“I once had a student named Usmail, which I at first thought was some Hispanic version of Ishmael,” writes CUNY linguist Leonard R.N. Robert Lawrence Trask, Language: The Basics, 1999 The Filipino father had noticed that American soldiers, in moments of stress, tended to call upon their saint by exclaiming San Ababís! - or something like that. In Spanish, the word for ‘saint’, when it occurs in a male saint’s name, is San - hence all those California place names like San Francisco, San José and San Diego. Well, before the Americans arrived, the Philippines were a Spanish colony, and Spanish was widely spoken. But my favourite example is a story told by the American linguist Charles Hockett, who reports that at least one Filipino father, during the American occupation of the Philippines, named his son Ababís - after the patron saint of the United States.
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