Baybayin
Baybayin,
also sometimes erroneously referred to as alibata, is a Philippine script widely used primarily in Luzon during the 16th and 17th centuries and prior to write Tagalog and to a lesser extent Visayan languages, Kampampangan, Ilocano, and several other Philippine languages.
Baybayin is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Its use was gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet during Spanish rule, though it has seen limited modern usage in the Philippines.
The script is encoded in Unicode as Tagalog block since 1998 alongside Buhid, Hanunoo, and Tagbanwa scripts.
The Archives of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila holds the largest collection of extant writings using Baybayin.
Baybayin has seen a rise in modern usage, primarily for cultural and artistic purposes, including in visual arts, literature, tattoos, and logos. It is also featured on the logos of government agencies, Philippine banknotes, and passports. Additionally, there are educational initiatives and workshops aimed at teaching Baybayin to a new generation. Social media has also been instrumental in the increased awareness and interest in Baybayin. Artists, educators, and enthusiasts use these platforms to share tutorials, artworks, and historical facts about the script, sparking interest among younger generations. Bills to recognize the script and revive its use alongside the Latin alphabet have been repeatedly considered by the Congress.
Terminology
Baybayin comes from the Tagalog root word baybay, which means "spelling". The first attested use of the term to refer to a writing system is from the 1613 Tagalog dictionary Vocabulario de la lengua tagala by the Spanish priest Pedro San Buenaventura. There, the word was recorded as baibayin. Early Spanish accounts commonly referred to baybayin as “Tagalog letters” or “Tagalog writing.” Additionally, it was referred to as sulat Tagalog by the heads of the communities in the attestation of Pacaen de Mayoboc.While all ancient Philippine scripts are related, ethnic groups used varying names for their respective writing systems. Baybayin was the word used specifically among the Tagalog people. Elsewhere, Bicolanos, for example, called their writing system, and the Kapampangans called theirs kulit. Kulit is a cognate of the Tagalog word kudlit, which refers to the diacritic used in baybayin to change the sound of a given consonant.
Historically, the term alibata was used synonymously with Baybayin. Alibata is a neologism first coined in 1914, possibly under the false assumption that the script was derived from the Arabic script, hence the name. Most modern scholars reject the use of the word alibata as incorrect.
Origins
The origins of baybayin are unclear. Multiple theories exist as to its origin.Influence of Greater India
Historically Southeast Asia was under the influence of Ancient India, where numerous Indianized principalities and empires flourished for several centuries in Khmer-Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The influence of Indian culture into these areas was given the term Indianization. French archaeologist George Coedes defined it as the expansion of an organized culture that was framed upon Indian originations of royalty, Hinduism and Buddhism and the Sanskrit language. This can be seen in the Indianization of Southeast Asia, Hinduism in Southeast Asia and the spread of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. Indian honorifics also influenced the Malay, Khmer, Thai, Filipino and Indonesian honorifics. Examples of these include raja, rani, maharlika, and datu, which were transmitted from Indian culture to Philippines via Malays and the Srivijaya empire. Indian Hindu colonists played a key role as professionals, traders, priests and warriors. Inscriptions have proved that the earliest Indian colonists who settled in Champa and the Malay Archipelago, came from the Pallava dynasty, as they brought with them their Pallava script. The earliest inscriptions in Java exactly match the Pallava script. In the first stage of adoption of Indian scripts, inscriptions were made locally in Indian languages. In the second stage, the scripts were used to write the local Southeast Asian languages. In the third stage, local varieties of the scripts were developed. By the 8th century, the scripts had diverged and separated into regional scripts.Isaac Taylor sought to show that baybayin was introduced into the Philippines from the Coast of Bengal sometime before the 8th century. In attempting to show such a relationship, Taylor presented graphic representations of Kistna and Assam letters like g, k, ng, t, m, h, and u, which resemble the same letters in baybayin. Fletcher Gardner argued that the Philippine scripts had "very great similarity" with the Brahmi script, which was supported by T. H. Pardo de Tavera. According to Christopher Miller, evidence seems strong for baybayin to be ultimately of Gujarati origin; however, Philippine and Gujarati languages have final consonants, so it is unlikely that their indication would have been dropped had baybayin been based directly on a Gujarati model.
