The words Pigafetta wrote down in Cebu

In Cebu in 1521, Antonio Pigafetta made a list of more than 150 words of the language he heard around him, from the parts of the body to boats, weapons and the numbers one to ten. It is the earliest written record of the language of Cebu, and most of his words are still in use.

Reading his spelling

Pigafetta wrote the words as an Italian heard them. Read his c and ch as k (camat, kamot; chilei, kilay), his gh as g (dughan), his x and z as s (bughax, bugas; zlucha, suka), and his gu as w (gualu, walo). His double letters, as in matta and pitto, are Italian habits. A few of his words are Malay, the trading language that Magellan’s interpreter Enrique spoke, rather than the language of Cebu: raia for king, where the Cebuano word is hari, and mutiara for pearl, where it is mutya.

Words with a story

• tiam, “body”. The word he was given is tiyan, belly. As his 1906 translator suggested, he probably pointed at himself to ask for “body”, and was told the word for the part he was pointing at.
• bolan, “star”. Bulan is the moon. His other word for star, bunthun, is close to the right one, today’s bituon.
• balanghai, “their large boats”. The balangay, the plank boats of the islands, like the ancient ones dug up at Butuan. The word barangay, for a village or district, comes from it.
• tinapai, “rice cakes”. Today tinapay is bread. Spanish-era dictionaries already used it for wheat bread, and for the bread of the Mass.
• abaca, “the cloth with which they cover themselves”. Cloth woven from the fibre of the abacá, a relative of the banana. The word passed into Spanish and English, and the fibre became famous as Manila hemp.
• tahil, “weight”. Not weight in general but a particular weight: the tael, brought to the islands by Chinese traders.
• liogh, “throat”. Today liog means the neck; in 1906 his translator noted that it served for both.

The list, then and now

Here are 85 of his words, grouped by subject, with the meaning he gave and the Cebuano word used today. Where the meaning has changed, the new one is noted under it.

Pigafetta’s spellings and meanings are from James Alexander Robertson’s English translation of 1906, which matched them to the Visayan dictionaries of Juan Félix de la Encarnación (1885) and Antonio Sánchez de la Rosa (1895). Today’s words were checked against a current Cebuano dictionary. A few of his words, such as lac for man and main for good, cannot be matched with confidence and are left out. The fleet’s weeks in Cebu are told in the Cebu chapter; see also the study guide to Pigafetta in the Philippines and Limasawa or Butuan?