Instructor John Michael De Pano presented his paper, “On the classification of sin:
A diachronic analysis of sin-related words across 15 Philippine languages,” at the 2024 Language, Communication and Culture (LCC) Grad Conference organized online by the University of Alberta last 15 August (PHT).
The Graduate Student Network of UAlberta’s Faculty of Arts‘ Language, Communication and Culture Signature Research Area holds the event annually, and “welcomes graduate student applicants from all over the world” working on linguistics, language education, and culture studies. The theme of this year’s conference is “Communication and Culture through a Global Lens.”
Below is the abstract of De Pano’s presentation:
On the Classification of Sin: A Diachronic Analysis of Sin-related Words across 15 Philippine Languages
Roman Catholicism, introduced to the Philippines in the early 16th century (Agoncillo, 1974) by its Spanish colonizers, is the largest religion in the archipelago. The Catholic notions of guilt (Sheldon, 2009) and sin (Deely, 2009) then, have been deeply ingrained in the country’s culture, as reflected by its people’s practices and languages. However, Tagalog (Tag.) words like kasalanan ‘sin,’ kamalian ‘wrongdoing,’ and atraso ‘unsettled offense,’ along with their shared histories in their equivalents in other Philippine languages, suggest a story that traces the origin of ‘sin’ through different pre-colonial societies, Austronesian beliefs, and inter-cultural contact.
This study, then, gathered cognates for these three words in 15 genetically related languages–representing most of the Philippine microgroups as presented in Blust (1991)–to provide a preliminary inquiry on the history of the terms through form and meaning. After the researcher’s analysis of sound changes via the comparative method, and consulting the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary (Blust & Trusell, 2010) for similar forms, the protoforms [ˈsaː.laʔ] ‘error’ from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and [ma.ˈliʔ] ‘wrong’ from Proto-Philippine have been reconstructed. Next, during the course of the study, language-specific notions of sin–both religious and secular–have also been discovered, with some ethnolinguistic groups internalizing sin as (i) inherited, (ii) clan-based, (iii) fungible/payable by money, or (iv) automatically forgiven. Borrowings from Spanish (Span.) have also been seen, such as Tag. atraso from Span. atraso ‘behind; delay’ which reveals a semantic change via pejoration. Interestingly, its possible doublet pair, Tag. atras, retains its Span. meaning.
The gathered data provided a better understanding of ‘sin’ through the intersection between colonial history and indigenous beliefs. The Philippine context, then, allows for culture-specific notions of it as it is heavily influenced by what Macaranas (2021) calls folk religiosity – the “reinterpretation” of the common or mandated religion into the folk level of different ethnolinguistic groups.
Keywords: ethnolinguistics, diachronic linguistics, language and religion, sin, semantics
For more information, you may visit the conference’s website at <https://langcultcom.arts.ualberta.ca/home/grad-conference>.
Published by UP Department of Linguistics