Kawi
The Kawi script originated in Java, descending from the Pallava script, and was used across much of Maritime Southeast Asia. The Laguna Copperplate Inscription is the earliest known written document found in the Philippines. It is a legal document with the inscribed date of Saka era 822, corresponding to 21 April 900 AD. It was written in the Kawi script in a variety of Old Malay containing numerous loanwords from Sanskrit and a few non-Malay vocabulary elements whose origin is ambiguous between Old Javanese and Old Tagalog. A second example of Kawi script can be seen on the Butuan Ivory Seal, found in the 1970s and dated between the 9th and 12th centuries. It is an ancient seal made of ivory that was found in an archaeological site in Butuan. The seal has been declared a national cultural treasure. The seal is inscribed with the word Butwan in stylized Kawi. The ivory seal is now housed at the National Museum of the Philippines. One hypothesis therefore reasons that, since Kawi is the earliest attestation of writing in the Philippines, then baybayin may have descended from Kawi.South Sulawesi scripts
, accepting the view that the scripts of the Malay Archipelago originate in India, writes that the South Sulawesi scripts derive from the Kawi script, probably through the medium of the Batak script of Sumatra. The Philippine scripts, according to Diringer, were possibly brought to the Philippines through the Buginese characters in Sulawesi. According to Scott, baybayin's immediate ancestor was very likely a South Sulawesi script, probably Old Makassar or a close ancestor. This is because of the lack of final consonants or vowel canceler markers in baybayin. South Sulawesi languages have a restricted inventory of syllable-final consonants and do not represent them in the Bugis and Makassar scripts. The most likely explanation for the absence of final consonant markers in baybayin is therefore that its direct ancestor was a South Sulawesi script. Sulawesi lies directly to the south of the Philippines and there is evidence of trade routes between the two. Baybayin must therefore have been developed in the Philippines in the fifteenth century CE as the Bugis-Makassar script was developed in South Sulawesi no earlier than 1400 CE.Cham script
Baybayin could have been introduced to the Philippines by maritime connections with the Champa Kingdom. Geoff Wade has argued that the baybayin characters "ga", "nga", "pa", "ma", "ya", and "sa" display characteristics that can be best explained by linking them to the Cham script, rather than other Indic abugidas. According to Wade, Baybayin seems to be more related to other Southeast Asian scripts than to the Kawi script. Wade argues that the Laguna Copperplate Inscription is not definitive proof for a Kawi origin of baybayin, as the inscription displays final consonants, which baybayin does not.History
From the available material, it is clear that baybayin was used in Luzon, Palawan, Mindoro, Pangasinan, Ilocos, Panay, Leyte and Iloilo, but there is no proof supporting that baybayin reached Mindanao. It appears that the Luzon and Palawan varieties started to develop in different ways in the 1500s, before the Spaniards conquered what we know today as the Philippines. This puts Luzon and Palawan as the oldest regions where baybayin was and is used. It is also notable that the script used in Pampanga had already developed special shapes for the four letters by the early 1600s, different from the ones used elsewhere. There were three somewhat distinct varieties of baybayin in the late 1500s and 1600s, though they could not be described as three different scripts any more than the different styles of Latin script across medieval or modern Europe, with their slightly different sets of letters and spelling systems.Early history
The Calatagan Pot, an earthenware pot found in western Batangas, is inscribed with characters strikingly similar to baybayin, and is claimed to have been inscribed ca. 1300 AD. However, its authenticity is disputed.Although one of Ferdinand Magellan's shipmates, Antonio Pigafetta, wrote that the people of the Visayas were not literate in 1521, the baybayin had already arrived there by 1567 when Miguel López de Legazpi reported from Cebu that, "They have their letters and characters like those of the Malays, from whom they learned them; they write them on bamboo bark and palm leaves with a pointed tool, but never is any ancient writing found among them nor word of their origin and arrival in these islands, their customs and rites being preserved by traditions handed down from father to son without any other record." A century later, in 1668, Francisco Alcina wrote: "The characters of these natives , or, better said, those that have been in use for a few years in these parts, an art which was communicated to them from the Tagalogs, and the latter learned it from the Borneans who came from the great island of Borneo to Manila, with whom they have considerable traffic... From these Borneans the Tagalogs learned their characters, and from them the Visayans, so they call them Moro characters or letters because the Moros taught them... learned letters, which many use today, and the women much more than the men, which they write and read more readily than the latter." Francisco de Santa Inés explained in 1676 why writing baybayin was more common among women, as "they do not have any other way to while away the time, for it is not customary for little girls to go to school as boys do, they make better use of their characters than men, and they use them in things of devotion, and in other things that are not of devotion."
