Nang or ng ? The long and the short of it

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There are two little words in the Filipino language that cause more than their fair share of headaches for writers and editors who strive to be faithful to the balarila, the official grammar of the national language. The words nang and ng are actually the same single word but with many meanings – the short ng is just an abbreviation of the longer nang. This prompts the questions, “What’s the difference?" and, "which one is correct for a given situation?”

The reason there are two spellings for this word was probably a matter of convenience in the beginning. The word nang/ng has so many uses in the Filipino language that it naturally occurs with great frequency in writing. Using an abbreviation saves time and ink.

In the days of the old baybayin alphabet, 500 years ago, nang was written with just one character because the baybayin was incapable of showing the whole word nang. Writing just one character for this word was not a great burden back then, but this character was the letter na, which just happens to be another very common Filipino word. So although it was easy for the writers, we can imagine the confusion among readers who tried to figure out which of the multitude of possible meanings the writer had intended to say. (Download the PDF version to see special characters.)

During the Spanish era, the Western alphabet replaced the baybayin script. Originally nang was always spelled in full – as can be seen in the first book ever printed in the Philippines, the Doctrina Christiana of 1593. Later, various abbreviations arose for this ubiquitous word. Most of the abbreviations used the Spanish tilde ~ mark to signify the Filipino ng sound and to distinguish it from the sounds of either n or g alone. By the end of the 1800s, it was common to abbreviate nang as ñg or ng with a tilde over the g – or with a single large tilde above the pair of letters.

With the revolution against Spain, there was a revolution in Tagalog spelling as well. The national hero, himself, Dr. Jose Rizal laid out new ideas in his Studies on the Tagalog Language (1893) to simplify the often-awkward conventions of Spanish spelling.

Rizal and other reformers added some useful foreign letters to the alphabet such as k and w, and he advocated the use of the letter g˜, alone with a tilde, to represent the sound of ng. He proposed that the long nang should be spelled, nag˜ and the short ng˜ as it is, but both would have a tilde over the g˜.

The general public accepted most of these ideas immediately but the long nag˜ was not one of them. The various versions of the short ng, however, persisted well into the 1900s.

In 1940, Lope K. Santos wrote the Balarila, the standard grammar for the national language. In it, he standardized the rules for using the short ng (without a tilde) and the long nang, so that writers could convey their ideas more precisely. But to this day most people are still confused about which one to use.

For many Filipino students, grammar class is a nightmare and it doesn’t help that even the teachers are often confused by this little word. Rules for using it are needlessly complicated and can fill pages in a textbook. It is no wonder that the rules are applied inconsistently throughout written media; from informal blogs to respected newspapers – even from page to page within a single newspaper.

But there is a relatively easy way to remember the correct usage of nang/ng without invoking the dreaded B-word (Balarila). Just keep in mind that there are only five situations where you should write the long nang, and for everything else, just write the short ng.

The author, poet, critic and national artist, Virgilio Almario boiled all the rules down to these five cases in one of his articles on language in a 1992 edition of Diyaryo Filipino.

Use the long nang in the following situations:

1. When nang means the same thing as noong –

Umaga nang barilin si Rizal.

Nang umagang iyon ay nagkasakit si Pedro.

2. When nang means the same thing as upang and para –

Sa mga Espanyol, dapat barilin si Rizal nang matakot ang mga Filipino.

Dapat dalhin si Pedro sa ospital nang magamot.

3. When na and ng are combined –

Sa mga Filipino, sobra nang lupit ng mga Espanyol.

Sobra nang hirap ang inabot ni Pedro.

4. When nang describes how something is done or to what extent –

Binaril si Rizal nang patalikod.

Namayat nang todo si Pedro dahil sa sakit.

5. When nang is a ligature that joins a repeated word –

Barilin man nang barilin si Rizal ay hindi siya mamamatay.

Ginamot nang ginamot si Pedro para gumaling.

That’s all there is to it.

Grammarians may spend an eternity splitting hairs about the application of the long nang and short ng, but the rest of us don’t need to know about all that. As long as we remember these five special cases for the long nang, we can write the short ng for everything else and forget the rest of the rules.

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