The Jama Mapun's Kana-kanahan Ni Uruhan: the Culture of Storytelling

This paper explored the Jama Mapun legends which despite their existence in antiquity remained to complement the Jama Mapun’s culture but may vanish over time because they are not written. Sometimes in 1976, the late anthropologist Professor Arsenio E. Manuel here in the Philippines encouraged the collecting and recording of oral tradition countrywide which served as one of the bases in launching this study. At least five legends were collected and analyzed with Lavob’s Narrative Model of Analysis which is used to answer the following research questions: the linguistic features of the legends, the classification and themes of legends, and how they connect to the culture of the Jama Mapuns, and what does the legend embody within the cultural tradition of the Jama Mapun. The findings of the analysis show that the legends portray themes of the transgression of traditional belief, leadership skills, jealousy, ungratefulness, and justice. The transcribed legends reveal prevalent linguistic features of affixations, circumfixation, and reduplication of words, which sorting and correctness were accurate per verification with the grammar rules compilation of Millard A. Collins. and Virginia R. Collins (2001) lexicographers of Mapun-English Dictionary. Additionally, the dialect’s verbs are not tense-aspect as a result, particles ‘lai’, ‘lai’, ‘bay’, and ‘bawoy’ are used to recoup the function of verbs, which features among others, are identical to some other Philippine local dialects as with the seminal work of Lawrence A. Reid, & Hsiu-Chuan Liao (2004)., authors A Brief Syntactic Typology of Philippine Languages.