ANCIENT PHILPPINES INDIANIZED KINGDOMS 300CE-1500CE

INDIANIZED KINGDOMS 300CE-1500CE

ndianized – Meaning to acquire or conform to some of the characteristics, culture, or usage of India.

In 1905 David P. Barrows wrote “A History of the Philippines”.  In it, he states, The Malayan languages contain also a considerable proportion of words borrowed from the Sanskrit, and in this the Tagálog, Bisayan, and Ilocano are included. Whether these words were passed along from one Malayan group to another, or whether they were introduced by the actual presence and power of the Hindu in this archipelago, may be fair ground for debate; but the case for the latter position has been so well and brilliantly put by Dr. Pardo de Taverathat his conclusions are here given in his own words. “The words which Tagálog borrowed,” he says, “are those which signify intellectual acts, moral conceptions, emotions, superstitions, names of deities, of planets, of numerals of high number, of botany, of war and its results and consequences, and finally of titles and dignities, some animals, instruments of industry, and the names of money.”

From the evidence of these works, Dr. Pardo argues for a period in the early history of the Filipinos, not merely of commercial intercourse, like that of the Chinese, but of Hindu political and social domination. “I do not believe,” he says, “and I base my opinion on the same words that I have brought together in this vocabulary, that the Hindus were here simply as merchants, but that they dominated different parts of the archipelago, where to-day are spoken the most cultured languages,–the Tagálog, the Visayan, the Pampanga, and the Ilocano; and that the higher culture of these languages comes precisely from the influence of the Hindu race over the Filipino.”