Reading the first Kapampangan dictionary, and what a dictionary can settle
Bergaño's Vocabulario de la Lengua Pampanga en Romance is the first Kapampangan dictionary. It circulates in an English translation, which makes it far more usable than the Arte for most readers.
It is not a wordlist. Entries carry the accent class, the part of speech, the derived forms, the passives the root admits, and often an example sentence or a note on where a usage is current.
A real one, reproduced as it stands:
ASBOC. (pp.) Noun, the mouth, including the mouth of a jar or pitcher. Mayasboc, talkative, morally, the gossiper, magatal a asboc…
| Part | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| ASBOC | the headword, capitals, old orthography |
| (pp.) | the accent class — penultimate |
| Noun | part of speech |
| the mouth… | the gloss, with its range: a person's mouth and a jar's |
| Mayasboc | a derived form, with its own gloss |
| magatal a asboc | a collocation |
Another, showing two senses under one shape:
PUSU. (g.) Noun, the heart of living things, and of various fruits: verb, when such fruits come out, or appear in the form of a heart. Pusuan, the plant that has heart-shaped fruits, like the coconut palm, the banana, etc.
PUSU. (a., g.) Noun, the groin, belly. Mapusú, adjective, one with a protruding, prominent…
Two headwords, same letters, different accent classes — (g.) against (a., g.) — and different meanings. This is the six-way contrast of lesson 10 in miniature, and it is why the accent marks matter.
| Mark | Means |
|---|---|
| (pp.) | penultimate accent |
| (a.), (pc.) | acute — final accent |
| (g.) | guttural |
| (cort.), (cor.) | clipped |
| (dipht.) | diphthong |
| P. 1. | first passive — the i- passive |
| P. 2. | second passive — the -an passive |
| Mi, Ma | the mi- and ma- forms this root takes |
So an entry reading "Active verb and its infinitive… P. 1.… Mi, frequentative" is telling you the full derivational profile of the root: which passives it admits, which particles it takes, and whether it has a frequentative.
That profile is exactly what lesson 3 said you cannot predict. The dictionary is where the unpredictable part lives — which is why Bergaño kept telling his reader to go there.
This is not a hypothetical. During this course's A1–A2 audit, five everyday words were listed as unattested. Four of them were in the dictionary all along:
| Searched | Found | Actually spelled |
|---|---|---|
| asbuk | nothing | ASBOC |
| katawan | nothing | catauan |
| pusu | found | PUSU |
| pisali | found | pisali |
| dake | nothing | genuinely absent |
The conversion rules are lesson 2's. Apply them before concluding a word is not there, and apply them in several variants — a word may have both a c and a u to convert.
A working procedure:
Step five is what confirmed asbuk: searching the English for "the mouth" turned up ASBOC as a headword immediately.
| It settles | It does not settle |
|---|---|
| whether a word was attested | whether it is used now |
| what it meant in the 1730s | what it means today |
| what derived forms existed | which are still productive |
| the accent class | how your barrio says it |
Finding asbuk in Bergaño proves it was a Kapampangan word for "mouth" in 1736. It does not prove anyone says it now — though in this case Forman's body parts and ordinary usage both support it.
The reverse matters more. dake is absent from Bergaño and from Forman, which is decent evidence against it — but absence from a dictionary is weaker than presence in one. A 300-year-old book not containing a word is not proof the word does not exist.
This course removed dake on that reasoning. That is a judgement call, and a speaker could overturn it tomorrow.
From ASBOC. (pp.) Noun, the mouth…
Answer yes or no.
Is there a modern Kapampangan dictionary? There are modern wordlists and community projects, but nothing with Bergaño's derivational detail is freely available. That is the gap lesson 14 returns to.
Should I trust a 1736 gloss? For what the word meant then, yes. For now, treat it as a strong hypothesis to check.
Why does he give accent classes when modern writing drops them? Because accent is phonemic. Modern orthography loses information the dictionary preserves — one of the few places where the old system is straightforwardly better.
The dictionary is where every unpredictable fact about a root lives, and both grammars keep pointing at it. Being able to use it is the difference between following a course and doing your own work.
Next: Lexical Depth and Near-Synonyms.