Baybayin – The Ancient Script of the Philippines by Paul Morrow

Ang Baybayin

Baybayin – The Ancient Script of the Philippines  by Paul Morrow

 

This language of ours is like any other,
it once had an alphabet and its own letters
that vanished as though a tempest had set upon
a boat on a lake in a time now long gone.

“To My Fellow Children”,
attributed to 
Jose Rizal, 1869
English translation by P. Morrow

The tempest in Rizal’s verse struck the Philippines in the 16th century. It was the Spanish Empire and the lost alphabet was a script that is known today as the baybayin.

Contrary to the common misconception, when the Spaniards arrived in the islands they found more than just a loose collection of backward and belligerent tribes. They found a civilization that was very different from their own. The ability to read and write is the mark of any civilization and, according to many early Spanish accounts, the Tagalogs had already been writing with the baybayin for at least a century. This script was just beginning to spread throughout the islands at that time. Furthermore, the discovery in 1987 of an inscription on a sheet of copper in Laguna is evidence that there was an even more advanced script in limited use in the Philippines as far back as the year 900 C.E.  (See The Laguna Copperplate Inscription)

Continue at: http://www.mts.net/~pmorrow/bayeng1.htm

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