1

The Tasaday Language: A Key to Tasaday Prehistory*

1. Introduction
In this chapter I examine two bodies of linguistic evidence in order to de-
termine whether there was a systematic attempt to deceive investigators as to
the true identity of the Tasaday.1 First, I will look at the linguistic material ga-
thered from the Tasaday during the 1971-72 contacts by outsiders; second, at
the linguistic evidence that has become available since then. I will test the
claims of the ‘hoax’ proponents regarding the identity of the Tasaday against the
form of the Tasaday language.
New linguistic evidence now available in papers by Johnston (1992), Elkins
(1992), and Molony (1992; Molony with Tuan 1976) makes it possible to draw
conclusions regarding a possible hoax.2 I will address the following issues: the
nature of language versus dialect; the position of the Tasaday speech variety
vis-à-vis other Manobo speech varieties; implications for whether the Tasaday
are a hoax; and the extent to which the Tasaday may have been isolated from
other Manobo communities.

2. Critical Evaluation of the Data

The most prominent claim hoax proponents make regarding the true iden-
tity of the Tasaday is that they are Tboli people who are bilingual in Manobo.

*
Originally published in: The Tasaday language: A key to Tasaday prehistory. In The Tasa-
day controversy: Assessing the evidence, ed. by Thomas N. Headland, 180-193. American
Anthropological Association Special Publications, Scholarly Series No. 28. Washington,
D.C.: American Anthropological Association. (1992)
1
I make no apology for using the term Tasaday as an ethnonym for the group under discus-
sion, even though Iten (1989:19) claimed that “it would be quite an exception, if in the
Philippines an ethnic group would name itself after a mountain. Tribal names generally
mean ‘people, human being’ in their language”. This is quite without foundation. The use of
prominent landmarks is a much more common ethnonymic practice in the Philippines than
the use of the local word for ‘person’. Examples are the various communities that surround
Lake Lanao in Mindanao, including the Maranao, Magindanao, and the Iranon and, simi-
larly, the Bukidnon and Igorot ‘mountain people’, the Itneg, who live along the Tineg River
in Abra, Northern Luzon, the Matigsalug Manobo who live along the Salug River, and so on.
To my knowledge the only groups in the Philippines who use their word for ‘person’ as an
ethnonym are the Negritos of Northern Luzon, and in these cases the term refers only to
‘Negrito person’, not ‘person’ in general.
2
I wish to express my thanks to Richard Elkins and Clay Johnston for reviewing my com-
ments on Manobo lexical items and to Vivian Forsberg for providing me with Tboli
cognates for some of the Tasaday terms discussed.
 2

This position is taken by Duhaylungsod and Hyndman (1989),3 as well as by

Salazar, who presented genealogical evidence for such a scenario.4 The only
non-Tboli is said to have been Balayem (alias Tinda), a speaker of Blit Manobo.
I proceed on the assumption that if the Tasaday were really Tboli, they would
most likely speak Blit Manobo, characterized by one or more of the following
features: (1) the sporadic appearance of uniquely Tboli terms, (2) Tboli cog-
nates of Manobo terms, and (3) Manobo terms spoken with a Tboli accent
pattern. I further assume that if the hoax proponents are correct, the first two of
these features would probably result in some variation between the two sets of
terms (Tboli and Blit Manobo) as they were recorded by different investigators.
A number of problems arise when we try to interpret the linguistic data that
have become available. First, there is a fair amount of variability for some terms
among the lists; that is, different investigators have recorded different Tasaday
terms with the same meaning. Second, the researchers’ phonetic transcriptions
for even the same lexical item frequently do not match. While it is true that
even within a small linguistic community there is often variation in the pro-
nunciation of certain lexical items, it is also true that with any linguistic
fieldwork, unless one is a skilled phonetician, there are invariably errors of
recognition and transcription during the first stages of elicitation. Thus, the re-
searcher may introduce variation where none actually exists.5
Still another problem in interpreting the data is the lack of substantial in-
formation from certain speech varieties spoken in the immediate geographical
vicinity of the Tasaday. There are four fairly substantial unpublished dictiona-
ries of Southern Manobo languages, each prepared by a member of the Summer
Institute of Linguistics after many years of residence in the area. Two of these
dictionaries (Johnston 1968 and Errington and Errington 1981) are for the
Manobo spoken in Kalamansig, Cotabato (referred to hereafter as MboKC), some

3
Duhaylungsod and Hyndman (1989:13) state that apart from the man Balayem (‘the only
Manobo made into a Tasaday’), all other Tasaday are Tboli who regularly speak Manobo.
4
This evidence has been convincingly refuted by Amelia Rogel-Rara and Emmanuel Nabayra
(1989).
5
These errors are not necessarily eliminated if one already speaks a Philippine language. A
native speaker of Tagalog, for example, will have difficulty distinguishing sounds such as
schwa or geminate consonants, neither of which occurs in Tagalog. Knowledge of a closely
related language obviously reduces the margin of error, but may not eliminate it entirely if
the phonology is at all different from that to which one is accustomed.
 3

