UNIQUELY FILIPINO
 by Matthew Sutherland

( Article received by email: Liza Velasco *Thank you!* )

The following is from a British journalist stationed in the Philippines.
His observations are so hilarious but true !!!

 "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches" -- (Proverbs
 22:1)

 WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of
 the first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has
 provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since.

 The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone
 here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have
 nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend, I
 am glad to say, to lose them.

 The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both
 girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as
 overbearingly cutesy for anyone over about five. Fifty-five-year-olds
 colleague put it. Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy
 Blue or Honey Boy would be beaten to death at school by pre-adolescent
 bullies, and never make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls
 with names like Babes, Lovely, Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech
 ech. Here, however, no one bats an eyelid. Then I noticed how many
 people have what I have come to call "door-bell names". These are nicknames that sound like -well, doorbells.
 There are millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of the
 more common. They can be, and frequently are, used in even more
 door-bell-like combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting,
 and so on. Even our newly appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping.
 None of these doorbell names exist where I come from, and hence sound
 unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear.
 Someone once told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was
 called Bing, replied, "because my brother is called Bong". Faultless
 logic. Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I come from "dong"
 is a slang word for well; perhaps "talong" is the best Tagalog equivalent.

 Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before
 encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or
 Ning-Ning. The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one:
 Leck-Leck. Such names are then frequently further refined by using the
 "squared" symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.

 Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming
 their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with
 the same letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy. More imaginative
 parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance or rhyme, as
 in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse the more
 kids there are-best to be born early or you could end up being a
 Baboy). Even better, parents can create whole families of, say,
 desserts (Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose,
 Daffodil, Tulip). The main advantage of such combinations is that they
 look great painted across your trunk if you're a cab driver. That's
 another thing I'd never seen before coming to Manila -- taxis with the driver's kids' names on the trunk.

 Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the
 phenomenon of the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar
 (for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for
 Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not). That's a bit like me
 being called something like "Engscowani" (for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland).
 Between you and me, I'm glad I'm not. And how could I forget to
 mention the fabulous concept of the randomly inserted letter 'h'.
 Quite what this device is supposed to achieve, I have not yet figured
 out, but I think it is designed to give a touch of class to an
 otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in creations like
 Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about Jhun-J hun (Jhun2)?

 How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with
 names like John Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where
 imagination and exoticism rule the world of names. Even the towns here
 have weird names; my favorite is the unbelievably named town of
 Sexmoan (ironically close to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else in the
 world could that really be true? Where else in the world could the
 head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin? Where else but the
 Philippines! Note: Philippines has a senator named Joker, and it is his legal name.

---