Note 1 — PREFACE

What is here presented is, then, a specimen of the speech of an educated speaker from Mr. Santiago’s home town, San Miguel na Matamés, Bulacán Province, Luzón. It would have been possible to include in the description the speech of at least one other educated Tagalog from a different region (uneducated speakers are unfortunately not within my reach), as well as such data as might be gathered from printed Tagalog books: I have refrained from this extension because, at the present state of our knowledge, a single clearly defined set of data is preferable to a necessarily incomplete attempt at describing the whole language in its local and literary variations. Comparison of literary Tagalog (chiefly the translation of José Rizal’s “Noli me Tangere” by Patricio Mariano, Manila, Morales, 19131) shows that Mr. Santiago’s speech is not far removed from it. In most cases where my results deviate from the statements of the Spanish grammars, the evidence of printed books (and not infrequently the internal evidence of the grammars themselves) shows that the divergence is due not to dialectal differences but to the fact that the grammars are the product of linguistically untrained observers, who heard in terms of Spanish articulations and classified in those of Latin grammar.