Maria Kristina S. Gallego
University of the Philippines, Diliman
The Wörter und Sachen technique (literally translated as words and things) regards existing lexical items in a language as environmentally salient, and more importantly, culturally significant in the community. Following this premise, this study seeks to trace the history and development of floral terms in the Philippines by looking into several languages belonging to different micro-groups within the Philippine language family tree. The existence (or perhaps non-existence) of local floral terms is indicative of the saliency of flora in the Philippines, not only environmentally, but culturally as well. Specifically, a plethora of local floral terms may point to the centrality of flora in indigenous practices and beliefs, whereas the apparent lack of native terminology (and correspondingly an overabundance of borrowed forms) would possibly point to a change in the function of such in the Philippine community.
(Presented in the 2014 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum: Flower Culture in Asia, 8-9 July 2014, Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Institute of Asian Studies, and Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University)