Basahan

Baybayin (,),
also sometimes erroneously referred to as alibata, is a Philippine script widely used primarily in Luzon during the 16th and 17th centuries and prior to write Tagalog and to a lesser extent Visayan languages, Kampampangan, Ilocano, and several other Philippine languages.

Baybayin is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Its use was gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet during Spanish rule, though it has seen limited modern usage in the Philippines.
The script is encoded in Unicode as Tagalog block since 1998 alongside Buhid, Hanunoo, and Tagbanwa scripts.
The Archives of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila holds the largest collection of extant writings using Baybayin.

Baybayin has seen increasing modern usage in the Philippines. Today, Baybayin is often used for cultural and aesthetic purposes, such as in art, graduation regalia, tattoos, and logos. It is also featured on the logos of government agencies, Philippine banknotes, and passports. Additionally, there are educational initiatives and workshops aimed at teaching Baybayin to a new generation. Social media has also been instrumental in the increased awareness and interest in Baybayin. Artists, educators, and enthusiasts use these platforms to share tutorials, artworks, and historical facts about the script, sparking interest among younger generations. Bills to recognize the script and revive its use alongside the Latin alphabet have been repeatedly considered by the Congress.

Terminology

The term means "to write" or "to spell" in Tagalog. The earliest known use of the word to refer to the script was from the ''Vocabulario de la lengua tagala'' (1613) by Pedro San Buenaventura as . Additionally, it was referred to as ''sulat Tagalog'' by the heads of the communities in the attestation of ''Pacaen de Mayoboc'' (1681). Early Spanish accounts commonly referred to baybayin as “Tagalog letters” or “Tagalog writing.” While the script is most widely known today as ''baybáyin'', it has various regional names—such as “Badlit” or “Kudlit-kabadlit” among the Visayans, “Kurditan” or “Kur-itan” among the Ilocanos, “Kulitan” among the Kapampangans, and “Basahan” among the Bicolanos.

Historically, the term ''alibata'' was used synonymously with Baybayin. ''Alibata'' is a neologism first coined in 1914, possibly under the false assumption that the script was derived from the Arabic script, hence the name. Most modern scholars reject the use of the word ''alibata'' as incorrect.

Origins

The origins of are disputed and multiple theories exist as to its origin.

Influence of Greater India

Historically Southeast Asia was under the influence of Ancient India, where numerous Indianized principalities and empires flourished for several centuries in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam. The influence of Indian culture into these areas was given the term '' Indianization''. French archaeologist George Coedes defined it as the expansion of an organized culture that was framed upon Indian originations of royalty, Hinduism and Buddhism and the Sanskrit language. This can be seen in the Indianization of Southeast Asia, Hinduism in Southeast Asia and the spread of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. Indian honorifics also influenced the Malay, Thai, Filipino and Indonesian honorifics. Examples of these include raja, rani, maharlika, and datu, which were transmitted from Indian culture to Philippines via Malays and the Srivijaya empire. Indian Hindu colonists played a key role as professionals, traders, priests and warriors. Inscriptions have proved that the earliest Indian colonists who settled in Champa and the Malay Archipelago, came from the Pallava dynasty, as they brought with them their Pallava script. The earliest inscriptions in Java exactly match the Pallava script. In the first stage of adoption of Indian scripts, inscriptions were made locally in Indian languages. In the second stage, the scripts were used to write the local Southeast Asian languages. In the third stage, local varieties of the scripts were developed. By the 8th century, the scripts had diverged and separated into regional scripts.

Isaac Taylor sought to show that was introduced into the Philippines from the Coast of Bengal sometime before the 8th century. In attempting to show such a relationship, Taylor presented graphic representations of Kistna and Assam letters like g, k, ng, t, m, h, and u, which resemble the same letters in . Fletcher Gardner argued that the Philippine scripts have "very great similarity" with the Brahmi script, which was supported by T. H. Pardo de Tavera. According to Christopher Miller, evidence seems strong for to be ultimately of Gujarati origin; however, Philippine and Gujarati languages have final consonants, so it is unlikely that their indication would have been dropped had been based directly on a Gujarati model.

