Ibatan: A Grammatical Sketch of the Language of Babuyan Claro Island (review)

On language documentation. The Philippines is home to more than a hundred autochthonous languages. The Ethnologue: Languages of the World (16th edition, edited by Paul M. Lewis; SIL International, 2009; online, http://www.ethnologue.com/) lists 171 living languages spoken in the Philippine archipelago and four languages reported to be extinct. Not all of the languages included in the list, however, are indigenous to the Philippines or are descendants of Proto-Austronesian. The list also includes English, Spanish, Chinese Mandarin, Chinese Min Nan, and Chinese Yue. Of the living spoken languages, 164 are indigenous to the Philippines. Other surveys and lists, however, are more conservative in the estimates of the total number of indigenous languages spoken in the Philippines. Darrell T. Tryon (in the work he edited, Comparative Austronesian dictionary, Mouton de Gruyter, 1995) lists 150 languages, while Ernesto Constantino ("Current Topics in Philippine Linguistics," in Parangal Cang Brother Andrew: Festschrift for Andrew Gonzalez on his Sixtieth Birthday, edited by Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista, Teodoro A. Llamzon, and Bonifacio P. Sibayan, 57–68; Linguistic Society of the Philippines, 2000) estimates the number to be 110 and believes that there may still be languages in the more remote areas in the Philippines that have not been recorded. Only a handful of these languages have been sufficiently described. The lack of description of these languages is one of the reasons perhaps behind the wide disparity in the estimates of the total number of languages spoken in the Philippines today. The methodical comparison and analysis of the differences and similitudes in the various levels of grammatical study between these languages to establish the distinct linguistic identity of each language, and subsequently to define the phylogenetic categorization and relationships of all the indigenous languages, start from an adequate description of these languages or at least of the languages to be compared.

Maree's grammatical sketch of the language spoken in Babuyan Claro called Ibatan of the Batanic or Bashiic microgroup, closely related but different from Ivatan, is an important addition to the description and analysis of Philippine languages. The sketch discussed some of the basic features of Ibatan: the sound system and some of the rules in the patterning of these sounds were discussed in the second chapter; morphological features and their extensions to syntactic formations in phrases and sentences were discussed in the succeeding chapters, e.g., nouns, pronouns, and their extensions in phrases were described in the chapter on nominals and the chapter on noun phrases, and the like; the last chapter introduces the reader to the semantic structure of Ibatan through the discussion of the relations of propositions and propositional clusters; and finally more examples of verbs, affixes, and texts are provided in the appendix. The texts included in the appendix illustrate the linguistic features discussed in the sketch. They can also serve as secondary data for researchers in Ibatan.

The linguist in the field. Data for Maree's grammatical sketch were collected from almost three decades of field research from 1978 to 2006. Maree was able to collect oral recordings (speech data) and written texts that came up to a 480-page text corpus. Apart from this remarkable corpus, Maree also used an unpublished dictionary with 5,000 main entries compiled by Judith Maree, his near-native speaker insight and the intuition of the Ibatan native speakers as data and tools for his analysis of Ibatan.

Being in the field, instead of relying simply on data previously collected by other field researchers, gives the linguist not only an unlimited access to data but also to the functional and contextual frame words, phrases, and sentences as these are used. While sentences gathered using designed elicitation materials, devoid of context and relations, may prove useful in the definition of certain sentence types, it also limits the linguist from describing structures and constructions that may not be elicited by the material. Having to elicit isolated sentences also...