The Ingrate Farts on the Merciful

Say mangasi atoto'y lasi. -- Pangasinan proverb

Questions for the Pangasinan Song Verse

Gras Reyes provided the preceding post's Pangasinan song verse and these accompanying questions:

1)  Anto'y ngaran na kiew?  (What kind of tree?)

2)  Anto'y pirawat a imbaga?  (What is the speaker's hope?)

3)  Anto'y agawa?  Nanbunga?  Pigara?  (What happened?  Did the tree bear fruit?  How many?)

4)  Anto'y agawa ed bunga?  (What happened to the fruit?)

Pangasinan Oral Tradition

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas | 2005 | Maddox, Gregory | 700+ words | Copyright

Oral Traditions: Telling, Sharing

For the vast majority of human history, the only way people could transmit information has been by speaking, listening, and remembering. Indeed, the capacity for speech and the connected capacities for learning and remembering might be thought of as the defining elements of human consciousness, shared perhaps with other, now extinct, members of the hominid lineage but not shared with any other existing species. Through speech, humans did more than coordinate cooperation necessary for individual and group survival; they transmitted knowledge. They taught new generations techniques and ideas. They developed the ability to use abstract and theoretical thinking that allowed them to adapt to new circumstances. They created moral codes that regulated behavior between genders, between generations, between ranks, and between communities, and devised elaborate justifications for these codes. They speculated about the sublime question of the reason for the existence of it all and made up great cosmological explanations that usually placed humanity at the center of some sort of creation. For the vast majority of the at least 100,000 years that Homo sapiens has walked the earth (and perhaps longer if earlier hominid species had the power of speech), humans transmitted all of this orally. It would seem then that speaking and listening are the "natural" way humans learn.

The following song verse is from a Pangasinan oral tradition:

Palar ko la kumon
          The fate of the bulala tree/ I hope it's mine.

Palar nen bulala

Nansenga'y mataundos
          It grew a long branch/ And bore four fruits.

Nanbunga'y apatira

Naplag ed senged tu
          They fell beneath it./ And there they gathered them.

Diman dala inalila.