"NG", Excuse Me, Is NOT a Unique Alphabet Letter, er Digraph
My high school Balarila differentiated the words ng from nang as used in the following examples:
Nang si Jesus ay isinilang (When Jesus was born)
On the other hand, “ng” appears only once, in the following stanza:
ang cabayo’i, mag-aarma,
palo’t, dagoc na lahat na
ng gauin mo sa caniya.
Obviously, ng and nang may be used interchangeably. Whether the user wants to use either ng or nang to mean “of” or “when” should be determined by the context in which either word is used. As in other languages, there are words in Filipino that could mean different things under different contexts, e.g., bata for gown, or bata for child. So why the need to go out on a limb to differentiate ng from nang when, as in Ibong Adarna, they are one and the same?
[Coincidentally, “manga” appears 32 times in Ibong Adarna, while “mga” was not used at all. The conclusion is that “mga”, as used in current Tagalog/Filipino discourse, is a contraction or abbreviation of “manga”.]
I don't think, however, that the "NG" in the Filipino alphabet refers to the contracted or abbreviated "NANG". It is the digraph ng. A digraph, by the way, is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the letters combined, as in the following example: Ngunit ang tugon niya'y dalangin na walang hanggan (But his answer was a prayer without end).
Yet the digraph ng is not considered a unique phoneme in the English alphabet, or in some other Roman languages that use it simply because they don't have words that start with the digraph, one of three tests that a digraph must pass to be considered as a unique phoneme (the other being that the digraph may occur in the middle of the word or at the end). Some linguistic technicality--which is probably why the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino insists that "language planning... should be a collaborative endeavor of scholars, linguists and practitioners in the study and use of the language." The ordinary language user--you and I--well, we're chopped liver! But then, that's another story.
While it may be difficult to find a "native" English word that starts with ng, the explosion of the Vietnam War into the global consciousness introduced us to non-native words that did so. Some of the words thrown about by the media during that war were proper Vietnamese names, like the Ngo's and the Nguyen's. Then 1976 saw the largescale migration of the Vietnamese--including the Ngo's and the Nguyen's--to the
I learned from a reliable language authority that the inclusion of ng in the Filipino alphabet is an effort to differentiate ours from others. Well, the Vietnamese have other ideas because they, too, have ng as one of 8 digraphs in their 37-letter alphabet where "A" with varying inflection marks is counted as 3 unique letters!
If we eliminate NG as a separate letter, er digraph, the 2001 revision of the Filipino alphabet is, for all intents and purposes, an adoption of the current 27-letter Spanish alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, Ñ, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. In a nation where more than half the population have Spanish names, it certainly is difficult to understand the misguided bent of some of our intellectuals to try to distance you and me and themselves from the Spanish alphabet at some point and then grudgingly re-adopt it anyway.