Kawi

The Kawi script originated in Java, descending from the Pallava script, and was used across much of Maritime Southeast Asia. The Laguna Copperplate Inscription is the earliest known written document found in the Philippines. It is a legal document with the inscribed date of Saka era 822, corresponding to 21 April 900 AD. It was written in the Kawi script in a variety of Old Malay containing numerous loanwords from Sanskrit and a few non-Malay vocabulary elements whose origin is ambiguous between Old Javanese and Old Tagalog. A second example of Kawi script can be seen on the Butuan Ivory Seal, found in the 1970s and dated between the 9th and 12th century. It is an ancient seal made of ivory that was found in an archaeological site in Butuan. The seal has been declared as a national cultural treasure. The seal is inscribed with the word ''Butwan'' in stylized Kawi. The ivory seal is now housed at the National Museum of the Philippines. One hypothesis therefore reasons that, since Kawi is the earliest attestation of writing in the Philippines, then may have descended from Kawi.

South Sulawesi scripts

David Diringer, accepting the view that the scripts of the Malay Archipelago originate in India, writes that the South Sulawesi scripts derive from the Kawi script, probably through the medium of the Batak script of Sumatra. The Philippine scripts, according to Diringer, were possibly brought to the Philippines through the Buginese characters in Sulawesi. According to Scott, 's immediate ancestor was very likely a South Sulawesi script, probably Old Makassar or a close ancestor. This is because of the lack of final consonants or vowel canceler markers in . South Sulawesi languages have a restricted inventory of syllable-final consonants and do not represent them in the Bugis and Makassar scripts. The most likely explanation for the absence of final consonant markers in is therefore that its direct ancestor was a South Sulawesi script. Sulawesi lies directly to the south of the Philippines and there is evidence of trade routes between the two. must therefore have been developed in the Philippines in the fifteenth century CE as the Bugis-Makassar script was developed in South Sulawesi no earlier than 1400 CE.

Cham script

could have been introduced to the Philippines by maritime connections with the Champa Kingdom. Geoff Wade has argued that the characters "ga", "nga", "pa", "ma", "ya" and "sa" display characteristics that can be best explained by linking them to the Cham script, rather than other Indic abugidas. According to Wade, seems to be more related to other southeast Asian scripts than to Kawi script. Wade argues that the Laguna Copperplate Inscription is not definitive proof for a Kawi origin of , as the inscription displays final consonants, which does not.

History

From the material that is available, it is clear that was used in Luzon, Palawan, Mindoro, Pangasinan, Ilocos, Panay, Leyte and Iloilo, but there is no proof supporting that reached Mindanao. It appears that the Luzon and Palawan varieties started to develop in different ways in the 1500s, before the Spaniards conquered what we know today as the Philippines. This puts Luzon and Palawan as the oldest regions where was and is used. It is also notable that the script used in Pampanga had already developed special shapes for four letters by the early 1600s, different from the ones used elsewhere. There were three somewhat distinct varieties of in the late 1500s and 1600s, though they could not be described as three different scripts any more than the different styles of Latin script across medieval or modern Europe with their slightly different sets of letters and spelling systems.

Early history

An earthenware burial jar, called the "Calatagan Pot," found in Batangas is inscribed with characters strikingly similar to , and is claimed to have been inscribed ca. 1300 AD. However, its authenticity has not yet been proven.

Although one of Ferdinand Magellan's shipmates, Antonio Pigafetta, wrote that the people of the Visayas were not literate in 1521, the had already arrived there by 1567 when Miguel López de Legazpi reported from Cebu that, "They he Visayanshave their letters and characters like those of the Malays, from whom they learned them; they write them on bamboo bark and palm leaves with a pointed tool, but never is any ancient writing found among them nor word of their origin and arrival in these islands, their customs and rites being preserved by traditions handed down from father to son without any other record." A century later, in 1668, Francisco Alcina wrote: "The characters of these natives isayans or, better said, those that have been in use for a few years in these parts, an art which was communicated to them from the Tagalogs, and the latter learned it from the Borneans who came from the great island of Borneo to Manila, with whom they have considerable traffic... From these Borneans the Tagalogs learned their characters, and from them the Visayans, so they call them Moro characters or letters because the Moros taught them... he Visayanslearned he Moros'letters, which many use today, and the women much more than the men, which they write and read more readily than the latter." Francisco de Santa Inés explained in 1676 why writing was more common among women, as "they do not have any other way to while away the time, for it is not customary for little girls to go to school as boys do, they make better use of their characters than men, and they use them in things of devotion, and in other things that are not of devotion."

