Terms for Rice Agriculture and Terrace Building in Some Cordilleran Languages of the Philippines

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reconstructable terms for wet rice agriculture in the Central Cordilleran languages of the Northern Philippines, in an attempt to throw light on problems relating to the antiquity and function of the rice terraces found throughout the area where these languages are spoken. The age of the rice terraces has been estimated by some to be in the range of thousands of years, but by others to be in the order of several hundreds of years. Their primary function today is to provide a suitable environment in the rugged terrain of the region for the production of wet rice. Whether this was the function for which the terraces were originally constructed has been questioned in recent anthropological studies which accept the relatively great antiquity of the terraces but view the introduction of wet rice in the region as a relatively recent result of agricultural intensification.