Baybayin
| Baybayin | |
| Type | Abugida |
|---|---|
| Spoken languages | Ilokano Kapampangan Pangasinan Tagalog Bikol languages Visayan languages other languages of the Philippines |
| Time period | c. 1300–20th century |
| Parent systems | Proto-Canaanite alphabet → Phoenician alphabet → Aramaic alphabet → Brāhmī → Pallava → Old Kawi → Baybayin |
| Sister systems | Balinese Batak Buhid Hanunó'o Javanese Lontara Old Sundanese Rejang Tagbanwa |
| Unicode range | U+1700–U+171F |
| ISO 15924 | Tglg |
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| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | |
Baybayin or Alibata (known in Unicode as the Tagalog script) is a pre-Spanish Philippine writing system that originated from the Javanese script Old Kawi. The writing system is a member of the Brahmic family (and an offshoot of the Vatteluttu alphabet) and is believed to have been in use as early as the 14th century.[1] It continued in use during the Spanish colonization of the Philippines up until the late 19th Century. The term baybayin literally means syllables. Closely related scripts are Hanunóo, Buhid, and Tagbanwa.
The Philippine Baybayin is one of a dozen or so individual alphabets from such Southeast asian islands as Sumatra, Java, and Sulawesi which are derived from ancient India and share the Sanskrit characteristic that any consonant is pronounced with the vowel a following it— diacritical marks being used to express other vowels (this vowel occurs with greatest frequency in Sanskrit, and also probably in all Philippine languages).[1] None of these other scripts, however, enjoys the wealth of documentary testimony spread across four centuries which exists for Philippine Baybayin.[2]
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Usage
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The writing system is an abugida system using consonant-vowel combinations. Each character, written in its basic form, is a consonant ending with the vowel "A". To produce consonants ending with the other vowel sounds, a mark is placed either above the consonant (to produce an "E" or "I" sound) or below the consonant (to produce an "O" or "U" sound). The mark is called a kudlit. The kudlit does not apply to stand-alone vowels. Vowels themselves have their own glyphs. There is only one symbol for D or R as they were allophones in most languages of the Philippines, wherein D fell in initial, final, pre-consonantal or post-consonantal positions and R in intervocalic positions. The grammatical rule has survived in modern Filipino that when a d is between two vowels, it becomes an r as in the words dangál (honour) and marangál (honourable), or dunong (knowledge) and marunong (knowledgeable), and even raw for daw (he said, she said, they said, it was said, allegedly, reportedly, supposedly) and rin for din (also, too) after vowels.[1] This script is not used for Ilokano, Pangasinan, Bikolano, and other Philippine languages to name a few as these languages have separate sounds for D and R.
In its original form however, a stand-alone consonant (consonants not ending with any vowel sound) cannot be produced, in which case these were simply not written and the reader would fill in the missing consonants through context. For example, the letters n and k in a word like bundók (mountain) were omitted, so that it was spelled bu-do. This method, however, was particularly hard for the Spanish priests who were translating books into the native language. Because of this Father Francisco Lopez introduced his own kudlit in 1620 that eliminated the vowel sound. The kudlit was in the form of a "+" sign[3], in reference to Christianity. This cross-shaped kudlit functions exactly the same as the virama in the Devanagari script of India. In fact, Unicode calls this kudlit the Tagalog Sign Virama.
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A single character represented the nga syllable. The latest version of the modern Filipino alphabet still retains the ng as a single letter but it is written with two characters. Words written in baybayin were written in a continuous flow, and the only form of punctuation was a single vertical line, or more often, a pair of vertical lines (||). These vertical lines fulfill the function of a comma, period, or unpredictably separate sets of words.[1]
Characters in Base form
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Unicode
The Unicode range for Babayin is U+1700–U+171F, where it is called Tagalog. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.
| Tagalog Unicode.org chart (PDF) |
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| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| U+170x | ᜀ | ᜁ | ᜂ | ᜃ | ᜄ | ᜅ | ᜆ | ᜇ | ᜈ | ᜉ | ᜊ | ᜋ | ᜌ | ᜎ | ᜏ | |
| U+171x | ᜐ | ᜑ | ᜒᜒ | ᜓᜓᜓ | ᜓᜓᜓ᜔ | |||||||||||
See also
- Laguna Copperplate Inscription
- Tagalog alphabet
- commons:Category:Baybayin letters
Notes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Baybayin, the Ancient Philippine script. Accessed September 04, 2008.
- ↑ Scott 1984, pp. 57-58
- ↑ Tagalog script. Accessed September 02, 2008.
References
- Scott, William Henry (1984), Prehispanic Source Materials for the study of Philippine History, New Day Publishers, ISBN 971-10-0226-4, http://books.google.com/books?id=bR2XAQAACAAJ.
External links
- Ang Baybayin by Paul Morrow
- Unicode Tagalog Range 1700-171F (in PDF)
- Yet another Baybayin chart
- Baybayin online translator
- Baybayin video tutorial
- Free custom Baybayin translations
- Tagalog script
Font downloads
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