25 km west of the Tasaday caves. Another dictionary (DuBois 1988) is for the
Tagabawa Manobo spoken on the southern and southeastern slopes of Mt. Apo
in Davao del Sur. The fourth (DuBois n.d.) is for the Sarangani Manobo spoken
on the east coast of the Sarangani Peninsula and on the San Agustin Peninsula
of southern Mindanao. But all that is known of the Blit Manobo speech variety is
the brief list in the comparative lists of Fox (Elizalde with Fox 1971a), Llamzon
(1971b), Yen (1976a), and Molony (Molony with Tuan 1976).6 Nor is there an-
ything available from any of the other supposedly Manobo-speaking
communities close to the caves, such as Barrio Ned.
Also lacking is a substantial body of lexical material from those languages
generally referred to now as the Southern Mindanao languages. There is a vo-
cabulary of approximately 1,500 words of the Tboli (TBL) used in Sinolon, Alah
Valley (Forsberg and Lindquist 1955). There is also a 6,000 word lexicon of
Tiruray spoken in Cotabato Province, north of Kalamansig (Schlegel 1971). But
for the other Southern Mindanao languages, Koronadal Blaan and Sarangani
Blaan, there are only the word lists in the studies of Reid (1971) and, for Ubo, of
Yap (1977).

2.1 Fox’s Word List

A list of approximately 110 words was collected by anthropologist Robert
Fox on June 16 and 17, 1971, about two weeks after the first reported Tasaday
contact (Elizalde with Fox 1971a: Appendix I). That Elizalde included Fox in the
first group of scientists to visit the area suggests that Elizalde did not attempt to
exclude anyone who might be able to detect a Tasaday fraud. Fox, a highly
respected anthropologist and former director of the Philippine National Mu-
seum, had considerable ability and experience not only in archaeology and
ethnographic description but also in recording the languages of tribal peoples in
the Philippines.
In this instance, according to Nance (1975:21), elicitation was conducted
through a multiple translation process, from English to Tboli to Blit Manobo to
Tasaday. The equivalent forms in the intermediate languages were also in many

6
There has also been recent linguistic research by Cesar Hidalgo and Araceli Hidalgo among
the Tasaday and surrounding Manobo groups, but their data were not available to me
during the preparation of this chapter.
 4

cases recorded by Fox. Presumably these are the terms which the translators
Mai Tuan and Dad Tuan (for Kemato Tboli) and Igna (for Blit Manobo) used. It
was Fox who first recognized the apparent similarities between the speech of
the Tasaday and that of what he was told was Blit Manobo.
As we carefully examine each of the terms collected by Fox in the light of
what later researchers recorded and compare them with lexical material from
surrounding languages, we soon distinguish two sets of data that differ from
what we would expect. The first set are what might be called probable elicita-
tion errors, that is, misidentifications of what are probably the actual meanings
of terms. They include:7

1. ǝbaŋ ‘moon’ (recorded by Peralta and Elkins as sǝbaŋ; cf. MBOKC sǝbaŋ
‘to rise, of the moon’)
2. bukuwan ‘arm’ (lit., ‘place of the joint’)
3. dáoy ‘leaf’ (possibly a typographical error, recorded as daun by later
researchers)
4. kaməl ‘hand’ (but note Tagalog and Kapampangan kamal ‘a large
handful’, MBOKC kǝmǝl ‘finger, toe’, Western Bukidnon Manobo kamǝl
‘the binder ring on the handle of a bolo’, also kǝmǝr ‘finger, toe’).
5. lablab ‘wild pig’ (Western Bukidnon Manobo ‘male pig, either wild or
domestic’, TBL lǝblab ‘wild male pig’)
6. loós ‘teeth’ (MBOKC ‘gums’)
7. nafnaf ‘small bamboo mortar for betel’ (Sarangani Manobo and MBOKC
‘a kind of thin-walled bamboo’, TBL naf ‘type of bamboo from which
baskets are made’)
8. sǝladaŋ ‘deer’ (MBOKC ‘buck, male deer’, TBL slǝdǝŋ ‘male deer’)

There are also a number of unique items in this list, forms that appear to
have no cognates in related languages. Some were recorded only by Fox, others
by other researchers as well. They include the following:

1. kálǝl ‘smoke’
2. kamfí ‘G-string’

7
All forms are cited precisely as they occur in the source documents, except that è is replaced
by schwa [ə] and ng is replaced by [ŋ]. In the cited Tboli forms, e is replaced by schwa [ə]
while o represents [ɔ].
 5

