my THE SUBANU. 
application of any system, and attempts at individual phonetics. Thus 
great diversity appears in official reports, both civil and military, and 
in the construction of maps of the islands. An example is given in the 
spelling of the Sulu term datu (chief), a Moro designation of rank, 
variously written as: datoh, datio, dattu, dato, datoo, dattoh, and datu, 
the last being the best form, according to Saleeby’s system oftrans- 
literation, described briefly as follows in his Studies 1n Moro History, 
Law and Religion (Ethnological Survey of the Philippine Islands): 
In translating the éarsila (original manuscripts) such a large number of 
words have to be transliterated that it is deemed necessary to adopt a system 
of transliteration which can be easily understood by every English reader and 
which is more adequate to express Magindanao sounds than either Spanish 
ot English. With the exception of mg and sk the characters used in this system 
represent simple sounds only. Every radical modification of a certain simple 
sound is regarded as a different simple sound and is represented by a separate 
and distinct character. Every compound sound is represented by those char- 
acters that express its simple constituent sounds. It is an unvarying rule in 
this system that every character represents an invariable sound and every 
sound has only one invariable character. 
We have already observed a considerable variation in the orthog- 
raphy of the tribal name of the Subanuns, which in that form has the 
sanction of the Philippine Bureau of Science. If the word is spelled 
as generally pronounced by the members of the tribe, and applying the 
principles of the Saleeby system, it would be written Subanu.* 
Concerning this question of orthography and nomenclature, Blu- 
mentrit said in 1890: 
Notwithstanding the rich literature concerning the peoples and languages 
of the Philippine Archipelago, there is no book or publication in which are 
catalogued the names of the tribes and the languages, and this appears the 
more inexcusable since both Spanish and Philippine writers, with few excep- 
tions, handle these names very carelessly, so that great confusion must ensue. 
The prevailing bad form in the Philippines of transferring the name of one 
people or family to another, who possess similarities of any kind with the first, 
either in manner or life,or even only in culture grade in the widest sense of the 
term, has its counterpart in a second bad fashion of making several peoples 
out of one by replacing the folk name with the tribal names. Only with the 
greatest pains and thought is it possible to extricate one’s self from this laby- 
rinth of nomenclature. After thorough search I am convinced that many 
names reported to me must be eliminated, since they owe their existence to 
mistakes in penmanship or printing, to ridicule, misunderstanding, or to error, 
as I have proved in single instances. 
*For the reasons stated in the preceding sentence it has seemed preferable to adopt for 
this work the designation Subanu and to employ it indeclinably. ‘The derivation proposed 
by the several authorities cited in the preceding pages is in violation of the principles of 
composition employed in the language. Thus suba is river, —nan is locative; observe in the 
vocabulary sinbaan, a church as the place (locative —am) in which worship (sinba) is per- 
formed; accordingly, subanun would not mean people of rivers, but a place where rivers are. 
Furthermore, in the language, —az is the locative suffix, —nan is restricted to the value of 
forming nouns of quality from adjectives. The suffix —2 is employed to form collective 
plurals, therefore Subanun means only all the Subanu. Following the best modern usage 
we shall employ Subanu for singular and plural, as noun and adjective.—W. C. 
