THIS POST should keep Isinay Bird readers up to speed on how many Isinay words I have so far rediscovered and/or resurfaced for the Isinay dictionary that has helped me drive Alsheimer's away for the past few years.
As of this writing, the words total 16,388 all in all.
Not bad, considering that I only had a little over 2,000 when I started inputting and alphabetizing (in my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop) all sorts of Isinay words -- be they Hispanized, Ilocanized, Anglicized, or Tagalized.
I admit there are hundreds or even a few thousands more Isinay words out there waiting to be dug out, dusted, or resurfaced as the case may be. Be they of the Aritao-Dupax version or of the phonetically and slightly lexically different Bambang version, many of them are still laying dormant in the now fading memories of Isinay Podda speakers, particularly those who have learned to embrace the culture of the migrants but did so without giving up their marginalized language.
The table below shows the distribution (according to their first letters) of the words I have compiled as of today.
Among other things, the numbers should give you an idea which letters in the more-than-two-centuries-old and largely Spanish-influenced alphabet and orthography of the Isinay language are the most dominant and which once have very few members, insofar as the respective first letters of the words are concerned.
A – 1,124
|
B – 1,112
|
C – 37
|
D – 638
|
E – 191
|
G – 388
|
H – 60
|
I – 1,783
|
J – 23
|
K – 665
|
L – 504
|
M – 3,513
|
N – 1,840
|
O – 173
|
P – 2,209
|
R – 74
|
S – 1,052
|
T – 599
|
U – 272
|
V – 37
|
W – 56
|
Y – 38
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