A calendar in Cebuano
By Jobers Bersales
Cebu Daily News
First Posted 08:17:00 11/11/2010
Jes Tirol of the University of Bohol has just published a seven-day, 12-month calendar in Cebuano. Dr. Erlinda Alburo, director of the USC Cebuano Studies Center, loaned it to me over the weekend because my curiosity was piqued.
I would have wanted to find out how he came about the terms used in his calendar, which he calls Tuigan (obviously derived from the Cebuano word for year, tuig), but this is basically a calendar and not a research paper and so I am left with wonderment. At least, Tirol provides some explanation on the meaning behind the term for each month at a boxed section of each page in his calendar.
Tirol has apparently adapted the Western or Gregorian calendar to lay out the days of the Tuigan, which starts the week on a Sunday (he calls it Ligid-ligid) and ends with Saturday (Hingut-hingot). The week days run this way: Monday is Tigburukad, Tuesday is Dumason, Wednesday is Dukot-dukot, Thursday is Baylu-baylo and Friday is Danghos. But he does not end there. He also uses the 12-month cycle of the Gregorian calendar that we are most familiar with.
The Tuigan's first seven months (Ulalong, Daghangkahoy, Daghangbulan, Kiling, Himaboyan, Kabay, Hidapdapon), are quite similar to those mentioned by the explorer Miguel de Loarca in his
Relacion de las Islas Filpinas, written in 1595 (i.e. Ulalen, Dagankahuy, Daganen Bulan, Elkilin, Inabuyan, Kaway and Irarapun). Loarca wrote that our ancestors observed a 12-month calendar but only seven of these were named. The rest were not because, according to him, our ancestors' method of reckoning was based on the seasonal planting of fields and the harvesting crops, which effectively covered only seven months.
How Loarca came to the conclusion that Cebuanos knew of a 12-month year akin to those in Europe remains unexplained. The historian William Henry Scott, writing in
Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society, gives caution to Loarca's terms in that they do not, according to him, appear in early Bisayan dictionaries as names of months but rather as specific events that happen in swidden (or kaingin) farming.
This fact is important because, as Scott notes further, before the introduction of the Western/Gregorian calendar, Bisayans reckoned the days not by looking at the sun but by observing the waxing and waning of the moon, a cycle of 29 and-a-half-days and 43 minutes to be exact (p. 122), which if spread into 12 cycles would only total to 354 days as against the modern 365-day calendar which is not based on the lunar cycle. Furthermore, our ancestors did not see tuig to mean a full year of 12 months but any recurring period of time, like the routine of field preparation, planting, weeding and eventually, harvesting.
So what are we to make of this adaptation of the Gregorian calendar into Cebuano? I believe that is what it simply is: an adaptation. I would like to think that the terms are borrowed from some historical sources somewhere that were developed during the Spanish period when the Gregorian calendar was already widely used inasmuch as it was an important referent to the Catholic paschal cycle. Incidentally, the final five months are these: Kangurulsol, Bagyu-bagyo, Panglot nga Dyutay and Panglot nga Dako. If you want to know what these terms mean in Cebuano, it's time to get hold of Jes Tirol's Tuigan.
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