WARAYWARAY and BINISAYA I believe it is now high time for us to straighten out and correct two of our bothersome cultural labels and repossess the original ones. First, the label on our people: we had called ourselves WARAYWARAY (no accent in any syllable, and no hyphen). The nearest phenomenological equivalent of this word in English is BRINKMANSHIP – “n., the policy of pursuing a hazardous course of action to the brink of catastrophe” (New World Dictionary). This facet of the Waraywaray character, our tendency to be “brinkmen”, which had been there when the Spaniards came to our shores centuries ago, seems to be at the root of our notoriety as a people as perceived by other ethnic groups. There is nothing wrong with this label, when put to good and proper use. So let us take it up again. Imperial Manila spoofed our people’s cultural label through the 1954 movie and song, “Waray-Waray,” a word which the Tagalogs hyphenated and pronounced with accents on the two “-ray” syllables. It is time for us to dismiss or simply ignore the intentional decades-old spoof once and for all. We should also resist and dismiss the abbreviated level, WARAY (accented on the second syllable), with which we are now bombarded with increasing frequency over the radio. This word always meant “nothing” or “none” in our language, and we should leave it at that. We should no longer allow this word to be appropriated as label of our people. Next is the label of our language. It was never WARAY, or even WARAYWARAY. It was always called BINISAYA in published tracks – in the Makabenta dictionary, first published in 1979, and in the 1890s novena translations of Fr. Antonio Sanchez de la Rosa, OFM, who published the most extensive grammar (in 1887) and dictionaries (in 1886, 1895, and 1914) of our language more than a century ago. We must realize that the BINISAYA label for our language is now open for us to repossess. The Central Visayans, our nearest contender for the label for some time, have now decidedly called their language as CEBUANO or SUGBUANON. The first step to strengthening our self-identity as an ethnic group in Eastern Visayas is to straighten out, preferably through reinstatement, the original cultural labels on our people (WARAYWARAY) and on our language (BINISAYA), before these were gradually garbled and bastardized with modified jargon since the 1950s.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 14:31:25 +0000
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