Second of a series: Filipinisms part 1 - Making sense of some terms

One of the biggest difficulties I have noticed among my Filipino students is their tendency to transliterate from Tagalog to English.  Case in point, they would say "Kill the lights" because one would say "Patayin ang ilaw" in Tagalog. Patayin literally means "to kill".

And thus was born this thing called Filipinisms.

Encyclopedia.com defines Filipinsm as "A linguistic usage specific to or typical of the Philippines, such as Open the light Switch on the light, captain-ball basketball team captain, and viand any dish eaten with rice."

Mind you, these terms may be popularly used in the Philippines, but these are terms unique to the Philippines. So, please, try not to use them when talking to foreigners.

Filipinisms don't end with transliterations. The funnier aspect of this phenomenon is when Filipinos try to put Tagalog expressions into English, or using English terms in the Tagalog context. To many, these terms then become their go-to terms when speaking in English.

Some are terms that came about using popular logic (it may not be straight logic but it could make some sense).

In old Tagalog, there were no terms for toothpaste, picture-taking, photocopying and other activities related to new technology. As these innovations were introduced to Filipinos, what most would encounter would the commercial products related to them. Hence, the toothpaste got to be more popularly known as Colgate. picture-taking was Kodak-an and photocopying was Xerox. So it wasn't uncommon to hear of people going to the store and asking for "Colgate na Close-up" when wanting to buy a tube of Close-up toothpaste. So when they try to speak in English, they'd most likely say, "Can I have these papers xeroxed?"

Here are some other commercial terms used as common nouns:
Chicklet - chewing gum
Coke - soft drinks
(feel free to suggest more)

Have you ever wondered what the Tagalog is for "pedicab" (that 3-wheeled contraption that is a bike with a sidecar)? It's traysikad (pronounced as try-see-khud). The term is actually a mash-up of "tricycle" and sikad (to pedal). Since part of its origin is already an English term, many would use the new Tagalog term to refer to it in English and say, "Let's ride the trisikad here."

There are also the classic terms that were created based on real English terms. For example, people do "tuck in" shirts, right? So Filipinos coined tuck out to mean that one has "untucked" the said shirt.

In referring to periods of time, Filipinos like saying next next week instead of "the week after next". The number of "next"'s would reflect the number of weeks hence. So three weeks from now would be next next next week and so on. This is also applicable to months, years, decades, centuries, etc.

When referring to people, there the:
Oppositor - someone who opposes
Senatoriable/Presidentiable - someone who could be a senator/president
Tutee/Advisee - as opposed to tutor or adviser
Sewer - one who sews
(Feel free to add more here too.)

Amused yet?  There are more.  The next one will be about terms whose origins I am not sure of.