrival of the Spanish explorers and then colonisers, we have the arrival too of an Indo-European grammar, suggestive perhaps of a quite different way of carving up conceptual space. We also have the Christian religion which gives a very particular way of understanding the relation of the moral, intellectual, metaphysical spheres as well. And as you say, both the language and the religion came to have enormous influence on Karay’A and wider Philippine culture. My questions concerns how much we can know baout what came before: do you think it is possible to reconstruct something of a pre-Christian, pre-Indo-European contact worldview?

It's a hard thing to talk about in the context of  modern Karay’a people. We're very attached to the Christian religion. We're very proud Christians. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. You know, we've had 400 years or so to change our minds about it.

Unfortunately all of the accounts we have of what we were up to before Christianity came to the region were written by Spanish colonial officers and explorers who often didn't get things right. There's a very famous example of this in popular Filipino thought, which is this journal of notes made by a Spanish colonial officer about various people in the Visayas and like the northern regions of the Philippines, who he noted a lot of things and then, in like the 1800s, Jose Rizal, our national thinker, published a version with all his annotations correcting what he could. So again, it's kind of difficult to come at it from a Western academia perspective.

It might be difficult to reconstruct any kind of system of thought from before Christianity started influencing us. I'm not really sure what the methodology would be. I suppose we could analyze some of our folk accounts, but I don't think those are the most respected, unfortunately.

Well, I suppose often one of the ideas is that if you have the idea of how a particular grammar might incline one towards a particular, you know, a grammar of tense might incline you towards a particular theory of time, then you could compare the differences between the two.

A lot of the vocabulary in Kinaray’a is covered in local concepts. A lot of words refer to nature. You'll often find we have one loan word for like, I guess, a more abstract concept that's less relevant every day life, like, “a senator” is just “senador”. Whereas for more important concepts like water or farm, there will be multiple original ways to refer to it in different senses. So I suppose if we were going down that road of thinking about the language inclining us to kind of philosophise in a certain way, I guess that would make us kind of animistic thinkers. A lot of our concepts relate to the natural world.

You'll find a lot of our metaphorical language also references concepts we see in nature, particularly water. A lot of Filipino peoples have origins as sailors and that's still an important part of society and the economy today. We have a lot of examples of words with very deep association with water. For example, there are all the words we have for the kind of water and moisture in our bodies that come from naturally occurring sources of water. For example Lawa, which is a lake and then we have Laway, which is like saliva. My favourite is Ugaw, which means roots and Unaw, which means thirst. So you get a very logical collection.

Logical indeed - do you think this grammatical relation is suggestive of a particular the relationship between the body and the world?

Definitely. I mean, my thinking is that this suggests how very differently we must have related to the environment in earlier times, compared to today with our Christian influences. I think this suggests that we thought of ourselves as not separate from the environment. I think we tended to think of ourselves as just a part of a moving part of the world which is not really a compatible idea with Christianity, which puts humans in a special position above the rest of nature. This idea hasn't really survived into modern times, but I think it is interesting how we can see these kind of parts of history in the language that remains today.

Even if it does remain a speculative account of how people may have thought in the past, these are the kind of informed speculations that linguistic distinctions can give us in the absence of written traditions. So I was going to ask you more generally about this question of methodology. What can it mean to philosophise in Kinaray’A, in a case where we don't have, journals of philosophy or history of philosophy textbooks in Kinaray’A, which are composed in that language. How have you been preparing for this interview?

Well, it's definitely, it's definitely been very different from anything I've done before. I'm an undergraduate in philosophy in the UK, which means I mostly study schools of thought with long literary traditions. I've had to build from the ground up in terms of philosophical research into Kinaray’A, because it's not really an established thing. I think there have been some articles in Tagalog and English, but I couldn’t find much to build off.

However, Karay’a are present in academia. We have modern lives, we are professors and students but we don't really talk about the language itself much, and we tend to participate in philosophy through a second or even third language. So I guess where I started was just talking to my family, discussing some religious concepts with them, discussing how the community has changed in their lifetimes. There was a point where you couldn't be in my hometown and hear another language. Whereas these days, it's a lot more common for you to hear Tagalog or even English. We even get the odd Dutch tourist passing through!

Mountain road in rural Antique

But again, it's been difficult. People do write plays and songs in it, which is a continuation of our traditions of passing down information, but it's hard to do academic research about it, especially from the UK when the literature is not available a lot of the time.

