A new translation of the Calatangan Pot inscription

The Calatangan Pot is a prehispanic (14th-16th century) artifact containing an inscription around the neck. It is said to be one of the earliest expressions of prehispanic writing in the Philippines, and there have been several attempts at translating the inscription. Rolando Borrinaga is the latest person to offer an translation of the script, based on old Bisayan and old Tagalog alphabets. An earlier attempt to decipher the Calatangan Pot incription was made by University of the Philippines’ Ramon Guillerm

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The mystery of the ancient inscription
The Inquirer, 23 May 2009

AFTER 50 years of enigma, the text inscribed around the shoulder of the Calatagan Pot, the country’s oldest cultural artifact with pre-Hispanic writing, may have been deciphered as written in the old Bisayan language.

Diggers discovered the pot in an archeological site in Calatagan, Batangas, in 1958. They sold it for P6 to a certain Alfredo Evangelista.

Later, the Anthropological Foundation of the Philippines purchased the find and donated it in 1961 to the National Museum, where it is displayed to this day.

The pot, measuring 12 centimeters high and 20.2 cm at its widest and weighing 872 grams, is considered one of the Philippines’ most valuable cultural and anthropological artifacts. It has been dated back to the 14th and 16th centuries.

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The Calatagan Pot
by Hector Santos
© 1996 by Hector Santos
All rights reserved.

http://www.bibingka.com/dahon/mystery/pot.htm

In the early 1960′s, an artifact was offered by treasure hunters to National Museum staff as they were working on a nearby excavation. It was the Calatagan pot, the first pre-Hispanic artifact with writing to be found. As such, it is the best known and written about among all artifacts with writing. Even at that, it is still undeciphered.

Calatagan Pot The late Dr. Robert Fox brought the pot to the offices of the Manila Times to ask help from its editor, Chino Roces, in deciphering the writing around the mouth of the pot. The newspaper, as a result, commissioned the sculptor Guillermo Tolentino, an expert on Philippine syllabaries, to decipher the writing. Tolentino had a hard time with certain letters so he, as a spiritist, reportedly summoned his special powers to come up with a translation.

The authenticity of the pot has been questioned since it first showed up. For one thing, no other pot has been found decorated with writing. Carbon dating was reportedly done on the pot but the results pointed to such an extremely early date that it had to be rejected. Dr. Fox wanted to do some thermoluminescence testing but didn’t live to see it done.

Nevertheless, the pot may still be authentic. It would have been very easy for a forger to write something decipherable on the pot, especially text which made sense. Anyone attempting to create a phony artifact would probably have done so. As it was, the strangeness of the characters and the direction of writing (or to be more precise, the direction in which the artisan wrote the letters) gives us something to think about.

Juan Francisco, a respected Philippine paleographer, did some analysis of the letters in his 1973 book, Philippine Palaeography. He could not decipher the writing, however. His analysis mainly consisted of classifying the letters as curvilinear, lineo-angular, or a combination of the two. I cannot see the usefulness of such a classification because there is no benefit from its use, whether in trying to find the script’s heritage or in classifying it among the known scripts of the world. His book contains good sketches of all the letters though, which makes the section on the Calatagan pot in his book not entirely useless.

The writing on the pot goes around its mouth. The letters look similar to those of classic Philippine scripts (Tagalog, Tagbanwa, Buhid, and Hanunóo) but some appear to be oriented in strange ways. Some show a similarity to older scripts used in Indonesia, suggesting an earlier development of classic Philippine scripts.

The symbols are divided by stop marks into six groups (which may be phrases), each consisting of five or seven symbols.

Calatagan Writing

What is strange and maybe significant about the writing is the apparent direction in which the artisan wrote it. A look at the pot will show that the artisan engraved the letters into the soft clay in a direction going to the left looking at the pot as it stands right side up.

He apparently misjudged the length of the writing and ran out of space so that its last few letters go under the starting point. This gives us a clue as to the literacy of the artisan.

We know that ALL Southeast Asian scripts share a common ancestor and were meant to be read and written from left to right. (Forget what others have said about having observed Tagbanwans writing on bamboo slats in a direction away from their body. You have seen classmates in grade school writing on paper oriented at an angle with respect to their body so that they appeared to have been writing vertically, have you not?)

There are two possibilities:

1. The artisan could well have been from modern times and may have trying to create a phony artifact but had an authentic sample to copy from. He may not have been aware of the direction of writing and so copied the sample from right to left. The result would have been a phony pot with an authentic inscription.

2. Perhaps the pot was authentic but the artisan, illiterate. He had a favorite curse or prayer written on a strip of bamboo or palm leaf. He wanted to use that phrase to decorate the pot.