3. laás ‘monitor lizard’ (but note MBOKC pǝlaǝs and Western Bukidnon
Manobo pǝlaas ‘monitor lizard’)
4. lágas ‘vulva’
5. liŋaw ‘tusk of wild pig’
6. nasagbuŋ ‘local group’
7. salumfíŋ ‘beard’
8. sǝtaláwmin ‘family’
9. túmas ‘dog’
10. bukíyaw ‘lightning’ (also recorded by Elkins)
11. búgǝd ‘bamboo container for Jew’s harp’ (also recorded by Molony)
12. iŋkúlan ‘river’ (also recorded by Llamzon)

How is one to account for these unusual forms? Fox was a competent and
careful scholar; he recorded what the translators told him and what he pre-
sumably thought he heard uttered by the Tasaday person who was being
queried. There is a remote possibility that one or more of the translators at-
tempted to make the language sound more exotic than they knew it really was,
but for such a scheme to succeed, the Tasaday themselves must have been in on
it. But I think either (or both) of two other explanations is far more likely.
The first alternative explanation is that the translation process was so new
to the Tasaday that they missed the point of many of the questions and gave
terms semantically unrelated to what was being asked. How did the translators
ask for terms for ‘local group’ and ‘family’, for example? It also seems unlikely
that a term for ‘vulva’ could have been successfully elicited so soon.
Unfamiliarity with the translation process would also account for at least
some of the ‘elicitation errors’ mentioned above. The use of terms such as di-
nagán ‘ear’ (lit., ‘hearing place’) instead of tǝliŋa, bulawan ‘arm’ (lit., ‘place of the
joint’) instead of bǝlad, and ʔighaʔa ‘eye’ (lit., ‘the thing that sees’, recorded by
Elkins) instead of matá, suggests that in these early elicitation sessions, the Ta-
saday had not yet grasped what it was that was being asked of them. It seems
that they were interested in describing the functions of the body parts being
pointed at, rather than the name they had for the part.
The second alternative explanation is that the terms given may in fact have
been genuine terms in the Tasaday language for the meanings that were sup-
 6

plied.8 This raises the interesting possibility that the different forms that were
recorded later for the same meanings were the result of language adaptation by
the Tasaday to the Blit Manobo with whom they were by then frequently inte-
racting. (The Blit Manobo language presumably would have had a higher status
than the earlier form of their own language.)9
One unique term in the Fox list suggests that this latter explanation may
have some validity—weél ‘water’. This term is apparently a reflex of Pro-
to-Philippine *waiR. The presence of a final l in the Tasaday word marks it
etymologically as a Southern Mindanao term (possibly a very early borrowing
into Tasaday). All Manobo languages, on the other hand, reflect *R as g. But in
none of the available word lists of the southern Mindanao languages does the
word appear in this full form weél. Either the initial consonant has been lost (as
in Koronadal Blaan ʔeʔel), or the first syllable has been lost (as in TBL ʔel). It is
highly unlikely that any of the Tboli people or other outsiders present during
the first language elicitation session would have been aware of the etymologi-
cally correct initial consonant in the form. The term recorded by later
researchers is invariably wayeg, showing the appropriate Manobo reflexes of
*waʔiR.
There is only one term in Fox’s list that seems to be shared only with Blit
Manobo and was not subsequently recorded by other researchers. It is balaŋús
‘nose’ (cf. Blit Manobo blǝŋús ‘nose’). This is hardly what one would expect if the
Tasaday were either Tboli poseurs who were all bilingual in Blit Manobo, or
were themselves native speakers of Blit Manobo.

2.2 Peralta’s Word List

A list of approximately 100 Tasaday terms were collected by Jesus Peralta
(1971), presently Chief Researcher at the Philippine National Museum, during

8
Such an explanation is available for terms such as finíngting ‘grandmother’ (cf. fènengtingan
‘ankle’ [Molony]), and lúlud ‘grandfather’ (cf. ‘knee’ [Molony]). The apparent inconsistency
in the meanings of these terms as recorded by Fox and Molony disappears when one knows
that body parts such as ‘knee’ and ‘ankle’ are used in many Philippine languages, including
Manobo languages, to refer to different generational levels.
9
This is apparently the position Hidalgo and Hidalgo have taken to explain the relatively
large percentage of unique forms occurring in the Tasaday data that they recently elicited.
 7

short visits on July 20 and 21, 1971 (Nance 1975:47).10 Peralta is an archaeo-
logist, not a linguist. The list available to me is an unpublished photocopy of
Peralta’s original fieldnotes, a series of words and phrases that appear to have
been jotted down often without semantic connection during the course of his
anthropological investigations. They do not appear to be the result of systematic
language elicitation, but simply a casual listing of overheard items. The terms
collected are generally the same as those gathered by other researchers, but
where the lists differ, it appears to be because of Peralta’s method of data col-
lection, and because of the fact that he was not a skilled phonetician. This
resulted in a number of incorrectly transcribed words as in these forms in which
Peralta used u to transcribe schwa: humiguf ‘sip’ (cf. himigǝf ‘sip’ recorded by
Molony); maidúb ‘sharp’ (probably a misidentification of maidǝb ‘pointed’ as
recorded by Molony, or maedáb ‘sharp’ as recorded by Llamzon; cf. MBOKC
mǝidǝb). There were also a number of forms whose meanings seem to have been
misidentified. They include:

