TOO MANY NAMES FOR A MANGO

I was home alone last night, my troop went out to attend a children’s party, I opted to stay at home since there were already too many of them, the invited by the invited, and out boredom I ate all the green mangoes on our sink top, which I handpicked from our front yard.  I dipped it in salted soy sauce, if that may sound superfluous but that’s the way how I ate it.

Munching over it while watching Gourmet, (another Koreanovela starred Kim Rae Won, by the way Gourmet is a very good material if you want to understand how culture influences the kind of food that we eat and how food is also a culture) My reckless thoughts keep grinding and I thought that we Filipinos really have a lot to say when it comes to mango, we have names for every stage of a mango fruit’s life.

Commonly, English language only have two names for a mango fruit, that is the green mango and the ripe mango, which is the yellow one. But Pinoys have more to that, take these for instance; (Some words are in Bisaya as I’m a native of Davao)

Putot – for a small very young fruit
Bangkalawag – for bigger green mangoes that has young crunchy seed
Gulang – for big green ones with fiber coated seeds
Gulang-gulang – for mangoes in between gulang and manibalang
Manibalang – for old crunchy just right for bagoong (call it salted rotten fish or whatever, but pinoys only have good thoughts about this delicacy) and sukang tuba dipping
Hinog-hinog – for a stage between ripe and manibalang
Hinog – for a ripe mango, this is the yellow one
Lata-lata – for a stage between ripe and overripe
Lata – for overripe ones
bulok-bulok – for mangoes between overripe and rotten ones
Bulok or dunot – for rotten ones

You see , we have more to tell than the foreign ones, and if you have more to these terms just leave a comment so we can add up to our vocabulary.

That’s for some reckless thinking dude, thanks for dropping by, see again for another experience in this side of town.