Being illiterate, he had a 50% chance of going the wrong way which unfortunately he did, verifying Murphy’s Law yet one more time. He also ended up misjudging the length of the writing and had to go under the starting point to get everything written down.

If he had held the written sample right side up while copying it, the letters would be shown in their correct orientation. However, if he held the sample upside down the letters can be viewed in their proper orientation by looking from above the pot.

There may be other possibilities but the fact remains that the successful decipherment of an unknown script requires enough samples to be available.

If the Calatagan pot turns out to be a fake, its creator may either have been a bumbling fool who did not know much about scripts or a very sophisticated forger who could have introduced mysterious symbols deliberately to send paleographers wondering what they represented. A fool may have been dumb enough to copy a written sample in the wrong direction but would a sophisticated forger do so?

In the end, it would be easier to assume that the pot is authentic because it is hard to understand why a forger would do things the way he did in making the pot. But it would also be terribly uncomfortable to work on something not knowing whether a fool or a sophisticate really put one over you.

The mystery of the pot can somewhat be cleared up by doing new tests today. But maybe the pot is like an old toy that was put away in the closet as one got older. Someday, a new family member will rediscover it and play with it again.

Additional Reading

1. Francisco, Juan R. “Philippine palaeography,” in Philippine Journal of Linguistics special monograph 3 (Quezon City, 1973).
2. Potet, Jean-Paul G. “Morphologie du Philippin.” Doctoral dissertation, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Paris, 1983.
3. Santos, Hector. “Artifacts with writing revisited” in Sulat sa Tansô, 2:5 (June 1995), 1.
4. —–. “Errors in earlier Calatagan material” in Sulat sa Tansô, 2:5 (June 1995), 1-2.
5. —–. “Other pre-Hispanic writing artifacts” in Sulat sa Tansô, 2:2 (February 1995), 1.
6. —–. “The Calatagan pot” in Sulat sa Tansô, 2:2 (February 1995), 4-5.
7. —–. “The writing on the Calatagan jar” in Sulat sa Tansô, 2:5 (June 1995), 3-5.

Original article by Hector Santos at: http://www.bibingka.com/dahon/mystery/pot.htm

Baybayin

Baybayin is a pre-Spanish Philippine writing system. It is a member of the Brahmic family and is recorded as being in use in the 16th century. It continued to be used during the Spanish colonization of the Philippines up until the late 19th Century.

The term Baybay literally means “to spell” in Tagalog. Baybayin was extensively documented by the Spanish. Some have attributed it the name Alibata, but this name is incorrect. (The term “Alibata” was coined by Paul Rodriguez Verzosa after the arrangement of letters of the Arabic alphabet  alif, ba, ta (alibata), “f” having been eliminated for euphony’s sake.” ) Versoza’s reasoning for creating this word was unfounded because no evidence of the baybayin was ever found in that part of the Philippines and it has absolutely no relationship to the Arabic language. Furthermore, no ancient script native to Southeast Asia followed the Arabic arrangement of letters, and regardless of Versoza’s connection to the word alibata, its absence from all historical records indicates that it is a totally modern creation. The present author does not use this word in reference to any ancient Philippine script.

Modern scripts in the Philippines, descended from Baybayin, are Hanunó’o, Buhid, Tagbanwa, the Kapampangan script and the Bisaya script.
Baybayin is one of a dozen or so individual writing systems used in Southeast Asia, nearly all of which are abugidas where any consonant is pronounced with the inherent vowel a following it— diacritical marks being used to express other vowels (this vowel occurs with greatest frequency in Sanskrit, and also probably in all Philippine languages).

The term Baybay literally means “to spell” in Tagalog. Baybayin was extensively documented by the Spanish. Some have attributed it the name Alibata, but this name is incorrect. (The term “Alibata” was coined by Paul Rodriguez Verzosa after the arrangement of letters of the Arabic alphabet  alif, ba, ta (alibata), “f” having been eliminated for euphony’s sake.” ) Versoza’s reasoning for creating this word was unfounded because no evidence of the baybayin was ever found in that part of the Philippines and it has absolutely no relationship to the Arabic language. Furthermore, no ancient script native to Southeast Asia followed the Arabic arrangement of letters, and regardless of Versoza’s connection to the word alibata, its absence from all historical records indicates that it is a totally modern creation. The present author does not use this word in reference to any ancient Philippine script.

Modern scripts in the Philippines, descended from Baybayin, are Hanunó’o, Buhid, Tagbanwa, the Kapampangan script and the Bisaya script.
Baybayin is one of a dozen or so individual writing systems used in Southeast Asia, nearly all of which are abugidas where any consonant is pronounced with the inherent vowel a following it— diacritical marks being used to express other vowels (this vowel occurs with greatest frequency in Sanskrit, and also probably in all Philippine languages).

Origins

Baybayin was noted by the Spanish priest Pedro Chirino in 1604 and Antonio de Morga in 1609 to be known by most, and was generally used for personal writings, poetry, etc. 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. There is no data on when this level of literacy was first achieved, and no history of the writing system itself. There are at least six theories about the origins of Baybayin.

Kawi

Kawi originated in Java, and was used across much of Maritime Southeast Asia.
Laguna Copperplate Inscription.

The Laguna Copperplate Inscription is the earliest known written document found in the Philippines.
Butuan Ivory Seal

It is a legal document, and has inscribed on it a date of Saka era 822, corresponding to April 21, 900 AD Laguna Copperplate Inscription#cite note-bibingka-1. 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. One hypothesis therefore reasons that, since Kawi is the earliest attestation of writing on the Philippines, then Baybayin may be descended from Kawi.

A second example of Kawi script can be seen on the Butuan Ivory Seal, though it has not been dated.

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

Old Sumatran “Malay” scripts

Another hypothesis states that a script or script used to write one of the Malay languages was adopted and became Baybayin. In particular, the Pallava script from Sumatra is attested to the 7th century.

Sulawesi

The Liboginese and/or Makassarese scripts of Sulawesi could have been introduced or borrowed and adapted into Baybayin.

Old Assamese

Assamese is a variant of Eastern Nagari script, a precursor to Devanagari. This hypothesis states that a version of this script was introduced to the Philippines via Bengal, which evolved into Baybayin.

Cham

Finally, an early Cham script from Champa—in what is now southern Vietnam and southeastern Cambodia—could have been introduced or borrowed and adapted into Baybayin.

Characteristics

The writing system is an abugida system using consonant-vowel combinations. Each character, written in its basic form, is a consonant ending with the vowel “A”. To produce consonants ending with the other vowel sounds, a mark is placed either above the consonant (to produce an “E” or “I” sound) or below the consonant (to produce an “O” or “U” sound). The mark is called a kudlit. The kudlit does not apply to stand-alone vowels. Vowels themselves have their own glyphs. There is only one symbol for D or R as they were allophones in most languages of the Philippines, where D occurred in initial, final, pre-consonantal or post-consonantal positions and R in intervocalic positions. The grammatical rule has survived in modern Filipino, so that when a d is between two vowels, it becomes an r, as in the words dangál (honour) and marangál (honourable), or dunong (knowledge) and marunong (knowledgeable), and even raw for daw (he said, she said, they said, it was said, allegedly, reportedly, supposedly) and rin for din (also, too) after vowels. This variant of the script is not used for Ilokano, Pangasinan, Bikolano, and other Philippine languages to name a few, as these languages have separate symbols for D and R.

Two styles of writing

Pre-Spanish “style”
In the original form of the Baybayin script, a stand-alone consonant (consonants not ending with any vowel sound) cannot be indicated unambiguously; therefore, such consonants were simply not written, and the reader would fill in the missing consonants through context. For example, the letters n and k in a word like bundók (mountain) were omitted, so that it was spelled bu-do.
Virama Kudlit “style”

The original writing method was particularly difficult for the Spanish priests who were translating books into the native language. Because of this, Francisco López introduced his own kudlit in 1620 that cancelled the implicit a vowel sound. The kudlit was in the form of a “+” sign, in reference to Christianity. This cross-shaped kudlit functions exactly the same as the virama in the Devanagari script of India. In fact, Unicode calls this kudlit the Tagalog Sign Virama. See sample above in Characteristics Section.

“Nga” character

A single character represented “nga”. The current version of the Filipino alphabet still retains “ng” as a digraph, viz, a single letter composed of two characters.

Punctuation

Words written in baybayin were written in a continuous flow, and the only form of punctuation was a single vertical line, or more often, a pair of vertical lines (||). These vertical lines fulfill the function of a comma, period, or unpredictably separate sets of words.

Usage

Baybayin historically was used in Tagalog and to a lesser extent Kapampangan speaking areas. Its use spread to Ilokanos when the Spanish promoted its use with the printing of Bibles. Related scripts, such as Hanunóo, Buhid, and Tagbanwa are still used today, along with Kapampangan script. Currently, Baybayin itself is experiencing an artistic revival of sorts, used to convey a Pre-Hispanic feeling as well as a symbol of Filipino identity. Most activist groups used Baybayin as part of their logo using the script for the acronyms (such as the Baybayin K for Anakbayan) alongside the use of a baybayin-inspired latin script. Baybayin tattoos and brush calligraphy are growing in popularity. It is also used in the Latest Philippine Banknotes Issued Last Quarter of 2010. The word used in the bills was “Pilipino” and is used not only as artistic design but a security feature.

From Wikipedia