The earliest printed book in a Philippine language, featuring both Tagalog in and transliterated into the Latin script, is the 1593 ''Doctrina Christiana en Lengua Española y Tagala''. The Tagalog text was based mainly on a manuscript written by Fr. Juan de Placencia. Friars Domingo de Nieva and Juan de San Pedro Martyr supervised the preparation and printing of the book, which was carried out by an unnamed Chinese artisan. This is the earliest example of that exists today and it is the only example from the 1500s. There is also a series of legal documents containing , preserved in Spanish and Philippine archives that span more than a century: the three oldest, all in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, are from 1591 and 1599.

was noted by the Spanish priest Pedro Chirino in 1604 and Antonio de Morga in 1609 to be known by most Filipinos, and was generally used for personal writings and poetry, among others. However, according to William Henry Scott, there were some datus from the 1590s who could not sign affidavits or oaths, and witnesses who could not sign land deeds in the 1620s.

In 1620, ''Libro a naisurátan amin ti bagás ti Doctrina Cristiana'' was written by Fr. Francisco Lopez, an ''Ilocano Doctrina'' the first Ilocano baybayin, based on the catechism written by Cardinal Bellarmine. This is an important moment in the history of , because the krus-kudlít was introduced for the first time, which allowed writing final consonants. He commented the following on his decision: "The reason for putting the text of the Doctrina in Tagalog type... has been to begin the correction of the said Tagalog script, which, as it is, is so defective and confused (because of not having any method until now for expressing final consonants - I mean, those without vowels) that the most learned reader has to stop and ponder over many words to decide on the pronunciation which the writer intended." This krus-kudlít, or virama kudlít, did not catch on among users, however. Native experts were consulted about the new invention and were asked to adopt it and use it in all their writings. After praising the invention and showing gratitude for it, they decided that it could not be accepted into their writing because "It went against the intrinsic properties and nature that God had given their writing and that to use it was tantamount to destroy with one blow all the Syntax, Prosody and Orthography of their Tagalog language."

In 1703, was reported to still be in use in the ''Comintan'' (Batangas and Laguna) and other areas of the Philippines.

Among the earliest literature on the orthography of Visayan languages were those of Jesuit priest Ezguerra with his in 1747 and of Mentrida with his in 1818 which primarily discussed grammatical structure. Based on the differing sources spanning centuries, the documented syllabaries also differed in form.

The Ticao stone inscription, also known as the Monreal stone or Rizal stone, is a limestone tablet that contains characters. Found by pupils of Rizal Elementary School on Ticao Island in Monreal town, Masbate, which had scraped the mud off their shoes and slippers on two irregular shaped limestone tablets before entering their classroom, they are now housed at a section of the National Museum of the Philippines, which weighs 30 kilos, is 11 centimeters thick, 54 cm long and 44 cm wide while the other is 6 cm thick, 20 cm long and 18 cm wide.

Usage

Historically, baybayin was used in Tagalog- and to a lesser extent Kapampangan-speaking areas. It spread to the Ilocanos when the Spanish distributed bibles written in baybayin. Pedro Chirino, a Spanish priest and Antonio de Morga noted in 1604 and 1609 that most Filipino men and women could read baybayin. It was also noted that they did not write books or keep records, but did use baybayin for signing documents, for personal notes and messages, and for poetry. During the colonial period, Filipinos began keeping paper records of their property and financial transactions, and would write down lessons they were taught in church. Documents written in the native language and began to play a significant role in the judicial and legal life of the colony.

Traditionally, baybayin was written upon palm leaves with a sharp stylus or on bamboo with a small knife. The curved shape of the letter forms of is influenced by this practice; straight lines would tear the leaves. Once the letters were carved into the bamboo, it was wiped with ash to make the characters stand out.

During the era of Spanish colonization, baybayin came to be written with ink on paper using a sharpened quill. Woodblock printed books were produced to facilitate the spread of Christianity. In some parts of the country, such as Mindoro the traditional writing technique has been retained.

Decline

Baybayin fell out of use in much of the Philippines under Spanish rule. Learning the Latin alphabet also helped Filipinos to make socioeconomic progress, as they could rise to relatively prestigious positions such as clerks, scribes and secretaries. In 1745, Sebastián de Totanés wrote in his ''Arte de la lengua tagala'' that "The Indian ilipinowho knows how to read baybayin is now rare, and rarer still is one who knows how to write t They now all read and write in our Castilian .e. Latinletters." Between 1751 and 1754, Juan José Delgado wrote that "the ativemen devoted themselves to the use of our atinwriting". The ambiguity of vowels i/e and o/u, the lack of syllable-final consonants and of letters for some Spanish sounds may also have contributed to the decline of baybayin.

