Our Buhi Languge by Benjamin A. Claveria

|OUR BUHI LANGUAGE                                                                                                                     |          |
|by Benjamin A. Claveria                                                                                                               |         |
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|DON'T be scared away by the title of this piece. This is not something highbrow. This is not about linguistics. This was written for laymen, by|
|a layman, from a layman's point of view. So, please read on.                                                                                   |
|On February 20, 1996 my brother, Basting (the district supervisor, not the Alatco/Philtranco officer, not the doctor, and definitely not the   |
|judge for that's me), phoned me that a team from the UP Department of Lingustics had come to his house to interview his wife, Judith, about her|
|book, Boinen, Tao ag Sasabyen. But, of course, she was no longer available for an interview. St. Peter had called her to join his select group |
|six years before. So Basting had suggested to the team that they interview me instead. They should have interviewed Basting himself, but he     |
|passed the buck to me.                                                                                                                         |
|I went over to his house and met Prof. Ricardo Nolasco and his two assistants. They told me that they were engaged in a long-term project of   |
|preparing a dictionary of Philippine languages, some 400 of them. In their research on Buhinon, they had come across Judith's book at the       |
|Philippine National Library....