# nagbobobobobohan



## alkor

Nagbobobobobohan ka ba o nagmamarunong?

I understand that nagmamarunong means to pretend as if you're smart, but how about this word nagbobobobobohan? I'm starting to wonder if I heard it correctly.. If the rule of duplicating the root applies, can't I say nagmamarunong-marunong? Also, can you please give me other examples of "pretend" verbs. 

Maraming salamat!


----------



## rockjon

Nagbobobobobohan, I think means something along the lines of pretending to be stupid as bobo and tanga means stupid. 

I remember reading it in some my tagalog books before but I wasn't too sure if people still used this conjugation form  if you take the Mag- conjugation and you combine it with the adjective along with a duplicated first syllable of adjective eg. mayaman (rich) as in Nagmamayaman it means something along the line of someone who pretends to be rich.  Nagmamahirap for example should mean someone who pretended to be poor.  

I'm not exactly sure if this is correct but most of the searches I've conducted on google confirms that this should be right.  Though, I'm not sure how it works for adjectives that usually don't take a ma- form (mahirap, marunong, maganda) such as payat, puyat, bobo, etc.


----------



## niernier

True, nagbobobobobohan means to pretend to be stupid. Some words I can think of that follow the same pattern are nagbabahay-bahayan(to play house game) and nagluluto-lutuan(to play cooking game).


----------



## DotterKat

alkor said:


> Nagbobobobobohan ka ba o nagmamarunong?.........
> ....If the rule of duplicating the root applies, can't I say nagmamarunong-marunong?



Not in this case. The root word of _*nagmamarunong*_ is the noun _*dunong*_ which  means _knowledge _or _wisdom_.  The root can be duplicated to formulate the verb _*nagdudunongdunongan *_(one pretending to be wise or knowledgeable).  However, as is sometimes the case in Tagalog, there is more than one way to append affixes to a stem and arrive at the same meaning and thus your word nagmamarunong. Different rules apply for the latter and suffice it to say that the correct word is _*nagmamarunong*_ (which likewise refers to one pretending to be wise or knowledgeable) and not nagmamarunong-marunong, even though this latter word has the "semblance" (ironically enough) of sounding correct. You can also correctly say _*nagmamarunong-runongan*_, which means the same thing.


----------



## alkor

Thank you all for helping. I've learned a lot again.


----------

