Worth Repeating

Repeating Homophonic Syllables:
"A Baybayin Tradition worth Repeating."

A sample of an occurrence of vowel sign doubling in old Tagalog script. (Excerpted from a 1635 land deed, University of Santo Tomas Archives, reproduced by Villamor in 1922), provided by Christopher Ray Miller, Ph.D., 2014:

From a 1635 land deed. UST Archives.

Earlier this year, we covered this in our papers and presentations at the International Workshop on Endangered Scripts of Island Southeast Asia held in the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan.

“Vowel sign doubling: Tagalog script historically shares with Buginese a spelling convention that can be called “vowel sign doubling”. This consists in marking a consonant letter with two vowel signs, either the same or two different ones, to represent two succeeding syllables beginning with the same consonant.”
~ Miller (2011-2014)

In his book on Baybayin, Jean-Paul Potet Ph.D., noted that this same convention occurs in a Bugis script inscription on an old tombstone in Brunei. The inscription shows two i-vowel diacritic marks on top of a "NA" letter/character to be read as néné, meaning "grandfather". (Potet, 2014; Noorduyn, 1993)

Reintroducing Traditions:

Since I introduced the ᜍ "RA" glyph into my fonts a few years ago, it slowly gained acceptance and has become a de facto standard for the "RA" character. Similarly, I there has been an increase of online usage and enthusiasm for Antoon Postma's "pamudpod", from Surat Mangyan, a crescent-shaped virama (for indicating a trailing vowel-less consonant) since I also include the glyph in all my fonts. So, I think that it is about time that we bring back the dual-kudlit for syllable doubling convention. I am confident that the practice will gain acceptance once again, given some time, exposure, and proper education.

There is one hitch though, we need a couple more new markers. Since the /a/ vowel sound inherent to each base baybayin character is obviously not marked, how do we repeat an /a/ ending syllable without doubling a base letter?  ...or repeated compound syllables too for that matter? We have to look into other related South East Asian abugida scripts for answers. Luckily, we didn't have to look too far. I found that the Buginese (Lontara/Bugis) ᨞ “pallawa” mark is used to separate rhythmic-intonational groups and also used to denote the doubling of a word or its root. We can borrow the same concept and style/position as the the pallawa mark.

We can actually use the pallawa mark to denote word or root doubling. It would greatly reduce reduplication of words like "halo-halo", "bola-bola", "turo-turo", "Bong-bong", "bato-bato", "sunod-sunod", etc.

Borrowing from the pallawa concept, I introduced the : colon as a “padalaw-a” mark in my Tokyo paper. The padalaw-a mark also doubles the vowel characters in the same manner prescribed in the book "Ang Wika at ang Baybaying Tagalog" by Tolentino (1937) except that the marker is on the right side instead of being on top or bottom of the ᜁ I and ᜂ U characters. The padalaw-a mark makes it possible to repeat an /a/ ending syllable without doubling a base letter.

Another extended possibility for this type of Kudlit mark is what I call a “pahantig” mark which is a single solid dot • mark on the right side of the a consonantal syllable character; it duplicates the consonant sound at the end of the marked syllable.

Before we could disseminate this, I would have to update all my fonts to include the pallawa mark. Currently only a couple of my commercial license fonts has the updated markers. The pallawa is assigned to the \ backslash key. In the mean time, we can educate baybayin practitioners about this forgotten tradition and updated solution.

Here's a recent chart to explain the dual/doubling/repeating marker system:

Baybayin dual / doubling / repeating marker system chart.

For a larger view of the chart above: CLICK HERE

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Baliktárin Palindrome and Baligtádin Ambigram.

A new exercise in tradition. Try your hand and mind at it; see what you can create.

Baligtádin ( ᜊᜎᜒᜄ᜴ᜆᜇᜒᜈ᜴ ; lit. reversible ) is a Baybáyin equivalent of an ambigram. 

Basically, an ambigram is a typographic, calligraphic, or symbolic art form representation of a word or phrase, whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation.

The meaning of the ambigram may either change, or remain the same, when viewed or interpreted from different perspectives.

Baligtadin ( ᜊᜎᜒᜄ᜴ᜆᜇᜒᜈ᜴ ; lit. reversible ). is a Baybayin equivalent of an ambigram.

Faux-Latin Alphabet "Love", ᜃᜊᜌᜈ᜔ "Kabayan" (townsfolk/countrymen) a Multi-Lingual ambigram.

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Baliktárin ( ᜊᜎᜒᜃ᜴ᜆᜍᜒᜈ᜴ ; lit. returnable back and forth ) is a Baybáyin equivalent of a palindrome, or in other words: a palindromic Tagalog sentence written in Baybayin Script; it reads the same from the beginning to the end or from the end to the beginning.

