Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the
wall may be the tune in the minds of those eager to participate in St. Patrick’s festivities this coming Friday, but
the buzzword in Baco, Mindoro Oriental,
Philippines is banana’s and lots of them. This weekend, March 18-19, 2006 the area will celebrate the abundance of
banana by cooking loads of it and by hosting banana (saba) inspired street dancing competitions. Now that’s something
I’d like to see.
Today’s word is a Tagalog word used in
the Philippines:
kalye – street
Golets meaning let’s go and take it to the kalye or street for some banana eats. If you’re a
real jet-setter hit Ireland for a beer guzzling good time and then the Philippines for banana’s only if your tummy can
handle such excessive consumption of both in one three-day period.
Tagalog is one of the major languages in
Central Philippines and part of the Austronesian language family. For some reason I was surprised by the number of free
GOOD resources available to prospective Tagalog student. Wikipedia
has great background info on the lingo as well as related languages, Bikol, Hiligaynon, Waray-Waray, and Cebuano. Mongabay pretty much covers
all the really good, up and running links to sites that help teach Tagalog, after checking out a few I’ll do the favor
of pointing the best out. The first is an interactive
language and Filipino culture resource site tools are provided for both teachers and students. A pretty intense
breakdown on local slang and how it is derived can
be found here. Travel Lang has word and phrase
generator that spits out all the basic words you’d use while visiting.
Past Tagalog words: taon