It's so interesting what you were saying about the kind of research that one has to do in the absence of a large body of written sources, and I really like this idea of you sitting down with native speakers – your own family – and reflecting on the concepts themselves.

It would be amazing to have people who speak these minority languages that have been up until this point. It would be amazing to have dictionaries and philosophical research into them, you know, maybe they wouldn’t take it as far as Socrates did, but especially because we are so decentralized, a lot of our speakers are so isolated. My family are immigrants so I didn't grow up speaking to many people outside of my family in the language, and I know this is the case for so many people, so the usage of it changes.

We have so many different kinds of language communities all across the world and I was very intimidated at first by the lack of any overarching methodology and literature for me to follow along with, but ultimately it was very rewarding to sit down with my family and people in my community, and think through maybe a simplified version of a concept that has been very overstudied in Western philosophy, and just see what they make of it from their perspectives.

Absolutely, and that's, that's really what we're all about in doing these interviews. It's not only to demonstrate that these lesser-studied languages, languages where in this case we don't even have grammars and dictionaries and the like, have philosophical riches of their own.

III - Gender and the Soul

There's another example which you've mentioned that I think, in a way, I might show some interesting light on, and that's the concept of gender. Now, you mentioned that in Kinaray’A Grammar, it gender's not so strongly linked to sex necessarily as a sort of identity assigned at birth, perhaps for sort of grammatical reasons. Could you tell me a little bit about what you had in mind as the distinction?

Yeah, okay. This is actually a very common concept across the Philippines in pre-colonial societies. We do know that gender roles there looked very different to how they did post-Christianity, and before I talk about it, I do want to preface this by saying that. I don't think the arrival of Christianity into the Philippines was necessarily a bad thing.

Of course, nobody in the world should be forcibly and violently converted to any religion, but you know, I don't think the influence of Christianity, which has ultimately shaped who we are as a people today, has necessarily been negative.

Although I do think this is an interesting frame of reference to think about things in, which is that in Kinaray’A specifically, gender is less attached to I think the physicality of the body. It's less of a thing that is assigned to you when you're born, and more of a social role, I suppose.

There are words that describe specific parts of the female and male anatomy that don't really go between the sexes, I suppose, but in general, I would say we have up to maybe five concepts of what the various genders could be. Again, it's kind of controversial to talk about in this day and age where we are such a Christian culture and Christianity gives us these very rigid gender roles, but I think it's even if you aren't receptive of the shift in thinking in a lot of the world, I think it's important to consider it in our history. Yeah, absolutely.

One thing that was quite interesting about the structure of the language with regards to gender is you suggested that the language itself, so you don't have gender pronouns or noun structures, and that it's instead expressed through specific individual nouns and adjectives. And I suppose it's always an interesting question.

This is the question with, say in English, the gender neutral, they, or in gender languages that use prononal genders in German and French say, how social and political categories of gender like you were just mentioning, are related to the grammatical concept, right? Do you have any strong opinions on how that works in the case of Kinerai or more generally?

I think the best way to approach it for everyone's sake is to kind of treat it value-neutrally.

The way our language speaks about sex and gender is just a product of how our society was before the Spanish, which in itself was most likely developed in response to lots of different events across our history. I think, Kinaray’a speakers are very influenced by English these days where we have very specific conversations about how we express gender and language.

So, I'm not, I'm not really sure, I suppose if I were to make any kind of connection between the two, I would say something like that. It's basically just reflective of how gender roles in our society were before the introduction of Christianity, which is that I don't want to say fluid because that kind of applies a concept from English to these distinct ideas about gender, but I would say maybe less linked to physical sex and more linked to your role in society.

For example, I would say our kind of class of priests or I guess shamans, you might describe them as kind of discussed as a set of gender. We have instances in songs and folk stories about heroic characters who move across the gender divide.

Yeah, I remember you mentioning this story about a hero who saves the day by changing gender, is that right?

Kind of. Tell us a little bit about this story.

Again, this has a lot of versions. It essentially, it kind of starts by, this woman's husband going missing. there are a lot of reasons, some involve a giant crab. She essentially has to take on this heroic role, this like, the role of kind of a heroic lone soldier herself because she doesn't have any sons, this is a big point.

