Anyone have any idea why ‘Philippines’ is spelled with a ‘Ph’ while the word ‘Filipino’ is spelled with an ‘F?’
Thanks!
The islands were named by Magellan after Philip, the son-in-law of Isabella and Ferdinand, who was effectively King of Spain as Philip I (though this was “by the crown matrimonial” – his wife Joanna was the heiress).
But the national languages, part of the Malayo-Polynesian group, spell phonetically, and generally derive their Westernized terms from Spanish, which converts Latin and Greek “ph” to F. (You will occasionally see Pilipino, a variant spelling/pronunciation in one of the languages of the islands.)
Was/is Philip spelled that way in Spanish, or is that also an English spelling of the name (which I thought was anyway Greek)?
It’s Felipe in Spanish.
Tagalog (the major indigenous language of the Phillipines) lacks the /f/ phoneme, so the Spanish Filipinas/Filipino was/is pronounced bilabially as Pilipinas/Pilipino by many natives. The Phillipines were never more than a very tangential part of the Spanish empire, so Spanish never became the dominant language as in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
From a 1595 account of the Phillipines:
…Although in the city of Manila there are Spaniards, in the native villages there are none at all, and the indian communities have changed little from how they were before the Spanish came.