The origin of the name, "Marinduque", has been the subject of discussions and thought-provoking conjectures.
Fr. Miguel Bernad in a brief account commented on the origin of the names of a number of places in the Philippines, among which was Marinduque. He said that "Malinduk (or Malindik) is now Marinduque." Explaining that there are provinces, towns and villages whose modern names have been the result of some inability on the part of the Spaniards (or of others), to pronounce the original native name.
F. Arsenio Manuel (of the former National Historical Institute), who conducted a study of place-names, made an interesting one on the origin of 'Marinduque'. He said that 'Marinduque' could not have originated from Malinduk or Malindik but rather from "MALINDUG".
This he said, has historical implication, for the word "malindig" which means "tall and elegant stature" in Tagalog has similar if not parallel meaning to the Visayan term "malindug". These were two cognate terms, Manuel wrote in the study, which fittingly describe the island's volcano, Mt. Malindig.
As for the probability that the Visayan term used as basis for naming the mountain and not the Tagalog word, accounts of early Visayan migration to the island would appear to support this view. The Dasmarinas listing of encomiendas in 1751 already spelled Marinduque in this manner, said he. (But I suspected then that Manuel must be Visayan...)
Manuel explained further that the phonetic hispanization of Malindug followed the Spanish phonetic system. Spanish does not tolerate the voiced velar stop "g" in its phonology. In Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas and other Spanish chronicles for example, the term for 'loincloth' is spelled 'bahaque'. This spelling and its Spanish pronunciation follows Spanish phonetic laws - 'bahag' becoming 'bahaque'.
This change according to Manuel also appears to have happened to "Palanyag" which became "Paranaque", with additional change taking place, the "l" becoming "r", again following Spanish phonetic tendencies. This "l" - "r" 'spin shift' is, of course, also evident in 'Marinduque'.
Hence, the legend of Marinduque as having resulted from the romance of "Marin" and "Duque", the ill-starred lovers of a popular local myth cannot have any value in historical writing nor folklore studies, stated Manuel. This, he opined, was just another instance of 'folk-etymologising'.
In 2002, as a volunteer cultural worker I decided to call the theater group I formed in Buenavista, "Teatro Malindug", for that town lies at the foot of the subject volcano. I spent sometime, of course, explaining to the cast (students from the Marinduque Victorian's College), that we owe it to our ancestors to preserve that forgotten name.
The MALINDUG name wasn't new to me, though. I first encountered the same explanation from a research paper given to me by the late Ding Jardiniano of Boac back in 1993, in connection with a play I was writing entitled "Saan Nanggaling ang Moryon", that we presented as "Moryonan" Isang Baliktanaw."
The said research paper (there was a dearth of such at that time so we valued anything about Marinduque), was authored by another person (Jardiniano told me then that he knew the guy personally), not Manuel.
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