The eradication of Spanish, the revolutionaries' language. American-promoted Filipino. I

The first vocabulary of Filipino appeared in 1915. It was published by the American Philosophical Society. Its author, Eusebio T. Daluz.

CERTIFICATE OF APPROBATION

CERTIFICAMOS que este Vocabulario Filipino-Inglés fué aprobado y adoptado oficialmente por la Academia de la Lengua Filipina en sesión ordinaria celebrada el día 7 de Marzo de 1915. Y para que conste firmamos la presente en Manila, 1. F., hoy veintidós de Mayo del año del Señor de mil novecientos quince.

SOFRONIO G. CALDERON, Presidente de la "Akademyang Wikàng Pilipino".

REFRENDADO: PAUL L. STANGL, B. S, M. Ph., Secretario interino y Vice-Secretario de la 'Akademya ng Wikàng Pilipino".


PREFACE

This historical, constructional period, in which the national ideals seem to acquire definite form; when national boundaries are tending to become defined more and more along lines of ethnical cleavage and entities group on race affinity; when the consciousness of a world mission becomes the logical fruit of widespread education, and each racial unit tends to arrange itself upon its natural base, to develop more fully and take its proper place in the concert of world powers to bear its share of the burden and the heat of the day in bringing to richer fruition the heritage of man; this is the time of creating new factors of linguistic development. In this epoch the natives of the Philippines, after being, for over three centuries shut off by a worse than Chinese wall of exclusion of progress, tight bound by the swaddling clothes of religious and secular prejudice, whereby growth was hindered, have at last been freed of the trammels, and in less than two decades have taken enormous strides forward on the path of national greatness. It is at such time, when the trammels of dialects and other variants of speech are most strongly made manifest, and prove the test of true national fitness. A united Germany with its people speaking diverse dialects was only solved by making one of them the standard and from the rest enriching it, making it the virile expression of national consciousness.The world has seen no strong nation adopt the language of another people; still less that of a race alien in thought, feeling, speech and habit. Hence, however well meaning it may be to try or implant the English speech in these islands as a common medium, it is so obviously a violation of all psychic and ethnic unities, that can never, in the opinion of the writer, be a lasting success. Hence a solution along those lines that centuries of experience has proven to be the only logical, because natural one, that of a developed national language based on national stock and material, enriched and perfected, but akin to the native spirit of rich and poor alike, is the only one that, in the end, will succeed. Whatever the place of English, no doubt important in the economic development of land and people, a national malasian language is bound to be the proper vehicle of a united Filipino people. Hence a book like the present, which gives concrete form to this innate aspiration, and whatever its present imperfections, which definitely shapes the raw material along plausible, stable lines of development, is worthy of applause, study and support. It can only be recomended to the thoughtful study of friend and foe alike, in order that it may fulfil its mission of aiding in the solution of that important question, the future language of the Filipino people. May it meet with success, and that each successive edition be a vast improvement on the preceding one, is the earnest wish of

PAUL L. STANGL, B. S. M. Ph.