NOT SEXIST, NOT MYSOGINIST, and definitely NOT A MOTHER HATER.- An Attempt at MorphoSyntactics to Derive Meaning

Never thought I had to do this, but if I didn’t, nobody else probably would. Here I present a very rudimentary morphosyntactic analysis of Duterte’s swearing behaviors, and give the obvious (to me) conclusion that he is NOT SEXIST, NOT MYSOGINIST, and definitely NOT A MOTHER HATER.

Since linguistics is a rapidly progressing science, the terminology I employ might be unpopular or worse, outdated. Although currently the nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutist axes are still popular, the opinion that Philippine languages are rendered in the passive voice is considered passe; so taking a convenient way out, I prefer the generic employment of a generic category of focus as an easy solution to the sometime contentious debate about Tagalog and Bisaya (Duterte’s native language) being as being ergative.

 “PUTANG INA KA” has a different meaning from “PUTANG INA MO”, although both are swear sentences. The latter is frequent among Tagalog speakers, but the first is more frequently used by non native Tagalog speakers. The first sentence is what I hear from Duterte, and from those who intentionally swear at inimical parties, to the exclusion of intentional reference to their mothers. 

PUTANG INA MO is easily rendered into a nominative NOUN -MODIFIER/s language, which is how the American press interpreted Duterte’s retort to Barack Obama. In English it can reconstructed-transformed into YOUR MOTHER IS A WHORE [receiver’s mother as subject, followed by an phrase modifier]

PUTANG INA KA has NOTHING TO DO WITH MOTHERS. It is the receiver who is TOTALLY targeted, and intentionally denigrated, degraded, cursed. You can follow this with a praise to the receiver’s mother without nullifying the meaning of the original swear sentence. The better English translation would be YOU’RE A SON OF A BITCH, meaning a unredeemed asshole, a total jerk. Again, there is intention to denigrate the mother of the receiver. It can be parsed as a sentence in an absolutive language: the “ka” as the marker of a subject with the intransitive verb “to be”

Therefore, the American translation into nominative SUBJECT-MODIFIER (adjective phrase) is totally WRONG. The Tagalog sentence especially spoken by a native Bisaya speaker can only be meaningful in an ergative-absolutive sense. More easily, the FOCUS is on the party being spoken to, NOT TO ANY OF HIS RELATIVE, LEAST OF ALL HIS MOTHER. He is the SUBJECT (NOT HIS MOTHER) marked by “ka” (inflected IKAW, [at hindi ang INA mo]). The translation fails because English is a nominative-accusative language.

PUTANG INA MO is incorrectly used when PUTANG INA KA is intended, especially frquent among the younger population of Filipinos, who speak hybrid Tagalog, if it can be called that. The language variant in Metro Manila is a mixture of native sentences and English or foreign words, and has its own grammar. It is no wonder that the President sometimes speaks in Bisaya, even to an audience of native Tagalog speakers, or who speak mostly in Metro Manila Tagalog, when he wants to communicate his emotions, and correctly convey his intention and meaning.