Surat Buhid is an

Abugida An abugida (, from Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel no ...

used to write the

Buhid language The Buhid language (Buhid: ) is a language spoken by Mangyans in the island of Mindoro, Philippines. It is divided into eastern and western dialects. It uses the Buhid script, which is encoded in the Unicode-Block Buhid (Buid) (1740–175F). ...

. As a

Brahmic script The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...

indigenous to the Philippines, it closely related to

Baybayin (, ''pre-kudlít'': , ''virama-krus-kudlít'': , ''virama-pamudpod'': ; also formerly commonly incorrectly known as alibata) is a Philippine script. The script is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Geographically, it ...

and Hanunó'o. It is still used today by the

Mangyan Mangyan is the generic name for the eight indigenous groups found on the island of Mindoro, southwest of the island of Luzon, the Philippines, each with its own tribal name, language, and customs. The total population may be around 280,001, ...

s, found mainly on island of

Mindoro Mindoro is the seventh largest and eighth-most populous island in the Philippines. With a total land area of 10,571 km2 ( 4,082 sq.mi ) and has a population of 1,408,454 as of 2020 census. It is located off the southwestern coast of Luz ...

, to write their language, Buhid, together with the Filipino latin script. There are efforts to reinvigorate the use of Surat Buhid. Buhid script use varies across Northern (Bansud area) and Southern Buhid (Bongabong) communities.

Structure

The Buhid script has 18 independent characters, 15 are consonants and 3 vowels. As an Abugida, there is an additional diacritic vowels. Consonants have an inherent /a/ vowel. The other two vowels are indicated by a diacritic above (for /i/) or below (for /u/) the consonant. Depending on the consonant, ligatures are formed, changing the shape of the consonant-vowel combination. Vowels at the beginning of syllables are represented by their own, independent characters. Syllables ending in a consonant are written without the final consonant.

Letters

The letter order of Buhid, recorded in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

, is based on

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

principles that consider both the manner and

place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...

of the consonants and vowels they represent.

Vowels

Consonants

Note: With the proper rendering support, the Buhid syllable ki above (ᝃᝒ) should resemble a plus sign (''+''). Buhid writing makes use of single (᜵) and double (᜶) punctuation marks.

Unicode

Buhid script was added to the

Standard in March, 2002 with the release of version 3.2. The Unicode block for Buhid is U+1740–U+175F:

References

External links

About Buhid
in omniglot.com Philippine scripts Brahmic scripts {{writingsystem-stub