Boie’nen (ISO 639–3 code UBL, Lewis 2009) is a suprasegmental, honorific and gender-absent language belonging to the major language classification Austronesian that encompasses this descendancy: Malayo-Polynesian > Philippine > Greater Central Philippines > Central Philippine > Bikol > Inland.
It is spoken in the town of Buhi, Camarines Sur Province, Philippines.
This dictionary focuses on Standard Old-Boie”nen words - these being spoken in and around the immediate vicinity of the town proper of Buhi. Various other Boie’nen dialects are spoken in Buhi communities mainly in the periphery of its mountainous-border communities with the Albay, Rinconada and Partido geo-political areas. However, even just seven kilometers from the town center heading towards Iriga City, barangay Sta Justina's dialect is distinclively Rinconada-language influenced.
No extensive scholarly investigation of the lexical phonology of the Buhi language have been found to date. Not surprisingly. This system of language analysis and classification even in the world's most popular languages are still scarce.
Producing orthographic print or simply put, writing of the boie'nen words will not do it justice just based on alphabetic segmentations.
Intonation, stress placement & rhythm need to be visibly integrated in any boie'nen orthography or phonetic inventory.
Take for example the word PO'LAW. This word takes on completely different meaning when put in the context of actual-word use as such:
Similar to Japanese, Boie'nen....
There is no gender-specific pronouns in Boie’nen just like in many other languages of the Philippines if not all. Traditionally and as may be gleaned from the mythology of the creation of our people, the first man and woman came into being simultaneously. Fully grown, Malakas and Maganda emerged from the inside of a bamboo culm pecked and split open by a mythical crow to populate the Philippine islands.
So the myth goes that very obviously too characteristically underpins the psycholinguistics of the Boie’nen language.
Boie’nen does not have any free-morpheme pronoun say for example like in the English language that means /he/ or /she/. Instead, the “sibling” noun that is equivalent to the Boie’nen /ipatngoed/ must be transformed in perhaps what I may term “phrasal pronoun”.
For example, if I want to say “She’s my sister.” it will translate to “Iya ipatngoed-kong-babayi.” or to refer to “brother” it will be transliterated as /Iya ipatngoed-kong-axaki./ He’s my male-sibling
In these cases [iya] is the pronoun translation of either “he” or “she”. The noun [ipatngoed] in this case is a free morpheme that for purposes of transforming it to the phrasal-pronoun [brother] must be bound to the possessive pronoun [ko/my] which by orthographic necessity must also be bound with the noun [axaki] as a adjective modifier of the neutral-noun [ipatngoed/sibling]. [ko] has to transform to [kong] in order to correctly bind it to both [ipatnoged] and [axaki]. The transformation of [ko] to [kong] (that are both bound morphemes) distinguishes between the complex words [ipatngoed-kong-axaki / brother] and /[ipatnoed-ko] axaki / my sibling is male]/.
[ipatngoed-kong-axaki] and similar complex-words will be treated as lexemes that will each make single entries in this dictionary. This particular case belongs to the lexeme [ipatnoed-nga-axaki / brother] together with [ipatnoed-mong-axaki], [ipatngoed-tang-axaki], [ipatngoed-nirang-axaki], [ipatngoed-niyang-axaki]
...(To be continued/ Al Claveria 240503)