Reconstructing the etymology of Philippine numerals’ protolanguage: a socio-phonemic approach
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The Philippines is home of a diversely tongued people who were already numerate and literates even before the Spanish colonization. These people communicated leveraging protolanguage which evolved through time via linguistic change into various languages and/or dialects. This paper attempts to partially reconstruct the mother language, with specific focus on the possible sounds of counting terms used by primitive Filipinos. Using the comparative-interpretive methods, it explored twelve number concepts in nine regional languages whose sound correspondences were analyzed to deduce the phonemics of the etymological terms. Findings reveal that there were indeterminate vowel sounds which evolved from the mother language of the first four and the sixth counting terms, while there was no problem with reconstructing the etymology of the fifth and the seventh to ninth counting lexical terms. Considering some of reconstructed lexical numerals, the origin of the explored protolanguage for hundred and thousand were likewise reconstructed.
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