There's no kind, there's no implication that she, you know, physically transforms into a man anyway, but rather she takes on this role in order to save her husband, which I think is an interesting demonstration of how we used to think about gender. And it's precisely in her taking on this sort of heroic role of going off and doing the kind of things that she does as opposed to anything about the physical constitution of her body that determines gender.

And I think if I were to hear this for the first time in English, I might have a thought like, well, why can't she just do it as a woman? However, I think that this kind of speaks to more of what gender, the broad gender serves in pre-colonial Visayan societies, which is just a social role you take on, and which isn't necessarily permanent. I guess I might compare it to a job, you know, you can work at Tesco's now, but you don't necessarily have to do that forever.

Indeed. Excellent. We really wanted to get that example in the bit about the giant crab, especially. It also leads us to a really interesting question, an interesting point that you've been making about personal identity in the relationship between brain and body or mind and soul, and I'm throwing out all of these various terms because I have no idea which of these might be cognates for the relevant Kinaray’a terms. And of course, 400 years of Christianity will suggest, or impose, or imply particular ideas of the relationship between the brain, the body, the mind, the soul, and all the rest of them. And these are ideas which have sort of come from outside the language. And I was just wondering could you tell us maybe about what some of those relevant terms and what their relations are in Kinaray’a?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, again, it's kind of difficult to definitively talk about these terms as we would in other languages. For example, we could have an argument about what Geist means in German that could actually have substance, whereas if I were to argue with another Kinaray’a speaker about what a certain word means in different senses, we probably wouldn't get very far because essentially it comes down to “I've been using the language in this isolated area and you've been using a language in this isolated area. So we have different concepts and different relations for each word.”An important one, as I mentioned earlier is Kanta, which is a song or poem or, I guess, an utterance might be a good  translation for it. You know, it is, it's the noun, but it's also the infinitive of to explain something to, recount something, I suppose. That's a very important concept for Karay’a as that is all our literature, that is all our system of thought.

Another one would be, as I mentioned earlier, Ginoo, which is God, this was a different concept before Christianity was involved, again, controversial because it's not recorded definitively, but generally the idea is that some kind of monotheism is going on there.

So it's always a singular that there is one, you know, there are not multiple of them. I guess the better way to describe it would be, like one kind of creator of the universe, and then several others, like deities that come from and are the same thing as this one big creator. Absolutely. And then you're always faced with the difficulties of knowing how much of this was the original, the audio version of the religion. So to what extent one of them is a translation in native terms of something like God and the angels or, you know, whether you have, yeah, whether you have a sort of, kind of, a reified Christianity or a Christianized kind of, or something like that. I definitely think there is evidence of the former.

I was looking at some accounts of the pre-Spanish native religion, which claims that we had originally, the first two humans called Adnan and Aba. I wonder where that came from? So, and, you know, there has been a lot of, in more recent years, trying to reconcile our pre-colonial religions across the Philippines with Christianity.

I feel like there's been a lot of attempts by Christian scholars over the past 200 years within the Philippines to paint our ancestors as kind of noble savages who just kind of needed the concept of Christianity to come in and enlighten us all, which  I see the thinking behind, but I don't really think that's the right way to approach indigenous history.

In terms of the attempted reconstruction of pre-colonial cosmology, do you have any examples of stories we might use?

Yeah. So, I, so, a very popular idea among Karay’a is that humans were, the first two humans were created from sand under various circumstances. The version I like best is that we come from wet sand flats left over from when the tide retreats.  I think this is interesting as this kind of follows the Christian structure of the creation myth; the Gods created a man and a woman from some kind of natural material. I kind of see a parallel between this creation myth and the creation myth from ancient Hellenic religion where you have the gods making people out of clay and mud, which was a conceptually important thing for many Greek societies.

The sea and shore is a very conceptually important thing for the Karay’a people because we historically have been and often are still seafarers. A little fun little fact that people who study Filipino languages like to throw around is that in the Philippines, if you will often find people speaking the same language on different sides of an ocean or a strait or a river but you'll find two different peoples who hadn’t heard of each other 200 years ago on the same island on different sides of a mountain range.

That's absolutely fantastic, thanks so much Abby for answering our questions

Abbie Lorenzo is an undergraduate student in Philosophy and Modern Languages at King’s College London.  She is interested in philosophy and literature across different cultures and languages, and occasionally contributes writing on these subjects to student publications