The Difficulties
The difficulty arises, however, when the object referred to is the divine or the unknown. We will observe that in almost all of the texts available, nin is used instead of kan. Here are the following examples: ‘Ina nin Dyos’ (Mother of God); ‘Tinapay nin Buhay’ (The Bread of Life); ‘Tataramon nin Kagurangnan’ (Word of the Lord); Sampolong Tugon nin Dyos (Ten Commandments of God); sa ngaran nin Ama… (In the name of the Father…).
First, we must wonder why our ancestors used nin instead of kan in these circumstances. Why were there no objections in the past? Why were those expressions pleasing to the ears? Why were they acceptable to the language users? Did we inherit literary materials with glaring grammatical errors?
How do we explain these texts?
Why is it that Bikolano speakers consistently use nin as a marker for the divine? Why does the use of it come out so natural in our speech, in our writing? Again, did we simply inherit a grammatical error? Then, when we became so used to it, following a logical rule is no longer acceptable to us?
Why is it that even in the attempt to follow such a rule, the revised edition still has this inconsistency: In most of the pages, it uses: ‘kan Ama,’ ‘kan Dios,’ ‘kan Espiritu’; yet in the Cordero, it still writes: ‘Cordero nin Dios’? – Or perhaps it was simply an inadvertent oversight. Or even a slip of the natural?
Speaking of inconsistency, why is it that in the Gloria, it writes: ‘nagpapara kan mga kasalan kan kinaban,’ while in the Cordero, it writes: ‘nagpapara kan mga kasalan nin kinaban?’