Audiobook Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis

Leonard Bloomfield presents a comprehensive examination of Tagalog texts and their grammatical structures, recorded primarily from the speech of Mr. Alfredo Viola Santiago. The work is divided into three main parts: transcribed native texts with English translations, a thorough grammatical analysis covering phonetics, syntax, and morphology, and a detailed index of word formations and glossary. In the first section, various traditional stories, anecdotes, and everyday accounts illustrate natural phrasing and idiom.

The grammatical analysis breaks down distinctive sounds, syllabication, and accentuation, demonstrating how accent shifts affect word meaning and how syntactic relations are constructed through specific particles. The morphology section details the formation of roots, duplications, and the extensive use of prefixes and infixes to create active, passive, and abstract forms. Throughout the text, Bloomfield critiques earlier Spanish grammars for imposing Latin and Spanish categories onto an entirely different linguistic structure, establishing instead a rigorous, empirical foundation for Philippine linguistics.