Note 1 — Acknowledgements

Tagalog characters are said to be similar to old Javanese, Ignacio Villamot, La Antigua Escritura Filipina, Manila, 1922, p. 30. They were replaced under the Spanish occupation by roman letters, and are not now used. The best definitive grammar is Frank R. Blake’s A Grammar of the Tagalog Language, New Haven, 1925, where, p. 1, he defines the language as follows: “Tagálog is the principal language of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippine Archipelago. It is spoken in Manila and in the middle region of Luzon. Tagálog, like all the Philippine languages about which anything is known, belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian family of speech, which embraces the idioms spoken on the islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Malaysia, on the Malay peninsula, and on the island of Madagascar.”