Mutya is a nounso you don't use it as a verb. By minumutyait means "to be held in high esteem"or to be adored.
niernierthanks for your input! You might be interested in the following papers -- if you have an interest in linguistics. David Gil studies PhilippineMalay and Indonesian dialects. He has put forth a theory that Tagalog does not possess internal syntactic categories like Noun and Verb. I've read several versions of his ideas and I find his arguments convincing.
NOTE: If you are not a linguistics personyou can safely skip through all the stuff that looks like mathematics. Gil makes his main points in plain English.
The main idea is that English and Eurocentric syntax have very little relation to Tagalog as spoken natively. The ideas of Noun and Verb are imposed. For me this has helped simplify my learning Tagalog because in practice it is very very alien to a native English speaker. The search for parallels between the behaviors of "Nouns" and "Verbs" in both languages just bends my head. In English we are proud that we can "verb any noun," but in Tagalog you can morph just about any stem to any "part of speech". Only linkers and "prepositions" seem exempt from this syntactic liquidity.
Gil argues that in reality Tagalog has only one base syntactic category. Almost all words (except linkersetc.) fit into this single category. One of his most convincing arguments (to me) is that even single bare words can be full stand-alone sentances in Tagalog. In English you can do this with a very limited set of words in limited contextsbut evidently in Tagalog you can do this with the vast majority of words (rootstemand derived). The meanings of these Tagalog "sentances" will vary because the meanings are often set by convention. There are always implied subjects and objects to complete the thought called forth by the stand-alone single-word "sentance". These one word sentances may not always sound like good Tagalogbut they don't sound "wrong" like they almost always do in English.
So for me I am learning Tagalog as a language of "phrases" that can be combined freely. Gil's vision of Tagalog structure makes it a more "poetic" language than English. If you have read dense descriptive English poetry you will understand what I mean. The language of such poems calls forth images and ideas and lets them all stand together in our imagination. The larger meaning of the poem is not syntactic or grammaticalbut almost purely associative. Gil implies that everyday Tagalog works similar to English associative poems. A Tagalog "Noun" might really mean something like "the X (in front of me) is a Y" -- already a full thought. Tagalog brings together full thoughts like this and the meaning of the full sentance comes more from the associations between the phrase-thought-words than from any syntactic order / relation between the words.
My 2 cents: English is a very analytical language -- it is good at taking thoughts apart into pieces and ordering the pieces. Tagalog seems much more like a "synthetic" language at heart -- it seems good at bringing meanings together into new wholes -- which is "synthesis," the opposite of analysis. A naive example from my own studies so far is the creation of color word in Tagalog. English has a huge vocabulary for specific shades of color. Tagalog borrows most of it's color words from Spanish. But Tagalog has the capacity to say "X color-of-Y" which is unnatural in English. You don't have a native word for orangebut you can say "the color of an orange" and use the compound word as a simple adjective. Instead of analytically naming the color of an orange like English doesTagalog brings together the ideas of "X" and "an orange" and uses the "color of" marker word (kulay-) to associate the color of the orange to the object X. Tagalog can easily say things like "the color of happiness" = kulay-masaya. In tagalog this is a natural extension of the color-word system. In English this is complex and sounds unnatural -- colors in everyday English are expected to be concretenot poetic. See:
Conversational Tagalog: a functional-situational approach By Teresita V. Ramos
http://books.google.com/books?id=p1...r+of"#v=onepage&q=tagalog "color of"&f=false
I hope that makes some sense to you...
As for mahal and minamahalthey are almost interchangeable in any context
In practice and usage"Minamahal kita" and "Mahal kita" both mean "I love you." It seems to me that the difference is that "Minamahal kita" is a more active statement.
This was my gut feeling after listening to 100s of hours of OPMeven though the Leo dictionary says minamahal is "more poetic." Artists seem to pick one or the other based on how it fits rhythmically into a song and it's lyrics. If they want to go beyond mahal they go straight to mahal na mahal.
UnfortunatelyI can't think of a way in English to demonstrate the difference.
I know the feeling!
I've been studying Tagalog on my own for maybe two months and I already sense that Tagalog can say **a lot** of things that cannot be said in English. The languages are *very* different. They focus on very different aspects of the world. For instance the Filipino awareness of interpersonal and family relations is deeply embedded in Tagalog grammar in a way that English cannot replicate. Tagalog is an inherently social language. English is very strong when dealing with objects and things outside a person. I will guess that Tagalog is stronger than English when dealing with things inside a person -- loob -- especially in a social context.
Perhaps this is why English has had such an easy time becoming the de facto world language. Tagalog is so tightly intertwined with Filipino social culture that it might be very difficult to transplant Tagalog to a different culture. On the other hand English has been coopted by every kind of culture. English seems to me to be fairly independent of it's originating culture... in the sense that you don't have to understand American or British culture to learn how to use English effectively. Even the wacky idioms can be learned rote and then used relatively well without needing to understand where they came from.
Maybe it's just because I'm new to itbut Tagalog seems like a language that cannot be effectively used without first understanding Filipino social culture.
well that's my article for this week!!
-brice
