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.

44

ILOKO LITERATURE

and Fr. Cipriano Marcilla, who wrote the important work,
Estudio de los antiguos alfabetos filipinos (1895).
These works would have been very valuable as linguistic
studies if the authors had a better background of linguistics
and a better knowledge of comparative Austronesian or even
only of comparative Indonesian linguistics. The fact is that
they knew little, if anything, about the relation of the Austroilesian languages to one another, and the nature of their grammar. The result was the production of grammars and dictionaries of the different languages patterned after the Spanish
grammars and dictionaries, works which would make the Austronesian languages sisters to the languages of the Indo-European
family, in the same way as German is a sister to the Dutch
language. However, as pointed out before, these works are not
without value because they may serve as materials for a more
scientific study of the languages.
C. HISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY
Historical accounts about the Ilokos of the early days are
not as complete and as illuminating as those about the Tagalog
region and the Bisayan islands. The early Spanish chroniclers
evidently did not know much about the Ilokos. Francisco Colin
in his Labor Evangclica and Antonio de Morga in his Sucesos
de las Islas Filipinas, do not give as much space to the Ilokos as
they do to the Tagalog region. The only accounts of some
detail about the region were the reports of the early governors
to the King of Spain, but even these documents cannot be relied
upon very much. From the early days of the Spanish occupation to the latter part of the nineteenth century, when Isabelo
de los Reyes published his Historia de Ilocos, there appears to
have been no serious attempt at writing down events in the
Ilokos in the manner of a historical study.
There were, however, some works of a historical nature
worth mentioning here. Fr. Juan Bautista Arenos. a religious
writer, is believed to have composed, about the middle of the
eighteenth century, a Descripcion de tlas provincias de Ilocos.15
Fr. Pedro Vivar wrote a Relacion de los alzaxnientos de la ciudad de Vigan... en los aios 1762 y 1763. In the early part of
the nineteenth century, Fr. Jose Nieto wrote a Historia de los
alzamientos de Ilocos.'6 Sinibaldo de Mas' Informe sobre el
estado de las Islas Filipinas en 1842 contains some information
about the Ilokos. So do Jean Baptiste A$allat's Les Philippines
(1846), Paul P. de la Gironiere's Vingt annees aux Philippines,
Buzeta and Bravo's Diccionario geogrdfico, estadistico, historico
de las Islas Filipinas (1850), and a few other works.
15-Marin y Morales, V. Ensayo..., v. 2, p. 6.
16-Perez, E. I., Catdlogo bio-bibliogrdfico..., p. 368.