This book is the list of printed documents I have collected about the Philippines in general and the Tagalog language in particular. The entries are followed by an index of the themes involved.

Spiffies and Loonies is a situational comedy developed into 88 episodes. It departs from the typical ones, in which the plot hinges on the emotional and irrational decisions made by the lead characters. The opposite happens here. First of all, Brad and Dolly meet, fall in love and marry. To make things worse, they become rich after a few episodes. They are therefore geared to lead the eventless life of the happy few. Fortunately they are surrounded by misfits warped by one big deviant trait. When these do not bump into Brad and Dolly along the way, they will come and knock on their door - thus a turmoil of events running from the amusing to the fantastic, with a lot of absurdities in between.You will soon be captivated by the antics of these cartoon-like characters, and will ask for more. Several passages are spoofs of literary works. Each episode is independent enough from the others to be read or performed for its own sake.

A parallel sitcom in English and French targeted at teenagers and adults who want to brush up and improve their French. The text is cut up into short, easy-to-remember segments, each having its own equivalent in front of it in the other language. The purpose of this method is to give the learner an opportunity to read a lot without having to open a dictionary. / Comedie de situation parallele anglais-francais destinee aux adolescents et aux adultes qui veulent reviser ou ameliorer leur anglais. Le texte est decoupe en courts segments faciles a memoriser, chacun ayant son propre equivalent en face dans l'autre langue. Le but de cette methode est de donner a l'apprenant l'occasion de lire beaucoup sans avoir a ouvrir un dictionnaire.

This is a modest digest of what should be known about the life and deeds of Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), the Ming military mandarin who founded Chinese Taiwan, and belonged to a family of international traders commanding a vast fortune and a fleet of merchantmen. Sometimes, instead of smoothly following its predictable course, history swerves to another direction because of an unexpected event. When Ming China was invaded by the Manchus, instead of collaborating to make even more profits, Koxinga launched a resistance movement. Yet, his fate was apparently sealed for hadn't he been compelled by tradition to celebrate his birthday during the siege of Nanking, he would not have been defeated by the Manchus the morning after. If he had not died suddenly the year he ordered the Spaniards of Manila to pay him a tribute as to their sovereign, the Philippines would now be an overseas Chinese territory like Taiwan.

Tagalog, spoken in Manila and the surrounding provinces, Luzon, Philippines, is a major language of the western branch of the Austronesian family. The bulk of this book is devoted to parallel words also found in Malay, a member of the same branch. These words are either cognates descending from Proto-Austronesian or borrowings from the same foreign languages. Other cognates were found in Javanese, Malagasy, Tahitian and even Siamese. The last third of the book deals with Sanskrit, Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and English loanwords.

Percival Stuffington, nicknamed "Stuffie", is a good-for-nothing, a womanizer and a crook. He belongs to the theatre of the grotesque. His ignorance and dishonesty is exposed when he poses as a teacher of English to foreign students in a London private school. He flies to California, where he tries to pass as a golf instructor. Finally he plans to extort money from a former fellow student by poisoning him, and promising the quick delivery of the antidote against a staggering sum.

An amazing English-French bilingual from the U.S., all-American boy Everett B. Cummings is recruited at 18 by the C.I.A. to pose as a Frenchman at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France, under the funny name of Anatole Hildephonse Leroy. Unfortunately the enemy has monitored him from the very beginning in the person of Jezzie, a stunning blonde who keeps him at her beck and call. When it is discovered Everett is no longer reliable, he is packed back to the U.S., and Jezzie is arrested and recycled into an agent posing as an environmentalist.

The few, and generally obsolete Tagalog words of Arabic and/or Persian origin that can be found in old and modern dictionaries are fragments from a period when they must have been more numerous, although their number cannot ever have been very large. Some illustrate how Manila was an outpost of the Bornean polity based in Brunei, itself a part of the Indo-Javanese system, while others point at direct contacts with traders who spoke some varieties of Arabic, but were probably Indians, Persians, Armenians from Persia or even Turks. Thus these terms entered Tagalog over a very long period that lasted until the 19th Century.

This book is the translation and the analysis of the Paglayonan manuscript of ten folios from the collections of the Newberry Library. The document is a compilation of official deeds from the Laguna town of Liliw, Philippines. They report two events that took place in the Seventeenth Century: the one concerns the genteel Paglayunan family, the other the making of an altarpiece for the church of San Juan-Bautista de Lilio by Chinese craftsmen from Siniluan, another Laguna town. Both give insights into provincial life during the Early Spanish Period. The most striking feature is that the Tagalogs who wrote these texts used the term hari, generally translated as 'king', to refer to their parish priest.

Under the influence of the lyrical drama of Medieval Japan called "Noh (Nogaku)", William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) wrote ten short plays to be performed for small elite audiences. These plays constitute his "noble theatre". They fall into two generations. Six plays belong to the first generation: At the Hawk's Well (1917), The only Jealousy of Emer (1919), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), Calvary (1920), The Cat and the Moon (1926), a farce, and Resurrection (1931). The second generation comprises four plays: A Full Moon in March (1935), The King of the Great Clock Tower (1935), Purgatory (1939), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939).

This is a collection of the scenes from the situational comedy Spiffies and Loonies in which intervenes Mrs. Hazel Twittle, a fiftyish prude and a dimwit that belongs to the theatre of the grotesque. At the beginning, she is a chambermaid. After she has come into a comfortable income from Brad, her cousin's son, she travels abroad, where she has the knack for antagonizing everybody because she can't help expressing her strong disapproval of things she doesn't like. Eventually she returns home frustrated, and settles in a Brighton boarding house to give herself time to find a suitable home. There, she makes friends with Polly, a crook who pretends she is a nun working as a nurse, and who quickly talks her into donating fat cheques for various fake foundations. Finally Mrs. Twittle is confronted with a hippie child psychologist who proves to be an ignorant narcissistic sociopath.

Mrs. Mabel Van Moo is an insane, overweight, middle-aged character that belongs to the theater of the grotesque, where only caricatures are admissible. The scenes of the situational comedy Spiffies and Loonies. in which she intervenes have been collected to constitute this booklet for actors and actresses who wish to impersonate that outrageous individual for its own sake. Mr. Van Moo is driven by her secret desire to become the lover of a handsome young man, Brad, her passion being disguised as a sort of motherly protection. At a time she even plans to marry him, although Brad is deeply in love with a peach of a girl named Dolly, and soon becomes her husband. She stalks him in various indirect ways to the extent that everybody worries about the consequences. In order to get rid of her family duties, she tries to make her son, Mickey, marry Twiggy, both being against the match.

Ce livre est le rapport romance de voyages aux Philippines attribue au personnage de Quentin Cumber, surnomme Cucumber "Concombre". C'est aussi une satire des milieux francais de la recherche en sciences humaines, teintee d'un hommage respectueux a ces universitaires qui travaillent sur des sujets difficiles dans des conditions mesquines. De Quentin Cumber, on pourrait dire qu'il ne savait pas ou il allait; neanmoins il y est alle quand meme et en est revenu. Il aurait pu ne pas y retourner de peur que la magie de la premiere fois soit ternie par les couches successives des nouvelles visites et des mises au point qui se feraient d'elles-memes, mais il y est retourne jusqu'au jour ou il a compris qu'il avait perdu a jamais sa vision innocente, car ce n'est pas impunement que l'on analyse ses impressions.