The rarity of pre-Hispanic baybayin texts has led to a common misconception that fanatical Spanish priests must have destroyed the majority native documents. Anthropologist and historian H. Otley Beyer wrote in ''The Philippines before Magellan'' (1921) that, "one Spanish priest in Southern Luzon boasted of having destroyed more than three hundred scrolls written in the native character". In fact, historians have been unable to verify Beyer's claim, and there is no direct evidence of substantial destruction of documents by Spanish missionaries. Hector Santos has suggested although that Spanish friars may have occasionally burned short documents such as incantations, curses and spells (deemed evil by the church) but rejected the idea that there was any systematic destruction of pre-Hispanic manuscripts. Morrow also notes that there are no recorded instances of pre-Hispanic Filipinos writing on scrolls, and that the most likely reason why no pre-Hispanic documents survived is because they wrote on perishable materials such as leaves and bamboo. There are also no reports of Tagalog written scriptures, as the Filipinos kept their theological knowledge in oral form while using the Baybayin for secular purposes and talismans.

The scholar Isaac Donoso claims that the documents written in the native language and in native scripts played a significant role in the judicial and legal life of the colony and noted that many colonial-era documents written in baybayin still exist in some repositories, including the library of the University of Santo Tomas.: "What is important to us is the relevant activity during these centuries to study, write and even print in Baybayin. And this task is not strange in other regions of the Spanish Empire. In fact indigenous documents placed a significant role in the judicial and legal life of the colonies. Documents in other language than Spanish were legally considered, and Pedro de Castro says that "I have seen in the archives of Lipa and Batangas many documents with these characters". Nowadays we can find Baybayin documents in some repositories, including the oldest library in the country, the University of Santo Tomás." He also noted that the early Spanish missionaries did not suppress the usage of the baybayin script but instead may have even promoted it as a measure to stop Islamization, since the Tagalog language was moving from baybayin to Jawi, the Arabized script of Islamized Southeast Asian societies. Paul Morrow also suggests that Spanish friars helped to preserve baybayin by continuing its use even after it had been abandoned by most Filipinos.

Characteristics

is an abugida (alphasyllabary), which means that it makes use of consonant-vowel combinations. Each character or ''titik'', written in its basic form, is a consonant ending with the vowel /a/. To produce consonants ending with other vowel sounds, a mark called a ''kudlít'' is placed either above the character to change the /a/ to an /e/ or /i/, or below for an /o/ or /u/. To write words beginning with a vowel, one of the three independent vowels (a, i/e, o/u). A third kudlít, , called a ''sabat'' or ''krus'', a ''virama'' removes a consonant's inherent ''a'' vowel, making it an independent consonant. The krus-kudlít virama was added to the original script by the Spanish priest Francisco Lopez in 1620. Later, the pamudpod virama , which has the same function, was added. Beside these phonetic considerations, the script is monocameral and does not use letter case for distinguishing proper names or words starting sentences.

Punctuation and spacing

originally used only one punctuation mark (), which was called ''Bantasán''. Today uses two punctuation marks, the Philippine single () punctuation, acting as a comma or verse splitter in poetry, and the double punctuation (), acting as a period or end of paragraph. These punctuation marks are similar to single and double danda signs in other Indic Abugidas and may be presented vertically like Indic dandas, or slanted like forward slashes. The signs are unified across Philippines scripts and were encoded by Unicode in the Hanunóo script block. Space separation of words was historically not used as words were written in a continuous flow, but is common today.

Alphabetical order

In the ''Doctrina Christiana'', the letters were ordered without any connection with other similar scripts, except sorting vowels before consonants as:
:
a, u/o, i/e; ha, pa, ka, sa, la, ta, na, ba, ma, ga, da/ra, ya, nga, wa.
In Unicode the letters are ordered in a similar way to other Indic scripts, by phonetic class.
:
a, i/e, o/u; ka, ga, nga; ta, da, na; pa, ba, ma; ya, ra, la; wa, sa, ha.

Way of writing

According to Scott, when e.g. the sign for ba has to be read as be / bi it has a ''kaldit'' (a small "v" shaped diacritic sign) on the left (or above), if it has to be read as bu / bo the kaldit is on the right (resp. below). The ancient characters of Tagalog and Camarines people had its own character for /r/, in contrast to more common modern Baybayin version and Ilokano Kurdita. In his time the kaldit was called or according to Marcos de Lisboa, author of the earliest dictionary of Bikol.

According to Lisboa, the writing of the old Bikolnons started from the bottom up, writing to the right. However, some scholars such as Ignacio Villamor who have studied the 'basahan' of pre-Hispanic Filipinos strongly emphasize that they all wrote the scriptures in a straight line starting from left to right, then returning on the left at the beginning, keep writing right.

Contemporary usage and revival

A number of legislative bills have been proposed periodically aiming to promote the writing system, including the "National Writing System Act" (House Bill 1022/Senate Bill 433).

