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Of mice and men

We have rats at the sewer back of our apartment, and mice inside the house. I am often in Bisaya mode, and now I realize we have no separate Cebuano terms for 'rat' and 'mouse' They are both 'ilaga' -- 'yatot' in Waray, 'daga' in Tagalog. Well, 'dagkung ilaga' for rats and 'gagmayng ilaga' for mice -- but that doesn't count because that's just describing their sizes . . .



Some people may say the advancement of a culture is seen on the richness of its language. If this were true, then Inuit culture is very advanced indeed -- what with its hundreds of terms for snow. Truth is, like a tool, the best language to use depends on the occasion. Charles V said "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse." Most good computer programmers know that.



Take the term 'ilog' [eelohg] -- that's Cebuano for 'to grab something forcefully from someone with the intent of depriving that someone with that something's ownership.  In English, that can either be 'grab' or 'rob' or 'take back' (depending on the context, 'ilog' can either mean that the object does not belong to the grabber or was once the property of the grabber' -- e.g., landgrabbing . . . [crotch-grabbing is something else -- in Cebuano, that's 'kuot']). You can even say something like 'grab back' if you mean to forcefully take back what was once yours. . . So the right language/term to use depends on how good it describes what you mean.



So, if vocabulary is not an indication of a culture's advancement, what does it indicate? It just points at the values of a culture. Getting back to Inuit -- snow is a very important part of their culture, therefore their vocabulary is rich with terms describing snow. What can we say then of a language that has a lot of terms for sex? Eherm . . . i think many contemporary languages fall in this category -- euphemisms are just slang that got respectable.



Speaking of euphemism for sex, Cebuano (and Waray and Tagalog) has this term: 'gamit' -- 'to use' -- as in 'gigamit niya ang iyang asawa' ('he made love to his wife,' literally, 'he used his wife'). As if a wife is just a washable utensil, without regard for her feelings. That's because of our patriarchal roots. Elizabethan English has something better -- the biblical 'know' -- "and Adam knew Eve, his wife." Arguably the King James translators might have just invented the term for the purpose . . . i don't know . . . yada yada yada ('yada' is the Hebrew original for the 'f' word).

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