What’s in a name?

A lot, it seems. In my case, my first name came from Nuestra Senora del Carmen whose feast fell on the day I was baptized.

That was the custom in those days but my parents changed the name to Carmencita without consulting me because I was still small… and cute. It was the name I used throughout my schoolyears until I found out that the name on my baptismal certificate was Carmen. From then on I used that name. Carmen.

My last name Navarro came from the Spanish government when they decided to make things easier for them to cope with the names of their subjects.

The decree was made by Spanish Governor General Narciso Claveria on Nov. 21, 1849. The decree was a systematic distribution of surnames and the implementation of the Spanish naming system for Filipinos, and contained in Catálogo alfabético de apellidos (“Alphabetical Catalogue of Surnames”) listing. There were other Filipinos who escaped the decree and retained their original names in Tagalog.

This is a personal travail but it shows how names are arbitrary and evolves for all kinds of reasons.

Now comes the debate on whether we should change our country’s name and how we are to be known. Those who are for it (and I am one among them) is to rekindle our pre-colonial past. Who were we before the Spaniards came? That is a study we have neglected because we have accepted ”Felipenas” and all that goes with it as subjects of a colonial power.

Others do not care about the issue because it was used as propaganda during Marcos’ time. But this is an issue that we should not take for granted with Duterte’s push for real independence. Other countries have done the same like Burma, a colonial name, and changed to Myanmar.

In the new museum one of the prominent displays is baybayin, a script we used even before the Spaniards came. I was in Paete recently and Noel Valdecantos who owns the Kesada Gallery told me we had an even earlier script still used in remote areas not touched by modernization.

It is believed that there were at least 16 different types of writing system present around the Philippines prior to our colonization. Baybayin is just one of them, which was said to be widely used among coastal groups such as the Tagalog, Bisaya, Iloko, Pangasinan, Bikol, and Pampanga around the 16th century. One theory is that “Baybayin” got its name from the word “baybay,”or seashore in Tagalog.

As for the word maharlika which is being proposed as a new name for the Philippines, it comes from the ancient language of India’s Sanskrit. The origin of the word is mahaddihka which denotes, “a man of wealth, knowledge or ability.” Today it is generally accepted to mean “nobility or aristocracy.” The venerable Tagalog dictionary of Leo James English states that “Ang mga harì at prinsipe ay kabilang sa mga maharlikâ (Kings and princes belong to the nobility).”

But still others differ and say that the word comes from the days when there really was a maharlika class in the Philippines, actually a lower class of nobility that served the datus, or chiefs, in times of war.

The maharlikas belonged to the “kings and princes” and not the other way around.

The maharlikas were just one rank in the ancient class system of the Tagalogs, which was a little more convoluted than our Western idea of aristocrats and commoners. This class system was the norm in other parts of the Philippines, too, though the names of the classes varied slightly.

This is what was learned and still taught in school as the ancient system of classes in the Philippines.

“First is the Maginoo – During the pre-colonial era, the maginoo class was the top of Tagalog society. Men and women of this class were generally referred to with the respectful title of Ginoo. Individually, the terms, Gat,meaning Lord, or Dayang, meaning Lady, preceded names as in, Gat Buka (now a town in Bulakan) and Dayang Angkatan who was mentioned in the Laguna Copperplate Inscription.

A panginoon was an especially wealthy maginoo who owned much property and valuable land. A panginoon was addressed with the shortened honorific, poon, which could be translated into English as milord or milady. Aba poon meant, “Greetings, milord/milady” and Oo, poon meant, “Yes, sir/ma’am.” Poon survives to this day as the term of respect, po.

A datu, or chief, was a maginoo who had followers and who ruled beyond his immediate household, over whole communities. This term was used in the Visayas as well as Luzon. A datu with power over a large area held the title Lakan or Rajah, a Hindu word brought from Malaysia. When the Spaniards arrived in the Manila area in 1570, there was a Banaw Lakan Dula in Tondo and an Ache Rajah (Ladyang) Matanda in Manila.

Timawa – The timawa class were free commoners of Luzon and the Visayas who could own their own land and who did not have to pay a regular tribute to a maginoo, though they would, from time to time, be obliged to work on a datu’s land and help in community projects and events. They were free to change their allegiance to another datu if they married into another community or if they decided to move.

As for maharlika they were members of the Tagalog warrior class They had the same rights and responsibilities as the timawa, but in times of war they were bound to serve their datu in battle. They had to arm themselves at their own expense, but they did get to keep the loot they won – or stole, depending on which side of the transaction you want to look at. Although they were partly related to the nobility, the maharlikas were technically less free than the timawas because they could not leave a datu’s service without first hosting a large public feast and paying the datu between 6 and 18 pesos in gold – a large sum in those days.” Sourced from Wikipedia.