Literature of the Philippines: Encyclopedia II - Literature of the Philippines - Archaic Writing System

Literature of the Philippines - Archaic Writing System

Compared to other Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines has very few artifacts that show evidence of writing. However literacy was widespread in Luzon when the Spaniards came in 1571 with a script called Baybayin or Alibata.

The Spaniards recorded that people in Manila and other places wrote on bamboo and specially prepared palm leaves using knives and styli. They were using the ancient Tagalog script which had 17 basic symbols, three of which were the vowels a, i, and u. Each basic consonantal symbol had the inherent a sound: ka, ga, nga, ta, da, na, pa, ba, ma, ya, la, wa, sa, and ha.

A diacritical mark called kudlit modified the sound of the symbol. The kudlit could be a dot, a short line, or even an arrowhead. When placed above the symbol, it changed the inherent sound of the symbol from a to i; placed below, the sound became u. Thus a ba with a kudlit placed above became a bi; if the kudlit was placed below, the symbol became a bu.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Archaic Writing System", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki