-- Keep Moving Because --

There is no word for "privacy" in Tagalog. Neither can you tell someone in Tagalog that you missed them in their absence without having to resort to Taglish: "Na-miss kita."

"That's because people are always together," explains one friend. "How can you miss anyone when you're always hanging out?"

Indeed. It's hard to miss your Filipino family, for instance, because you tend to live with them pretty much till the day they (or you) die. Mid- to upper-middle families often settle down in miniature gated communities where houses are clustered around a central courtyard. About three-quarters of my friends--who are in their mid-twenties to early thirties--live with their parents or siblings, often in the same house that their parents grew up in.

When I arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport from a two-month visit to Vancouver, the plane that I was on was packed, and the situation got worse at the luggage carousel, so much so that this one woman---dressed in faux fatigue, she had cropped hair and spoke in a tone that in the Philippines would mean, "Don't mess with me"---actually pushed her cart INTO MINE.

Let me illustrate:

I was pretty incensed. How could she possible push the squarish protrusion at the end of her cart into the squarish opening behind mine?! I felt like someone violated not only my privacy but my cart's as well.

Labels: lost in translation

Posted by Diego at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

I came across bakala.org, which looks like a gay dating site with a user base concentrated largely in Spain. But what I find odd is that word bakala sounds a lot like a Filipino term for gay men, bakla. Bakla is a contraction of the Tagalog words babae (woman) and lalake (man).

I don't speak Spanish well at all, but I did study a bit of it in high school and university, and what I find odd about the whole bakala business is that Tagalog and Spanish aren't really related languages. So if bakala does mean gay (at least to some people in Spain), the word could very well be derived from a language of one of its former colonies, the Philippines.

I googled bakala and concluded that it could either be what you would call a corner store in Kuwait; dried salted cod; or, yes, a variant of the term for a gay man in Tagalog, although I personally have never heard it used as a variant of the more well-known bakla.

(Incidentally, on bakala.org, I also noticed how words like quien, quieres, and como appear as kien, kieres, and komo. I'm wondering if this is an "edgier" version of the language, roughly reminiscent of "this sux".)

Could anyone contribute some insight?

Posted by Diego at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments