The Islands to the West
How are Philippine towns named?

Chinese annals from the Ming Dynasty referred to the islands south of China as Ma-i. Specifically the name referred to Mindoro but more generally to the Philippine archipelago. Before the advent of Spanish explorers, the group of islands located between 9 and 18 degrees latitude in the South China Sea had no common identity. It was Ferdinand Magellan who gave that group of islands the name "Islas de San Lazaro" because he arrived on Philippine shores on the feast of St. Lazarus.

Contemporary Philippine historians hesitate labeling Magellan’s arrival in the Philippines as "discovery" because Magellan had earlier been to the Moluccas and must have had an inkling of islands north. Carlos Quirino suggests that the slave whom Magellan bought in the Moluccas and named Enrique was, in fact, a Cebuano. Enrique served as an able interpreter for Magellan’s expedition when it had to deal with the inhabitants of Cebu or Sugbu as the inhabitants called their land. William Henry Scott suggests that because of his previous trips to the Spice Islands, Magellan did know where the Philippines was and this explains the itinerary he took. Magellan was hell bent at reaching the Philippines not so much to discover it but to claim governorship of the islands. However, to do so he had to carve a westerly route not trod by the Portuguese who blocked the easterly route.

Because it was approached from the west, subsequent Spanish chroniclers described Magellan’s archipelago simply as "las islas del poniente" the islands to the west, emphasizing the westerly route to Asia that Spain claimed as its own.

However, the name that stuck was Felipinas. Wishing to honor then young King Philip II, the expedition of Ruy de Villalobos named the islands after the ascendant monarch. Philip II had a special predilection for the islands and in 1565 sent the first batch of colonizers, under Miguel Lopez de Legazpi to the archipelago, despite the initial assessment of his council that the Philippines would be a fiscal burden.

Although the Spaniards had named the islands as one political unity, the inhabitants of the islands, however, did not see themselves forming one political entity but rather as distinct cultural groups with their own languages and traditional territories of land and sea. Islands and topographical features of islands were named but not the country. It would take many more centuries before a sense of nationhood was felt by the indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines.

Philippine place names are a variegated melange of ancient names from the Philippine vernaculars, Spanish place names, names of foreign and local dignitaries, even fanciful and imagined names from folklore and popular myth.

Popular tales say that place names came about because of miscommunication between the indigenous peoples and the foreign colonizers. One day it is said, a group Spanish soldiers was traveling through southern Panay Island. They came across a native and asked "Que es el nombre de este pueblo?" Thinking that the foreigners were asking the time of day, the natives replied "Ugtong adlaw," that is "Noon time." Hence the town came to be known as Oton. And again, or so it is claimed, that Davao comes from daba-daba, referring to a burning flame that the Spaniard encountered; Pasig comes from bagsic, referring to the swift currents of the Pasig river; and that Calamba in Laguna comes from kalan, referring to the native stove.

These etiological or origin stories have been enshrined in the "Historical Papers" kept in the National Library. These papers were compilations of oral stories about each town collected by public school teachers under the initiative of the Department of Education. The collection was intend to make up for the loss of much precious documentation because of the Second World War. A word of caution, however, about these papers because they do contain fanciful tales.

More reliable sources are the bi-lingual vocabularios compiled by Spanish friars some as early as the late-16th century. These sources indicate that town names are often topographical indicators. For instance, Ogtong is ancient Hiligaynon for the place of tides or tidal swamp; Calamba in ancient Tagalog meant foot of the hill; and Makati like Ogtong meant the place of tides, from the Tagalog word kati, meaning tide. Pasig writes Fray Buenaventura in his 1613 dictionary means river bank, margin or boundary. And so for a lot of other place names like Tigbauan from tigbao or reed, + an, a suffix indicating place. A common name is Ilaya, meaning inland. "I" is a directional prefix and laya refers to forested area. Its opposite, Ilawood, means seaward. Lawood is the Visayan name for the sea. Maguindanaos use the cognates sailud and saraya.

Some contemporary names have become redundant, for instance, Tagaytay Ridge. Tagaytay is ancient Tagalog for ridge. Or Liguasan Marsh. Liguasan as the 19th century vocabulario of Fr. Juanmarti indicates is the Maguindanao word for marsh. Spanish topographical have also been incorporated into the Philippine languages. Aplaya, meaning, seashore is a corruption of la playa and barangka meaning foot of the hill is a corruption of barranca. This has also led to redundancies, like Sierra Madre Mountain Range. Sierra or cordillera are Spanish terms meaning mountain range.

Nostalgic for home, Spanish colonizers named places after regions and places familiar to them, hence, the names Nueva Ecija, Nueva Vizcaya, Nueva Segovia (Vigan) and Nueva Guipozcoa (Davao), Numancia, Tarragona, Oroquieta and so forth. The more spiritually inclined friars named towns and places after saints: Santa Ana, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, San Fernando, San Miguel, San Nicolas. In the Ilocos, a string of towns were given saintly patronymics: San Esteban, Santa Maria, Santa Catalina, Santa Lucia, until the litany of saints run out, and a town was christened simply as Santa.

In the 19th century, villages desiring autonomy from a larger town had to send petitions to the Spanish crown. To gain a hearing in the court, they flattered a patron by proposing to name the town after the grandee, hence the strange names like Amadeo de Savoia, Mendez Nuñez, and so forth. The practice of naming towns after some important figure continues to our days, some replacing town names ancient as the hills.

So what’s in a name? A whole history, a heritage of cultural contacts and exchange.•