The earliest printed book in a Philippine language, featuring both Tagalog in baybayin and transliterated into the Latin script, is the 1593 Doctrina Christiana en Lengua Española y Tagala. The Tagalog text was based mainly on a manuscript written by Fr. Juan de Placencia. Friars Domingo de Nieva and Juan de San Pedro Martyr supervised the preparation and printing of the book, which was carried out by an unnamed Chinese artisan. This is the earliest example of baybayin that exists today, and it is the only example from the 1500s. There is also a series of legal documents containing baybayin, preserved in Spanish and Philippine archives that span more than a century: the three oldest, all in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, are from 1591 and 1599.
Baybayin was noted by the Spanish priest Pedro Chirino in 1604 and Antonio de Morga in 1609 to be known by most Filipinos, and was generally used for personal writings and poetry, among others. However, according to William Henry Scott, there were some datus from the 1590s who could not sign affidavits or oaths, and witnesses who could not sign land deeds in the 1620s.
In 1620, Libro a naisurátan amin ti bagás ti Doctrina Cristiana was written by Fr. Francisco Lopez, an Ilocano Doctrina the first Ilocano baybayin, based on the catechism written by Cardinal Bellarmine. This is an important moment in the history of baybayin, because the krus-kudlít was introduced for the first time, which allowed writing final consonants. He commented the following on his decision: "The reason for putting the text of the Doctrina in Tagalog type... has been to begin the correction of the said Tagalog script, which, as it is, is so defective and confused that the most learned reader has to stop and ponder over many words to decide on the pronunciation which the writer intended." This krus-kudlít, or virama kudlít, did not catch on among baybayin users, however. Native baybayin experts were consulted about the new invention and were asked to adopt it and use it in all their writings. After praising the invention and showing gratitude for it, they decided that it could not be accepted into their writing because "It went against the intrinsic properties and nature that God had given their writing and that to use it was tantamount to destroy with one blow all the Syntax, Prosody and Orthography of their Tagalog language."
In 1703, baybayin was reported to still be in use in the Comintan and other areas of the Philippines.
Among the earliest literature on the orthography of Visayan languages were those of Jesuit priest Ezguerra with his Arte de la lengua bisaya in 1747 and of Mentrida with his Arte de la lengua bisaya: Hiligaynon language in 1818 which primarily discussed grammatical structure. Based on the differing sources spanning centuries, the documented syllabaries also differed in form.
The Ticao stone inscription, also known as the Monreal stone or Rizal stone, is a limestone tablet that contains baybayin characters. Found by pupils of Rizal Elementary School on Ticao Island in Monreal town, Masbate, which had scraped the mud off their shoes and slippers on two irregular shaped limestone tablets before entering their classroom, they are now housed at a section of the National Museum of the Philippines, which weighs 30 kilos, is 11 centimeters thick, 54 cm long and 44 cm wide while the other is 6 cm thick, 20 cm long and 18 cm wide.