Thursday, May 08, 2008

Melee - Built To Last

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Chuck,

Didn't know you like this song. It's one of my recent favorites too :-)

cvj said...

Hi Pimpuk, yeah cool song. I just heard it over the car radio shortly before posting.

Anonymous said...

Eden in the East, the Lost Continent of Southeast Asia by Oppenheimer posits that Austronesians had their native homeland in Sundaland-which is located in the South China Sea area bordered by Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. The melting of ice after the last ice age drowned the continent, and pushed its people out of Sundaland into the Philippines, Oceania, even as far as Madagascar. Of course there was a lot of inter-migration since as well, which makes it harder for linguists to reconstruct the geographical origin of the proto-language.

Kapampangans used to populate the areas around Tondo, Nueva Ecija, Bulacan, and Bataan. The encroachment of Tagalogs is a recent phenomena (due to Tagalog speaking people's population boom). The policy of Filipino (Tagalog) as national language has converted a lot of native Kapampangan speakers as well.

Tagalogs were sent by Bornean Datus to represent Borneo's trade interests with mainland Chinese merchants in the all important port of Manila. In the beginning, Laguna and Batangas was their heartland, because that's as far as they can push (otherwise they'd meet the bolos of Kapampangan tribes if they pushed harder into Manila!) as Kapampangans had control of the Manila (Rajah Soliman, Lakan Dula and Matanda were Kapampangan). Of course, it should be remembered that Tagalogs and Kapampangans had friendly relations due to diplomacy by familial intermarriages of the aristocracy.