1. bukal ‘leaf’ (recorded by Yen 1976:140 as a kind of plant)

2. hinaa ‘catch a person’ (recorded by later researchers as a form of the
verb haa, ‘to see’)
3. laha ‘penis’ (MBOKC ‘scrotum’, recorded as such by Molony)
4. nǝkabugsaŋ ‘sun’ (recorded by Llamzon as nakabugsáng ‘noon’ and by
Molony as nakǝbugsaŋ ‘perpendicular’; cf. MBOKC bugsaŋ ‘to pass over
the center of some expanse’, used with nonvolitive naka- to indicate the
noon position in the sky)
5. sulo-lisan ‘rooster’, possibly a reference to a cock’s spur (recorded by
Molony as sulu lisèn ‘toenail’; cf. MBOKC sulu ‘nail’, lisèn ‘leg, including
the foot’)
6. tudu ‘finger’ (cf. MBOKC todoʔ ‘directed toward’, tinuduʔ ‘point with the
finger, aim a weapon’. TBL tdok ‘finger’)

The following appear to be unique terms occurring in Peralta’s list, not

found in other languages. These may be true Tasaday forms, especially in those

10
The chronology here is questionable. Nance (1975:70) implies that Llamzon and Lynch’s
visit postdated the visit by the group that included Peralta; yet an unpublished typed copy
of Llamzon’s word list states that it was compiled on July 16-17, 1971, which would have
been several days prior to the date when Peralta visited the Tasaday.
 8

instances where other researchers also recorded the same forms, but they may
also have been misheard or misidentified forms.

1. igsakag ‘full’ (also recorded by Llamzon)

2. lǝtu ‘ant’
3. makǝtú ‘satisfied’ (recorded by Llamzon as makáttu ‘satisfied’)
4. nukitan ‘trail’ (recorded by Llamzon as nukitán ‘road’)11
5. lugilak ‘tongue’ (cf. TBL dilak ‘tongue’)

Forms which Peralta collected that have cognates in geographically distant

Philippine languages are as follows:

1. dad-duma ‘other(s)’. Although the term duma ‘other, companion,

spouse’ is found in other Manobo languages, the plural form recorded
by Peralta is not. It is unusual both in the vowel of the prefix and in the
geminate medical consonant. To my knowledge, it is only in Ilokano
that the word occurs in exactly this shape.
2. dafúg ‘lime’ (also recorded by Llamzon as such). Later researchers rec-
orded the expected Manobo term ʔafug. The term dafúg appears to be a
reflex of the Proto-Philippine *dapuR ‘ash’, which is not reflected in
any other Manobo language or in any of the Southern Mindanao group
of languages, but is found in various Bisayan languages such as Cebu-
ano. It is possible that Tasaday is the only Manobo language to retain a
reflex of the protoform.
3. daŋot ‘root’ (also recorded by Llamzon as dáŋut). To my knowledge this
term is found elsewhere only in Blit Manobo and in Ubo (which is not a
Manobo language). Either language could have been the source of this
term. It could have been introduced into Tasaday by Igna, or by one of
the other speakers of Blit Manobo during the language elicitation ses-
sions. Later researchers recorded the expected Manobo term dalid
‘root’.

11
Johnston (pers. comm.) notes, “The [MBOKC] verb root -ukit means ‘to pass
through/over/by’. I suspect the form [nukitan] should be inukitan, where in- -an combine to
mean ‘past- -site’, i.e., ‘site or way over which we passed’. The form ukitan is common for
‘road’ or ‘trail’.”
 9

4. ǝfak ‘frog’. Recorded by all other researchers as bakbak, the term ap-
pears to be a borrowing of the word for ‘frog’ found in the Southern
Mindanao languages. (Tiruray has ǝfak; TBL, Blaan, and Ubo have fak.)
It was also recorded by Molony for Blit Manobo. It could have been
introduced by Igna.
5. sakat ‘foot’. This term has no equivalents in any Manobo or Southern
Mindanao language. It is possibly another Maranao borrowing (Mara-
nao sakat ‘to step up’) with a misidentification of the meaning.
6. tuod ‘knee’. A cognate of this form appears only in Agusan Manobo tu-
hod. MBOKC tuǝd, and its cognates Dibabawon Manobo tuod, and TBL
tuhod mean ‘stump’; tuod ‘knee’ occurs elsewhere in Mindanao only in
Mansaka.

