2 THE MANOBOS OF MINDANAO— GARVAN IM '"^ ?xxS£ 



THE DERIVATION AND ORIGINAL APPLICATION OF THE WORD " MAN6BO " 



One of the earliest references that I find to the Manobos of the Agiisan Valley is in the Gen- 

 eral History of the Discalced Augustinian Fathers (1661-1699) by Father Pedro de San Fran- 

 cisco de Assis. 3 The author says that "the mountains of that territory 4 are inhabited by a 

 nation of Indians, heathens for the greater part, called Manobos, a word signifying in that lan- 

 guage, as if we should say here, robust or very numerous people. " I have so far found no word in 

 the Man6bo dialect that verifies the correctness of the above statement. It may be said, how- 

 ever, in favor of this derivation that manusia is the word for "man " or "mankind " in the Malay, 

 Moro (Magindanao), and Tirurai languages. In Bagobo, a dialect that shows very close re- 

 semblance to Manobo, the word Manobo means "man," and in Magindanao Moro it means 

 "mountain people," 6 and is applied by the Moros to all the mountain people of Mindanao. It 

 might be maintained, therefore, with some semblance of reason that the word Manobo means 

 simply "people." Some of the early historians use the words Manobo, Mansuba, Manubo. 

 These three forms indicate the derivation to be from a prefix man, signifying ' ' people " or " dweller, ' ' 

 and suba, a river. From the form Manubo, however, we might conclude that the word is made 

 up of man ("people"), and hubo ("naked"), therefore meaning the "naked people. " The former 

 derivation, however, appears to be more consonant with the principles upon which Mindanao 

 tribal names, both general and local, are formed. Thus Mansdha, Manddya, Manggudngan are 

 derived, the first part of each, from man ("people" or "dwellers"), and the remainder of the 

 words, respectively, from sdka ("interior"), ddya ("up the river"), gudngan ("forest"). These 

 names then mean "people of the interior," "people that dwell on the upper reaches of the river," 

 and "people that dwell in the forest." Other tribal designations of Mindanao races and tribes 

 are almost without exception derived from words that denote the relative geographic position 

 of the tribe in question. The Banudon and Mamdnua are derived from banud, the "country," 

 as distinguished from settlements near the main or settled part of the river. The BuJcidnon are 

 the mountain people (bukid, mountain); Subanun, the river people (suba, river); Tirurai, the 

 mountain people (tuduk, mountain, eteu, man); 6 TagaJcaolo, the people at the very source of a 

 river (tdga, inhabitant, olo, head or source). 



The derivation of the above tribal designations leads us to the opinion that the word Manobo 

 means by derivation a "river-man," and not a "naked man." 



A further alternative derivation has been suggested by Dr. N. M. Saleeby, 7 from the word 

 tubo, "to grow"; the word Manobo, according to this derivation, would mean the people that grew 

 up on the island, that is the original settlers or autochthons. The word tubo, "to grow," is not, 

 however, a Manobo word, and it is found only in a few Mindanao dialects. 



Father F. Combes, S. J., 8 says that the owners, that is, the autochthonic natives of Minda- 

 nao, were called Manobos and Mananapes. 9 In a footnote referring to Mananapes, it is stated, 

 and appears very reasonable and probable, that the above-mentioned term is not a tribal desig- 

 nation but merely an appellation of contempt used on account of the low culture possessed by 

 the autochthons at that time. 



Hence there seems to be some little ground for supposing that the word Manobo was origi- 

 nally applied to all the people that formerly occupied the coast and that later fled to the interior, 

 and settled along the rivers, yielding the seashore to the more civilized invaders. 



> Blair and Robertson, 41: 153, 1900. 



* The author refers to the mountains in the vicinity of Llano, a town that stood down tho river from the present Veruela and which was aban- 

 doned when the region subsided. 



' Fr. Jacinto Juanmarti's Diccionario Moro Magindanao-Espafiol (Manila, 1892), 125. 



• My authority for this derivation is a work by Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera on The Origin of Philippine Tribal Names. 

 7 Origin of Malayan Filipinos, a paper read before the Philippine Academy, Manila, Nov. l f 1911. 



■ Historia de Mindanao y Jolo (Madrid, 1664). Ed. Retana (Madrid, 1897). 



The word manandp is the word for animal, beast in the Cebu Bisaya, Bagobo, Tirurai, and Magindanao Moro languages. Among some of 

 the tribes of eastern Mindanao, the word is applied to a class of evil forest spirits of apparently indeterminate character. It is noteworthy that these 

 spirits seem to correspond to the Manubu spirits of the Subanuns as described by Mr. Emerson B. Christie in his Subanuns of Sindangan Bay (Pub. 

 Bur. Sri., Div. Eth., 88, 1909). 



