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(More customer reviews)Seeing as this is only one of two grammars of Ilocano I've ever seen--the other one being in a university library 20 years ago that was somebody's doctoral dissertation printed on poor quality, smudgy paper--I was prepared to read it no matter how bad it was. The surprise was that this is a very well done grammar of Ilocano, along with separate phrase and word dictionaries that are quite extensive. The author has a Ph.D. in languages and linguistics himself from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and his interest and enthusiasm in the language comes through in this very well done book.
Ilocano belongs to the northern Marianas subfamily of the western Austronesian language group, and is spoken by about 10 million people, mostly on the northern Philippine island of Luzon. It has many interesting grammatical features, such as having an ergative-absolutive based case system, an extensive system of prefixes, infixes, and postfixes, as well as enclitic particles (i.e., word morphemes that can be attached to more than one category of words), and a three-way spatial system of demonstrative pronouns consisting of the proximal, distal, and medial, similar to Kapampangan, another language from Luzon. Like other Philippine languages, it is a predicate-initial language, meaning that verbs and adjectives usually occupy the initial position in a sentence. It makes extensive use of sound symbolism, having many onomatopoetic root words. In that sense it sounds similar to Swahili, which has something known as "onomatopoetic ideophones"--words which attempt to capture in sound the idea of the object, such as in the word, "trinka-trinka," (or tractor). I'm not sure if the two features in Ilocano and Swahili are really the same, but Swahili is the only other language I've read about that does something like this.
The first 101 pages of the book are devoted to the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Ilocano, with the remaining 165 pages being taken up by the phrase dictionary and the word dictionary. Throughout the grammar portion the author intersperses numerous vocabulary lists, so you can build your vocabulary as you go along. According to what I've read, this is the most extensive dictionary of Ilocano to date, and was compiled from a large number of sources. This is no doubt the best book on Ilocano out there, and one of the most scholarly as well as readable books and grammars on a more exotic language that I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot of them). :-)
Click Here to see more reviews about: Ilocano Dictionary and Grammar: Ilocano-English, English-Ilocano (Pali Language Texts: Philippines)
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