There are attempts of modernizing Baybayin such as adding letters like R, C, V, Z, F, Q, and X that are not originally on the script in order to make writing modern Filipino words easier such as the word Zambales and other provinces and towns in the Philippines that have Spanish origins.

Baybayin was used in the most current New Generation Currency series of the Philippine peso issued in the last quarter of 2010. The word used on the bills was "Pilipino" ().

It is also used in Philippine passports, specifically the latest e-passport edition issued 11 August 2009 onwards. The odd pages of pages 3–43 have "" (""/"Righteousness exalts a nation") in reference to Proverbs 14:34.

File:Philippine passport (2016 edition) Baybayin.jpg, Philippine passport showing the Baybayin script
Philippine revolution flag magdiwang.svg, Flag of the Katipunan Magdiwang faction, with the letter ''ka''
National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP).svg, Seal of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, with the two Baybayin ''ka'' and ''pa'' letters in the center
National Library of the Philippines (NLP).svg, Logo of the National Library of the Philippines. The Baybayin text reads
National Museum of the Philippines.svg, Logo of the National Museum of the Philippines, with a Baybayin ''pa'' letter in the center, in a traditional rounded style
CulturalCenterPH.svg, Logo of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, with three rotated occurrences of the Baybayin ''ka'' letter
NCCA Logo.svg, Logo of National Commission for Culture and the Arts, with the letter ''ka'' stylized as an eternal flame
Gawad Lakandula.png, The insignia of the Order of Lakandula with the name ''Lakandula'', in the middle, read counterclockwise from the top
National Living Treasures Award logo.svg, Logo of the National Living Treasures Award with the words ''Manlilikha ng Bayan''
Panitik Silangan, September 1963.png, The front page of the publication "Panitik Silangan", mostly printed in Baybayin, September 1963

Derivative scripts

Bayabin's surviving descendant scripts include the Tagbanwa script, also known as known as ''ibalnan'' by the Palawan people, who have adopted it, the Buhid script and the Hanunóo script of Mindoro. The modern Kulitan script is a unique script that employs consonant stacking and is derived from Old Kapampangan, the precolonial Indic script used to write the Kapampangan language, and reformed in recent decades.

Sample texts

Article one of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

;Tagalog in Baybayin script;

;Romanized

;English
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Motto of the Philippines

;Tagalog in Baybayin script

;Romanized

;English
For God, for people, for nature, and for country. One country, one spirit.

National anthem

The first two verses of the Philippine national anthem, ''Lupang Hinirang''.

;Tagalog in Baybayin script

;Romanized

;International phonetic alphabet

;English
Land of the morning,
Child of the sun returning,
With fervor burning
Thee do our souls adore.

Land dear and holy,
Cradle of noble heroes,
Ne'er shall invaders
Trample thy sacred shores.

Unicode

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

Block

is included in Unicode under the name 'Tagalog'.

Tagalog Unicode range: U+1700–U+171F

Keyboard

Gboard

The virtual keyboard app Gboard developed by Google for Android and iOS devices was updated on 1 August 2019 its list of supported languages. This includes all Unicode blocks. Included are "Buhid", "Hanunuo", ''baybayin'' as "Filipino (Baybayin)", and the Tagbanwa script as "Aborlan". The ''baybayin'' layout, "Filipino (Baybayin)", is designed such that when the user presses the character, vowel markers (''kudlít'') for e/i and o/u, as well as the ''virama'' (vowel sound cancellation) are selectable.

Philippines Unicode Keyboard Layout with

It is possible to type directly from one's keyboard without the need to use web applications which implement an input method. The Philippines Unicode Keyboard Layout includes different sets of layout for different keyboard users: QWERTY, Capewell-Dvorak, Capewell-QWERF 2006, Colemak, and Dvorak, all of which work in both Microsoft Windows and Linux.

This keyboard layout with can be downloade
here

See also

* Filipino orthography
**Suyat
*** Buhid script
*** Hanuno'o script
***Tagbanwa script
***Kulitan
*** Basahan
* Kawi
**Laguna Copperplate Inscription
**Butuan Silver Paleograph
**Butuan Ivory Seal

* Tagalog language
** Old Tagalog

* History of Indian influence on Southeast Asia
** Abugida

External links

Noto Sans Tagalogsample of Basahan script font

Notes

References

Works cited

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

External links

*
House Bill 160, aka the ''National Script Act of 2011''

{{Symbols of the Philippines

Brahmic scripts
Obsolete writing systems
Philippine scripts
Tagalog language
Filipino language