C1–C2 · 14 lessons
Reading the primary record: Bergaño 1736 and Forman 1971
For a language with a national literature and a shelf of modern grammars, C1 means reading novels and following arguments.
For Kapampangan it means something narrower and, in its way, harder: being able to open the primary record, navigate it, and judge it. By the end of this tier a claim about Kapampangan grammar is something you can check rather than believe — including the claims on this site.
The 1736 grammar: its orthography, its analysis, and the derivational system modern sources omit.
A 1736 grammar written in the town Forman would visit 235 years later
Reading four centuries of Kapampangan with three substitution rules
His analysis of the focus system, set against Forman's
The derivational system Forman gives a page and Bergaño gives a chapter
Doubling a root usually makes it smaller, not bigger
Five affixes, a chapter each, and the sub-senses no modern source lists
The prefix that cost Bergaño ten years and this course two corrections
The last of the C1 morphology, and how to look up what this course omits
The dictionary, the depth of the lexicon, translation, and what the record does not contain.
Reading the first Kapampangan dictionary, and what a dictionary settles
Six words spelled sala, and roots English has no word for
A counting system that reaches forward to the next ten
A 1736 grammar that treats sarcasm as a grammatical category
What will not go into English, and what to do about it
Where the record runs out, and what a course is worth when it has been wrong
Reference and practice alongside the lessons.
CEFR C1 and C2 descriptors, each linked to the lesson that teaches it.
Every word in the tier, most of it drawn straight from Bergaño's dictionary.
Passages from Bergaño and Forman, read in the original.
The C1–C2 reference: orthography, protocompuestos, maca-, his chapter map.
Diego Bergaño, Arte de la Lengua Pampanga (1736) and his Vocabulario de la Lengua Pampanga — the first grammar and the first dictionary of Kapampangan, both public domain. Alongside Michael Forman's Kapampangan Grammar Notes (1971), which carried the B1–B2 tier.
Bergaño was Prior of the Convento de Bacolor. Forman did his fieldwork in Bacolor. The two describe the same community's speech, 235 years apart — which is what makes the historical comparisons in this tier possible, and also fixes its limit: what you learn here is Bacolor Kapampangan, at two moments.
This tier has corrected the rest of the course twice. Reading Bergaño reversed the deictic decision in beginner lesson 6, and showed that B1 lesson 8's confident "maka- is not the potentive" was an overstatement. Lesson 14 collects every claim this course has had to withdraw, because judging sources is the skill the tier is actually teaching.