Tagbanwa alphabet

Tagbanwa
ᝦᝪᝨᝯ
Type Abugida
Languages Languages of Palawan
Time period c. 1300–present
Parent systems
Sister systems Balinese
Batak
Baybayin
Buhid
Hanunó'o
Javanese
Lontara
Old Sundanese
Rencong
Rejang
ISO 15924 Tagb, 373
Direction Left-to-right
Unicode alias Tagbanwa
Unicode range U+1760–U+177F
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.

Tagbanwa, also known as Apurahuano, is one of the indigenous writing systems of the Philippines. The Tagbanwa language, an Austronesian language, with about 8, 000 speakers in the central and northern regions of Palawan, is dying out as the younger generations of Tagbanua are learning Cuyonon and Tagalog.

Contents

Origin

The Tagbanwa script was used in the Philippines until the 17th century. Closely related to Baybayin, it is believed to have come from the Kawi script of Java, Bali and Sumatra, which in turn, descended from the Pallava script, one of the southern Indian scripts derived from Brahmi.[1]

Features

Tagbanwa is a syllabic alphabet in which each consonant has an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels are indicated either by separate letters, or by diacritics. When vowels appear at the beginning of words or one they own, they are represented by separate letters.

Tagbanwa is traditionally written on bamboo in vertical columns from bottom to top and left to right. Though it is read from left to right in horizontal lines.[1]

Unicode

Tagbanwa script was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2002 with the release of version 3.2.

The Unicode block for Tagbanwa is U+1760–U+177F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points:

Tagbanwa[1]
Unicode.org chart (PDF)
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
U+176x
U+177x
Notes
1.^ As of Unicode version 6.0

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Omniglot: Tagbanwa. Accessed August 28, 2008.

External links