2.3 Llamzon’s Word List

Teodoro Llamzon compiled a Tasaday word list of about 200 items, some 65
of which are acknowledged as being recorded by Fox and used with his per-
mission (Llamzon 1971a, 1971b). Collected at about the same time as Peralta’s
list (see note 10), a number of the items which were either misidentified by
Peralta or otherwise appear to be unique in his list, also appear in Llamzon’s
list. These include the forms for ‘full’, ‘lime’, ‘root’, ‘satisfied’, and ‘trail’.
In his discussion of the data that he collected Llamzon (1971b:1) indicates
that he used the translation procedure previously also used by Fox (i.e., from
English or Tagalog, to Tboli, to Blit Manobo and then to Tasaday, and back
again). (Although he did not explicitly say so, this must also have been the route
via which Peralta got his data.) The same translators were probably used by
both Llamzon and Peralta, and it is possible that at least some of the proble-
matic forms that are shared by the two lists were introduced by the translation
process.
Llamzon’s list has its share of problems too. Possibly misidentified forms
include:
1. taliŋ ‘go’ (recorded by Molony as ‘wander, roam around’)
2. tuduk ‘mountain’ (MBOKC ‘mountain range’)

Unique forms include:

1. fǝnágǝn ‘drive away’

 10

2. loongǝn ‘fly’
3. segelǝ ‘stick (v.)’
4. tifaŋ ‘roof’

Again, I find nothing in this list that would suggest that the Tasaday were
actually Blit Manobo, or that they were Tboli who were bilingual in Blit Ma-
nobo. The irregular forms are all the result either of insufficient time to adjust
to the phonological structure or to the semantics of the language, and are pre-
cisely what one would expect given the nature of these early contacts and the
elicitation techniques used.

2.4 Elkins’s Word List

Richard Elkins, a linguist and Bible translator who had by 1972 lived with
various Manobo groups for many years, spoke Western Bukidnon Manobo, and
was a specialist in the historical development of the Manobo languages, spent
four days at the Tasaday caves in August 1972. During this period he elicited
some 263 Tasaday words (see Elkins 1972), choosing the items from the 372
words in my word list (Reid 1971).
Elkins’s list has a number of forms that are probably incorrectly identified,
some of which follow.12

1. bagá ‘liver’ (recorded by Molony as bagaʔ with the expected meaning

‘lungs’)
2. bunbun ‘roof’ (recorded by Molony as meaning ‘ceiling, e.g., of a cave’)
3. damǝs ‘rain’ (MBOKC ‘typhoon, rain, and wind of long duration’)
4. igtigbas ‘right (hand)’ (lit., ‘the one used for cutting’)
5. ighaʔa ‘eye’ (lit., ‘the thing used for seeing’)
6. nǝkǝpákaŋ ‘sun’, perhaps used metaphorically to refer to the heat of the
sun (cf. MBOKC pakaŋ ‘to pound, to split by pounding’)

12
Elkins used an orthography which approximates that used by Johnston. p is used to
represent the bilabial fricative since there is no contrasting bilabial stop. Other researchers
represented the sound as f. In addition, Elkins used e to represent the central vowel [].
Molony was consistent in using  for this sound (transcribed here by me as è), but other
researchers, including Peralta and Llamzon represented it inconsistently, sometimes with ,
and sometimes with a. (It should be noted that there may have been other incorrectly
identified terms in Elkins’s list. Johnston 1989 cites some that he feels are incorrect; also
see Johnston 1992.)
 11

7. pǝdú ‘heart’ (recorded by Molony as fǝdu ‘mind, feeling’, cf. MBOKC

pǝdu ‘gall bladder, the seat of the emotions, mind, thought’)
There are a few unexplainable forms in the Elkins list (as in the lists of ear-
lier researchers). These include:
1. lipad ‘to fly’. There are phonetically similar forms in several other Phi-
lippine languages (e.g., lupad in Kalagan and Tausug, and lǝpad in
Botolan Sambal and Mamanwa), but nothing similar is recorded for
Manobo or Southern Mindanao languages.
2. paway ‘cloud’

Elkins records one form which, because of its final vowel, is probably Tboli
in origin, kǝlipot ‘forget’. (TBL has klifot ‘forget’, Western Bukidnon Manobo,
Maranao, Ilokano, and others have lipat.) Molony records the expected Manobo
form kǝlifoŋ ‘forget’, which Tasaday shared with Cotabato Manobo.

2.5 Language versus dialect

In discussing the linguistic affiliation of the Tasaday, we must understand
how the terms language and dialect are being used. Considerable confusion has
surrounded this matter, primarily because some of those who have written on
the Tasaday lack linguistic sophistication. From a linguist’s point of view, the
term dialect refers to a speech variety that is distinguished from other mutually
intelligible dialects by restricted lexical, phonological, or syntactic features
(whether restricted geographically or socially). So everyone (the Tasaday in-
cluded) speaks a language and, depending on the features that are commonly
used, a specific dialect of that language.
A variety of techniques have been used by linguists to measure degree of
mutual intelligibility in order to draw language boundaries between more dis-
tantly related dialects and, conversely, to unite as one language those that are
more closely related. Presumably then, when the question arises as to whether
the Tasaday have an “independent language,” the issue is whether or not the
Tasaday speech variety is mutually intelligible with some other speech variety.
The answer to this will depend upon the measure that the linguist uses to de-
termine mutual intelligibility. There is no unequivocally correct answer to such
a question.
 12