The unit of Baliktarin is mora (per syllable measure) since the Baybayin Script is an Abugida (alphasyllabary or phonetic-syllabary). This syllabic constrained writing differs from a Palindromya (Tagalog Palindrome), which is written using the Latin Alphabet and uses phoneme (per letter measure) as unit.

Baliktarin is very much like the Kaibun (回文; lit. circle sentence), the Japanese equivalent of palindromes which uses their syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana.

Preferably, traditional Baybayin orthography is used in Baliktarin; where a virama (vowel cancellation mark) is not advised and trailing/leading vowel-less consonants are not written.

Examples:

• ᜃᜒ ᜎ ᜎ ᜃᜓ ᜎ ᜎ ᜃᜒ
  | ki-la-la-ko(ng)-la-la-ki |
  Kilala kong lalaki.
  "A man I know."
• ᜁ ᜊ ᜊ ᜋᜓ ᜊ ᜊ ᜁ
  | i-ba-ba-mo-ba-ba-i |
  Ibaba mo, babae.
  "Put it down, woman."
• ᜊ ᜅ ᜃᜓ ᜅ ᜊ
  | ba-nga-ko-nga-ba |
  Banga ko nga ba?
  "Is it really my jar?"
• ᜆ ᜋ ᜐ ᜋ ᜆ
  | ta-ma-sa-ma-ta |
  Tama sa mata.
  "Hit right in the eye."
• ᜁ ᜃᜓ ᜎᜓ ᜋᜓ ᜎᜓ ᜃᜓ ᜁ
  | i-ku-lo(ng)-mo-lo-ko-i |
  Ikulong mo. Loko e!
  "Put him in jail. He's really crazy!"
• ᜁ ᜎ ᜋ ᜎᜒ ᜊᜒ ᜎ ᜎ ᜊᜒ ᜎᜒ ᜋ ᜎ ᜁ
  | i-la(ng)-ma-li(ng)-bi-la(ng)-la-bi(ng)-li-ma-la(ng)-i |
  Ilang maling bilang? Labinglima lang e!
  "How many did we miscount? We only have fifteen!"

Baliktarin ( ᜊᜎᜒᜄ᜴ᜆᜍᜒᜈ᜴ ; lit. returnable back and forth ) is a Baybáyin equivalent of a palindrome.

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NOTE: An easy way to remember Tagalog term for which is which (ambigram or palindrome):

• Baliktárin (baybayin palindrome) - key word "BALIK" meaning "RETURN".
• Baligtádin (baybayin ambigram) - key word "BALIGTAD" meaning "REVERSED" and "UPSIDE DOWN".

Baliktarin palindrome, once you read it forwards, RETURN and read it on the way back.

Baligtadin ambigram), you can turn it around over and over and still read it while REVERSED and UPSIDE DOWN.

From a facebook friend (J. Abelo):

“So, BALIKTARIN: Left to Right "pa balik-balik" (vice versa),
and BALIGTADIN: Readable in All Directions (pa bali-baligtad). ”

Have fun!

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Modern Baybáyin Chart

Conservative Modern Reform:
(For review; as submitted, archived, and published in international linguistic academia.)

The image/chart above is my current draft for a standardized modern baybayin script.

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The chart below lists the keystrokes for typing baybayin using fonts.



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Any other character sets you'll find on your online searches that claims to be traditional or modern baybayin are most likely made-up or misleading. If I haven't linked or talked about them here in my blog, or you can't verify them via respectable baybayin sites like Paul Morrow's or Kristian Kabuay's, then more likely those sets are not accepted by the community of baybayin practitioners & experts.

Any other sets of characters that include special individual characters for C, Q, Ch, Th, Z, J, and or Ñ instead of character combinations are suspect and most likely are made-up (conscript). And unfortunately, we have found out that the use of the word "Alibata" as a name or description of the scripts (without including the correction & acknowledging that the real name of the writing system is actually "baybayin") is more likely to be an indicator that the information or the character set is flawed.

My work on the indigenous Philippine writing system is well researched (for more than two decades). It is academically backed & published, traditionally mindful, typographically sound, and community & expert approved.

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Sometimes, forgotten traditions are re-discovered.



We make sure that these forgotten traditions are documented and revived as well as corrected. For example: the double top-down kudlit is being mistakenly used as a vowel cancellation method; there is a precedent that this is used differently by our ancestors. Instead of a vowel-killer, the double top-down kudlits are actually bi-vowel consonantal syllable repeaters: ᜊᜒᜓ = "bobi" ≠ "b"

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