Buhi Online (BOL) is in the process of evaluating a dictionary software.

With this software BOL will consolidate extant Boienen-English dictionaries or similar compilations on the Boie language.  As a start BOL is using Professor Yukihiro Yamada’s writing guidelines of the Boie language as shown below.

Afterwards we will incorporate the works of Mrs. Judith Noble-Claveria and Dr. Dominga Jacome-Portugal.

The following dictionaries are BOL’s initial collection of Boienen words using Prof. Yamada’s work as the primary reference for these projects.

With the participation of Boienen volunteer contributors and reviewers, we hope to build on our Boie Language Dictionary.

This is a work in progress.

Boie’nen-English

English-Boie’nen

***

(­Reprinted from the Bulleting of the Faculty of Education, Kochi University No. 24 Series 1, 1972)

Click here to download dictionary (.pdf)

A Buhi Bikol Vocabulary

Yukihiro YAMADA

This is a list of basic words and sentences with English equivalents arranged according to semantic categories. The questionnaire which was used for collecting the data is that of Tsuchida’s.¹⁾

The data presented here was collected in Manila, 1966, through interviews and taperecordings. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Yaguel for his patience and the precious time which he donated to my linguistic research.

Essential Data: Name of language: Buhi Bikol; Location: Buhi, Camarines Sur; Informant: Mr. Valerio N. Yaguel; Birthplace of informant: Buhi, Camarines Sur; Date of birth: April 14, 1937; Period which informant spent at birthplace: 1937-1953; Father’s birthplace and his languages: Buhi, Camarines Sur- Buhi Bikol, Naga Bikol; Mother’s birthplace and her languages: Buhi, Camarines Sur-Buhi BikoL Naga Bikol; Language spoken in family of informant: Buhi Bikol; Languages which informant speaks fluently: Buhi Bikol, Naga Bikol, Tagalog, English.

Buhi is a municipality located at the souteast corner of the Province of Camarines Sur, approximately 470 kilometers southeast of Manila. Naga City is the provincial capital. The population of Buhi is 37,786 and the people who speak Tagalog is 38.1 per cent of the population according to 1960 Census of the Philippines. ²⁾

The phonemes are /p b t d k g ^‘ s x h m n h r l w y; i a o e/ and [j f ñ e] are observed in loanwords. Stops in the final position are mostly unreleased. The glottal fricative /h/ is so weakly pronounced in natural speech that one might suspect that Buhi Bikol lacks it. The /r/ is a trill. The high front vowel /i/ has an allophone of a lower variety in the final syllable, and the allophone occasionally appears in the penultima too. The [e] often appears in loanwords but tends to become /i/ when adapted to the language; /ai/ in some cases becomes [ei] or [e:]; /o/ is realized as [o] in the final syllable and [u] elsewhere; and 181 is the pepet vowel. The fricative [f], when naturalized, changes to /p/, and [n] to /ny/. No initial and final consonant clusters have been recorded except in loanwords.

The glottal stop /?/ is phonemic in the word-final and -medial as in the cases like adí? ‘king’ vs. adí ‘this’, tobó? ‘an edible fungus’ vs. tobó ’sugar cane’, and also notice the difference between the glottal constriction and its absence like to^?ód ‘to obey’ vs. toód ‘knee’, although no distinction between them is made in the vocabulary below.

The phoneme /x/ is the voiced velar-uvular fricative which occurs mostly contiguous to /a/ or /e/, and not to /i/. It turns up only once contiguous to /o/; once in the post- consonantal position as in te^?xaken ‘to split (of bamboo)’; twice in the pre-consonantal position as in maaxsem ’sour’; and twice in the word-final position as in mag^?abex ‘to weave’ The phoneme seems in most cases to be the reflex of the proto-Austronesian *l as baxey ‘house’ <*balaj. saxeg ‘floor’ <*saleR. etc.

Stress occurs usually on the final syllable. this being the case especially among disyllabic words. The stressed vowel tends to be longer in length in the open syllable.

Notes: 1. Shigeru Tsuchida. Questionnaire for Philippine Basic  Vocabulary I (1962), 27 p.

2. 1960 Census of the Philippines: Population and Housing (Camarines Sur).                                    Department of Commerce and Statistics (Manila, 1962)