Questions of whether Tasaday speak an “older” language than some other

group are meaningless, since all languages change from one generation to the
next and are therefore only as old as the generation that speaks them. Neither is
it appropriate to speak of Tasaday as being an “offshoot” of some other pre-
sently spoken language, since such terminology implies that Tasaday is
somehow younger than the dialect to which it is related. Such ways of thinking
and talking about language (and culture) reflect the erroneous view that tradi-
tional peoples, particularly more isolated peoples, are purer or more pristine or
less changed from some earlier state than “modern” groups, or looking at it
from the opposite side, that the dialect of an out-migrating group is a corrupted
version of the groups from which they split. This is not to say that peripheral or
isolated areas do not tend to be more lexically conservative than central areas;
they do, but they cannot be considered to be “older” than non-relic areas.

2.6 The position of the Tasaday speech variety vis-à-vis other Manobo
speech varieties
Johnston’s review of Elkins’s word list and of the tape sent to him by Mo-
lony provides clear evidence that the Tasaday dialect is probably more closely
related to the Manobo speech spoken in Kalamansig (MBOKC) than to other
Manobo dialects.13 There is no question that they are mutually intelligible by
anyone’s measure and therefore constitute close regional dialects of a language
that has been called Cotabato Manobo. The number of linguistic features that
Tasaday appears to uniquely share with the Kalamansig dialect of Manobo
(MBOKC) establishes the relationship between them.14

13
The linguistic nature of the so-called Sanduka and the “Tao Mloy” (Duhaylungsod and
Hyndman 1989:12) is not relevant to determining the linguistic affiliation of the Tasaday.
The former groups may well be Tboli. We know already that this is a Tboli area, but until
the Hidalgos make their linguistic data available one should reserve judgment on even this
fact. And to claim that the area was the Tboli “homeland” is to lay claim to a knowledge of
prehistory that is simply not available either to the Tboli or to anyone else.
14
Salazar suggests that Malay may be “closer” to Tasaday than even Blit Manobo is, because
his count of cognates between the languages showed Tasaday sharing 40% of its cognates
with Malay, but only 28% with Blit Manobo. This is not good linguistics. Subgrouping
cannot be based on the number of shared cognates, but rather on the distribution of shared
innovations in phonology, morphology, and syntax, as well as lexicon. Most of the items
listed by Salazar have good Austronesian etymologies and are shared retentions in the two
languages. This tells us only that both languages are Austronesian, nothing more. Neither
has Salazar made any attempt to distinguish true cognates from similar forms that are the
result of borrowing.
 13

Still problematic is the relationship between this language and that spoken
in Blit, from whence, according to some, the Tasaday “poseurs” were recruited.
From present evidence, which as I mentioned above is minimal because of the
paucity of Blit Manobo language data, it would seem that Blit is either a sepa-
rate language (judging from the comments of Blit Manobo people who claimed
to be unable to communicate with the Tasaday),15 or it is a more distantly re-
lated dialect of Cotabato Manobo (i.e., of MBOKC).
As has been pointed out by others, the Tasaday language is more closely
related to geographically remote regional dialects than to the dialects that are
geographically closer. The actual degree of relationship between Tasaday and
Kalamansig Cotabato Manobo (MBOKC) is partially contingent on whether the
terms in the Elkins list that Johnston claims were elicitation errors were in fact
errors or whether they have undergone semantic change as is claimed by Elkins.
That some of Elkins’s data is in error is certainly possible. However, several of
the forms were also recorded by Molony with the same meanings as those pro-
vided by Elkins, and these are almost certainly the result of semantic change.
These (given with Molony’s fuller meanings) include: kǝladayan ‘deep, e.g., of a
river or valley’; bǝlagkál, ‘floor, e.g., of a cave or forest’; ǝgkǝbǝŋǝs ‘lonely’;
bunbun ‘ceiling (e.g., of a cave)’ (Elkins had ‘roof’); habhab ‘to smell’; ǝgbuǝlǝn ‘to
have thirst’. Similarly, Elkins’s mǝbágaʔ ‘boil (infection)’ appears in Mansaka as
bagaʔ with the same narrowed meaning. Ultimately whether Johnston or Elkins
is correct makes little difference: Tasaday and MBOKC would still be very closely
related to each other, and more closely related to each other than either is to
Blit Manobo.

