| Eskayan | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eskaya | ||||||
| Spoken in | Philippines | |||||
| Region | Bohol | |||||
| Native speakers | unknown (date missing) | |||||
| Language family | ||||||
| Writing system | Eskayan script (syllabary) | |||||
| Language codes | ||||||
| ISO 639-3 | None | |||||
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Eskayan script table
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Eskayan is the language of the Eskaya cultural minority of Bohol, an island province of the Philippines. Relatively little is known about this speech variety which has been the object of occasional media attention in the Philippines since the 1980s.[1] While Eskayan has no mother-tongue speakers, it is taught by volunteers in at least three cultural schools in the southeast interior of the province.
Eskayan has a number of idiosyncrasies that have attracted wide interest. One of its most immediately remarkable features is its unique writing system of over 1000 syllabic characters, all said to be modelled on parts of the human body.[2] Also significant is its syntactic and morphological relationship to Boholano-Visayan, the dominant language of Bohol and some surrounding provinces.[3]
The earliest attested document written in Eskayan provisionally dates from 1908 and was on display at the Bohol Museum until September 2006.
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Eskayan shows no consistent lexical similarity to any languages spoken in its vicinity, which has prompted broad speculation about its origins. Over the years, languages as far flung as Greek,[4][5] Phoenician,[6] Biblical Hebrew,[7][8] Latin,[9][10] Etruscan,[11] and Arabic[12] have all been linked to Eskayan without success. Comparative studies have since indicated that although Eskayan shows no credible lexical relationship with any tested language, apart from a good number of Spanish words (some with their meanings changed, such as astro 'sun' (from 'star') and tre 'two' (from 'three'), and only a few from Cebuano,[13] it displays a manifest grammatical and semantic relationship with Boholano-Visayan. That is, many Eskayan words and grammatical elements have semantically equivalent counterparts in Boholano-Visayan.[14] The most plausible explanation is that Eskayan is an auxiliary or secret language encoded from Boholano-Visayan. This theory is consistent with the Eskaya written legend Pinay, which tells of how an ancestor was instructed to create the language and script, basing it on the human anatomy.[13] Indigenous auxiliary languages with accompanying creation myths are attested elsewhere in the world. One notable case is the Damin ceremonial language of the Gulf of Carpentaria which is derived from the (natural) Lardil language and is said to have been the creation of the ancestor Kalthad. Another example is the auxiliary Pandanus Language spoken in Medan region of Papua New Guinea. Whatever the origins of Eskayan, structural comparisons show that it is grammatically Cebuano while the age and origin of Eskayan words remains a mystery.
The Eskayan script has both alphabetic and syllabic components. A basic 'alphabet' of 46 characters accounts for most of the common sounds and syllables used in Eskayan while a broader subset totalling over 1000 is used to represent the remaining syllables. The unusual diversity of consonant and vowel clusters accounts for this relatively large number of composite characters, which even includes superfluous symbols.[15] The symbols are said to be based on parts of the human anatomy, though many are clearly based on the cursive roman alphabet.
A romanised form of Eskayan is used in the cultural schools for the purpose of exposition. Although not strictly standardised, this orthography has elements in common with the Spanish system once used for transliterating Cebuano. E.g., the letters ‘i’ and ‘e’ are interchangeable symbols representing the sound /ɪ/; the ‘ll’ combination is pronounced /lj/ and the letter ‘c’ will be pronounced /s/ when it precedes a frontal vowel as per Spanish. A notable innovation in Eskayan romanised orthography is the letter combination ‘chd’ which represents the sound /d͡ʒ/.[13]
Eskayan shares all the same phonemes as Boholano-Visayan (the particular variety of Cebuano spoken on Bohol) and even includes the distinctive Boholano voiced palatal affricate /d͡ʒ/ that appears in Visayan words such as maayo [maʔad͡ʒo] (‘good’). With the exception of this phoneme, Eskayan shares the same basic phonology as Cebuano-Visayan, Tagalog and many other Philippine languages. The phonotactics of Eskayan, on the other hand, are quite different from those of Boholano-Visayan and Philippine languages generally. This can be seen in Eskayan words such as bosdipir [bosdɪpɪr] (‘eel’), guinposlan [ɡɪnposlan] (‘face’), ilcdo [ɪlkdo] (‘knee’) and estrapirado [ɪstrapɪrado] (‘flower’) that contain consonant sequences like /sd/, /np/, /sl/, /lkd/ and /str/ which do not feature in Philippine languages. Furthermore, a significant number of Eskayan words have phonemic sequences that are common in Spanish or in Spanish loans into Boholano-Visayan but appear rarely, if ever, in non-borrowed words.[13]
Eskayan conforms to the same syntactic and morphological structure as Cebuano. As such, Eskayan nouns are uninflected but may be marked for case with one of several preceding case markers.
