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Nangorng?The long and the short of it

Pilipino Express Vol. 2 No. 13Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

July 1, 2006

There are two little words inthe Filipino language that causemore than their fair share of head-aches for writers and editors whostrive to be faithful to the balarila,the official grammar of the na-tional language. The words nangand ngare actually the same singleword but with many meanings the short ngis just an abbreviationof the longer nang. This promptsthe question, Whats the differ-ence and which one is correct for agiven situation?

The reason there are two spell-ings for this word was probably amatter of convenience in the be-ginning. The word nang/nghas somany uses in the Filipino languagethat it naturally occurs with greatfrequency in writing. Using anabbreviation saves time and ink.

In the days of the old baybayinalphabet, 500 years ago, nangwaswritten with just one character, n,

because the baybayin was incapa- ble of showing the whole wordnang. Writing just one character

for this word was not a great bur-den back then, but this characterwas the letter na, which just hap-

pens to be another very commonFilipino word. So although it waseasy for the writers, we can imag-ine the confusion among readerswho tried to figure out which ofthe multitude of possible meaningsthe writer had intended to say.

During the Spanish era, theWestern alphabet replaced thebaybayin script. Originally nangwas always spelled in full as can

be seen in the first book ever printed in the Philippines, the Doctrina Christiana of 1593.Later, various abbreviations arosefor this ubiquitous word. Most ofthe abbreviations used the Spanishtilde ~ mark to signify the Filipinongsound and to distinguish it fromthe sounds of either n org alone.By the end of the 1800s, it was

common to abbreviate nangas gorng, or with a single large tilde

above the pair of letters.With the revolution against

Spain, there was a revolution inTagalog spelling as well. The na-tional hero, himself, Dr. Jose Rizallaid out new ideas in his Studieson the Tagalog Language (1893)to simplify the often-awkwardconventions of Spanish spelling.

Rizal and other reformersadded some useful foreign lettersto the alphabet such as k and w,and he advocated the use of theletterg, alone with a tilde, to rep-

resent the sound of ng. He pro-posed that the long nangshould be

spelled, nag and the short ng asng.

The general public acceptedmost of these ideas immediately

but the long nag was not one of

them. The various versions of theshort ng, however, persisted wellinto the 1900s.

In 1940, Lope K. Santos wrotethe Balarila, the standard gram-mar for the national language. In ithe standardized the rules for usingthe short ng (without a tilde) and

the long nang, so that writerscould convey their ideas more precisely. But to this day most people are still confused aboutwhich one to use.

For many Filipino students,grammar class is a nightmare andit doesnt help that even the teach-ers are often confused by this littleword. Rules for using it are need-lessly complicated and can fill

pages in a textbook. It is no won-der that the rules are applied in-consistently throughout written

media, from informal blogs torespected newspapers even from

page to page within a single news-paper.

But there is a relatively easyway to remember the correct us-age of nang/ng without invokingthe dreaded B-word (Balarila).Just keep in mind that there areonly five situations where you

should write the longnang, and for everything else, just write theshortng.

The author, poet, critic and

national artist, Virgilio Almarioboiled all the rules down to thesefive cases in one of his articles onlanguage in a 1992 edition ofDi-

yaryo Filipino.Use the long nang in the fol-

lowing situations:1. When nangmeans the same

thing as noongUmaga nang barilin si Rizal.

Nang umagang iyon ay nagka-sakit si Pedro.

2. When nangmeans the samething as upangandpara

Sa mga Espanyol, dapat bar-ilin si Rizalnang matakot ang mga

Filipino.Dapat dalhin si Pedro sa ospi-

talnang magamot.3. When na and ng are com-

bined Sa mga Filipino, sobra nang

lupit ng mga Espanyol.Sobra nang hirap ang inabot

ni Pedro.4. When nang describes how

something is done or to what ex-tent

Binaril si Rizalnang patalikod.Namayat nang todo si Pedro

dahil sa sakit.5. When nangis a ligature that

joins a repeated word Barilin man nang barilin si

Rizal ay hindi siya mamamatay.Ginamot nang ginamot si Pe-

dro para gumaling.Thats all there is to it. Gram-

marians may spend an eternitysplitting hairs about the applica-tion of the long nangand short ng,

but the rest of us dont need toknow about all that. As long as weremember these five special casesfor the long nang, we can write theshort ng for everything else andforget the rest of the rules.

E-m ai l the autho r at :feedback@pilipino-express.comor visitwww.mts.net/~pmorrow

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