2.7 Implications for whether the Tasaday are a hoax

I believe that any linguist reviewing the available Tasaday data could only
conclude that the Tasaday language has undergone a differentiation from any
other Manobo speech variety. This is not to say that the Tasaday speak a dif-
ferent language from their neighbors, but there certainly appears to be at least a

15
According to Nance (1975:12), “Dudim told Mai he couldn’t talk to these people, he didn’t
know their language and could do no good here....Igna had difficulty understanding even
half of the words he uttered”.
 14

dialectal difference.16 There are considerable differences, for example, between

the ethno-botanical terms collected by Yen and their Blit equivalents. Whether
the differences are as great with equivalent terms used in other Cotabato Ma-
nobo dialects has, to my knowledge, never been examined. There are also a
number of unique lexical items from the basic vocabulary that are not shared by
Manobo or by Southern Mindanao languages. Some of these terms have cog-
nates in other Philippine subgroups and could have been introduced by
translators bilingual in one of these languages, but at least one term (weél ‘wa-
ter’) cannot be so explained. There is no evidence that the speakers of the
language were bilingual in Tboli or in any other language.
Johnston (pers. comm.) also claims that the lexical accent in the Tasaday
tapes to which he has listened indicates that the speakers were probably not
Tboli speakers who were speaking a Manobo dialect as a second language. The
accent patterns of Tboli are clearly distinct from Manobo accent patterns, and
the Tboli accent patterns would probably have been carried over into the pro-
nunciation of Manobo words had these people been Tboli.

2.8 Extent to which the Tasaday may have been isolated from other
Manobo communities
All languages change, but the changes tend to affect different language
subsystems at relatively different speeds. Following geographical separation and
subsequent reduced intercommunication, two kinds of change soon become
apparent. One is lexical. Some words, although unchanged in pronunciation,
come to be used in slightly different ways than in the home community. Such
semantic shifts are often motivated by the different environment in which the
break-away community is living. (The changed environment also stimulates the
development of unique lexical items, words which would not exist in the orig-
inal home community.) The second kind of change that is quickly apparent is a
shift in intonation.
Other types of change take place over much longer periods. For example,
systematic shifts in the pronunciation of the segmental phonemes take longer.

16
This despite Iten’s statement about scientists “who, even now, claim that the Tasaday speak
a separate language, a thesis supported by questionable scientific standards” (Iten 1992).
Only Olofson, an anthropologist, is making such claims today (Olofson 1989:6).
 15

So do changes in the functional morphology, affecting pronouns, demonstra-

tives, verbal morphology, and so on. Discernible changes in the syntax typically
take longer still.
The types of differences that Johnston notes between MBOKC and Tasaday
suggest a relatively short period of separation and subsequent differentiation.
For all intents and purposes the two dialects are still mutually intelligible. There
appear to be no systematic sound changes that distinguish Tasaday from
MBOKC. Phonologically (apart from intonation) they appear to be identical.
There are a few morphological differences between Tasaday and MBOKC (out-
lined by Johnston), but whether these morphological features are shared by Blit
Manobo is unknown. Neither, as far as I can tell, has there been any syntactic
change.
Early studies such as Llamzon’s placed too much value on glottochronology
to measure the period of time that the Tasaday may have been separated from
their neighbors. This method assumes that core vocabulary is replaced at a
constant rate in all languages; therefore, the period of differentiation is mea-
surable. It does not measure isolation. But because everybody believed the
Tasaday’s claims that they had not had contact with outsiders (apart from Daf-
al), it was assumed that Llamzon’s calculation of 571 to 755 years of separation
reflected the length of their isolation in the rain forest.
It should be remembered moreover that glottochronology has long since
been discredited as a tool for dating periods of linguistic differentiation,17 al-
though lexicostatistics continues to be used by some as a rough measure of the

17
Despite Olofson’s (1989:6) claim that “[glottochronology] is the most modern we have for
reconstructing the evolution of languages,” no reputable linguist ever used glottochronol-
ogy to replace the comparative method that has been used for over a hundred years to
establish genetic relationships between languages. Even Dyen, who is one of the few re-
maining proponents of lexicostatistics as a linguistic tool for subgrouping, looks to
traditional use of exclusively shared innovations for qualitative evidence to confirm or
disprove subgrouping hypotheses first established using quantitative evidence (Dyen 1970).
Olofson’s attempts to respond to some of the uninformed linguistic comments that have
appeared in the literature is laudable, but in so doing he has misspoken himself in several
places, including his reference to Proto-Manobo as an ‘extinct’ language. Extinct languages
leave no daughter languages. Proto-languages are no more extinct than the languages of
our grandparents. They are alive and well in the languages of succeeding generations.
 16

degree of relationship shared by genetically related languages. In fact, the basic

assumptions upon which the method relied have been shown to be untenable.18
Can we say anything at all then about the possible period of time since the
Tasaday group moved away from their closest linguistic neighbors? Certainly it
was not of the order of several hundreds of years. There is insufficient linguistic
differentiation to allow for such a period of time. I think it more likely that
differentiation has been taking place for no more than five or six generations at
the most, perhaps for 100-150 years.19 Is such a short period of time sufficient to
lose the knowledge of agriculture?20 Given the high elevation, the mountainous
terrain hostile to agriculture, and an absence of metal tools to clear the terrain
and prepare the soil,21 the loss of agriculture could have taken place in a very
short period of time, even within a single generation. In this case, terminology
associated with it would quickly have been lost also. A single generation would
have been sufficient.22
Salazar (1988) has discussed several Tasaday terms in an attempt to show
that the Tasaday were not unfamiliar with houses. However, his explanation of
the Tasaday word lawi ‘lean-to, shed, shelter in forest’ (Molony) as a metathe-
sized form of Maranao and Magindanao walay ‘house’, is simply not right. The
form (with a final glottal stop) is found in MBOKC lawiʔ ‘lean-to, any temporary
shelter without floor’, and is probably a reflex of Proto-Philippine (PPH) *lawiR

