A brief survey of Iloko literature from the beginnings to its present development, with a bibliography of works pertaining to the Iloko people and their language, by Leopoldo Y. Yabes.

ILOKO LITERATURE

"The Visayan language is wistful, the tone is languid; the Ilocano is
brisk, clipped at the end; the Tagalog is poetic, lending itself readily to
declamation. The Ilocano is stripped by contractions, the Tagalog and
Visayan add euphonious syllables at the end of words. The Ilocano tone
is emphatic, short-waved, insistent; the Tagalog suggests; and the Visayan
creeps in-it cajoles and wheedles".
Cecilio Lopez, in a comparative study of Tagalog and Iloko,
has among other things found that:16 (a) Tagalog has an h
sound which is not found in Iloko; (b) both languages are agglutinative, almost non-inflectional; (c) in Iloko there is a
prevalence of double consonants, which is not found in Tagalog;
(d) both languages possess what might be called 'personal particles^; (e) there is no formal distinction of gender in both
languages; (f) practically any word, no matter what part of
speech, may be verbalized; (g) Tagalog and Iloko are two different languages instead of two sister tongues, with the same
trend of thought grown up from a common mother, Original
Indonesian; (h) Iloko is almost as good as uninfluenced by
Sanskrit, and if few isolated cases are found they are surely
due to the medium of Tagalog; (i) Iloko has less loan words
than Tagalog, hence is purer.
Until the coming of the Spaniards, when the Latin alphabet
was introduced, the Ilokos used an alphabet of their own.
"Vhether this alphabet was similar to or different from those
used by the Tagalogs and Bisayans, has been a mooted question
since the early days of the Spanish occupation-from the earliest writers like Colin, Chirino, Lopez, and Morga, through Mas,
Rizal, Marcilla, and Pardo de Tavera, to Ignacio Vll amor, Norberto Romualdez, and H. 0. Beyer. Villamor, who has published
the latest scholarly study on the subject (there are other selfstyled 'scholars' who of late have ventured opinions on the question, but their opinions are hardly worth anything because unscientific) says:7
"As far as our present knowledge goes, we may draw the conclusion
with sufficierdt ground, that neither the Visayans nor the Ilocanos had any
alphabet other than that of the Tagalogs; and that the Tagalog alphabet
was the one most generally used in the Islands, according to Father Lopez,
and was probably the only one used by all the Filipinos with slight changes,
of course, due to the ability and style of each individual writer...."
The ancient Philippine alphabet consisted of three vowelsa, i e, u o, and fourteen consonants-b, d, g, h, k, i, m, n, ng,
p, s, t, v, and y.'" Since the h sound is used rarely, if at all,
in Iloko, it may be said that the ancient Ilokos rarely made use
of h in their writings.
16-Comparison of Tagalog and Iloko. Hail;urg, 1928, pp. 184-187,
17-Villamor, Ignacio. La antigua escritura filipina. Manila,
University of Sto. Tomas Press, 1922, p. 28.
18-Ibid., p. 31.