The table below shows the basic case system of Eskayan, with Cebuano equivalents in brackets.[16]
| Personal name marker | Non-personal name marker | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| nominative | ye or e (si) | Specific (article) | esto (ang) |
| possessive | kon (ni) | Oblique specific | ya (sa) |
| dative | puy (kang) | Oblique non-specific | chda (ug) |
Eskayan personal pronouns are also marked by case. In the table below, the Cebuano equivalents are indicated in brackets. (These pronouns are drawn from a limited corpus; omissions are indicated by [] and uncertainties with an asterisk.)
| Absolutive | Genitive₁ (Preposed) |
Genitive₂ (Postposed) |
Oblique | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st person singular | naren (ako, ko) | damo (akong) | tompoy (nako, ko) | tompoy (kanako, nako) |
| 2nd person singular | samo (ikaw, ka) | gona (imong) | nistro (nimo, mo) | nistro (kanimo, nimo) |
| 3rd person singular | atcil (siya) | chdel (iyang) | kon chdil (niya) | mininos* (kaniya, niya) |
| 1st person plural inclusive | arhitika (kita, ta) | chdaro (atong) | [] (nato) | [] (kanato, nato) |
| 1st person plural exclusive | kim (kami, mi) | gramyu (among) | [] (namo) | [] (kanamo, namo) |
| 2nd person plural | chdicto (kamo, mo) | [] (inyong) | [] (ninyo) | [] (kaninyo, ninyo) |
| 3rd person plural | [] (sila) | persiyan (ilang) | [] (nila) | [] (kanila, nila) |
Despite its structural equivalence to Eskayan, Cebuano has had a very limited lexical influence on the language. In a comparison of core Swadesh vocabulary, there are eight identifiable cognates.[13]
| English | Eskayan | Cebuano |
|---|---|---|
| at | ya | sa |
| that | cano | ka'na |
| we (inclusive/exclusive) | arhitika/kim | kita/kami |
| who | kinya | kinsa |
| four | pat | upat |
| six | nom | un'um |
| eight | wal | walo' |
| nine | sem | siam |
Although the Eskayan lexicon bears a marked Spanish influence,[17] the loan-patterns are hard to map.[13] Some Spanish words appear to have been directly borrowed into Eskayan with virtually no semantic or phonetic alterations. E.g., the Eskayan word merido, meaning ‘husband’, is evidently loaned from the Spanish marido, also meaning ‘husband’. Others retain only a few of the semantic properties of the original. E.g., the word astro means ‘sun’ in Eskayan but ‘star’ in Spanish. In some interesting cases Eskayan lexical items appear to be borrowed but are assigned new meanings entirely. E.g., the Eskayan memorya (‘sky’) does not coincide semantically with the Spanish memoria (‘memory’). One of the most intriguing examples of such an ‘interrupted loan’ is that of the Eskayan tre (‘two’) seemingly derived from the Spanish tres (‘three’). Here the semantic property of ‘number’ was retained but the actual quantity it represented was reassigned.[13]
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Eskaya community attracted the interest of local mystics who promoted the notion that their language was of exotic origin.[1] Today, the few linguists who have examined Eskayan generally concur that it is structurally Cebuano but lexically irregular. The implication of these two premises is that Eskayan is an auxiliary language or a highly sophisticated form of disguised speech encoded from Cebuano. This raises further questions as to what the auxiliary functions of the language might have been – e.g., liturgical, political, military – and when precisely it came into existence.
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