18
See Blust (1983) for a review of literature and a convincing study that shows considerable
variation in retention rate, at least among the Austronesian languages, of which Tasaday is
a member.
19
In this I agree with Salazar: “If separation or isolation there was, it took place quite recently
—not more than six or seven generations ago. And it did not involve a great number”
(1971:36)
20
According to Llamzon (1971b:8), Frank Lynch proposed that the Tasaday probably never
had agriculture, since “571-755 years…would hardly have been time enough for the Ta-
saday to lose this knowledge.”
21
They probably had metal tools when they first moved away from their earlier homes, but
given the environment they were in, such tools could not have lasted more than a genera-
tion or two, at the most. Without access to a new supply, the development of a stone-tool
technology would have been the most reasonable adaptive strategy. That this technology
was relatively primitive is further evidence that it was a relatively young technology.
22
It has been only around 20 years since New Zealand switched to decimal currency from its
earlier pounds, shillings, and pence. Nevertheless, there are probably very few young New
Zealanders today who could, without referring to a dictionary, say what /heypni/ (half-
penny), /kwd/ (quid, one pound), or other such formerly common terms used to mean.
 17

‘hut’, with irregular development of the final consonant. (Compare Maranao

laoig ‘hovel, hut’ [McKaughan and Macaraya 1967:203] apparently borrowed
into Tboli as TBL lowig ‘field shelter’.) Similarly, his account of the development
of Tasaday tifaŋ ‘roof’ (Llamzon) as being related to Bikol atop, Tagalog atip,
Ivatan atǝp (PPH *qatǝp ‘roof’) by metathesis, runs into problems since there is
no Manobo language with an i reflex of PPH *ǝ, and no source for the final velar
nasal.
But even if Salazar’s etymologies were correct, these do not tell anything
about whether or not the Tasaday were cave dwellers, or how long they might
have spent isolated from other communities.

3. Conclusion
In conclusion, then, I argue that there is nothing in the linguistic data to
suggest that the early researchers on the Tasaday were participants in, or vic-
tims of, a conspiracy to deceive the general public as to the true identity of the
subjects of their research. To the contrary, the evidence clearly indicated that
Tasaday respondents were linguistically unsophisticated and unfamiliar with
the translation process. The data collected represent a dialect of Manobo that is
not spoken elsewhere, but is closely related to that known as Cotabato Manobo.
Furthermore, from the linguistic evidence presently available, I conclude that
the Tasaday may have been living in near isolation from other groups, as they
have consistently asserted, but that the isolation may have lasted for only a few
generations, possibly no more than 150 years. Otherwise, greater differences
would be apparent between the Tasaday speech variety and that of its closest
relatives.

4. Postscript
After this chapter had been submitted for publication, I had the opportunity
to do fieldwork with the Tasaday for a period of eight days (March 7-14, 1990)
in Surallah, Allah Valley, Cotabato. A group of Tasaday, including Dul and her
husband Udelen and four of their children, Maman, Okon, Klohonon, and Fakel;
Lobo and his second wife, Funding; Natek and Dego (sons of Bilangan and Etut);
and Adug, had temporarily left the Tasaday Reserve and were staying at the
house of Mayor Mai Tuan in Surallah. Also present at various times during my
 18

visit were several speakers of Blit Manobo, including Datù Mafalo Dudim and
his sister Bol; Igna Kilam, a speaker of Sdaf Manobo; Juanito Balimbang, a
speaker of Cotabato Manobo; and a considerable number of speakers of Tboli.
Lexical and syntactic data were gathered for each of the Manobo dialects for
which speakers were available, and I have begun comparative studies on the
material. The main Tasaday assistants were Dul and Lobo.
Preliminary analysis confirms that the language spoken by the Tasaday is in
no way similar to Tboli and is not mutually intelligible with it. It is clearly a
Manobo language and is perhaps less similar to Cotabato Manobo than has been
described by Johnston (1989 and this volume). Some of the lexical distinctive-
ness described by Hidalgo and Hidalgo (1989) has been confirmed, but their
characterization of the language as a pidgin form of Manobo is not confirmed.
The language has undergone certain syntactic changes which distinguish it from
Cotabato Manobo and from Blit Manobo. Evidence for these statements will be
presented in a forthcoming paper.

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