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Throughout the history of world, ancient cultures create their local forms of writing which they gradually evolved into their medium of communication and literary arts for example sanskrit in ancient India and hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. The Islands of the Philippines is no different and in the early times of this country, the type of writing invented by the locals is known as alibata believed to have begun since the 14th century. Alibata as it is now called was this form of writing that the Spaniards had discovered the inhabitants making use of when they first set foot on the Philippine islands.

When the Spaniards came to the Philippines, they discovered the people in Manila, which at the times was a port town and other locations in the country utilizing the indigenous bamboo and specially prepared palm leaves to write on using knives and styli. The locals were making used of an ancient Tagalog script that 17 basic symbols that consisted of three vowels, namely a, i and u. The other symbols consisted of consonants which had an inherent sound, i.e. ka, ga, nga, ta, da, na, pa, ba, ma, ya, la, wa, sa, and ha.

Eventually the Tagalog script became known as Baybayin and a little later on it was then known as Alibata. The Alibata script was syllabary. meaning that a particular symbol represented a particular syllable. This is different when compared to the standard Latin alphabet where in each symbol actually represents a phoneme or the smallest part of speech. With this difference it makes it difficult for western educated people to understand the correct usage of the script due to their familiarilty to the Latin aplahabet.

Understanding the Script

To further understand the script, one of the things to note is the use of the Kudlit which is a diacritical mark used to modify the sound of the symbol. The use of the kudlit could be a dot, a short line or even an arrowhead. Place above one of the symbols, it will change the sound of the symbol from a to i, and if it placed below the sounds would become a u. As an example if a ba symbol had a kudlit placed on top it would then become bi, and if the kudlit was inserted below the symbol then it became a bu. Simple as it was the system was elegant and at the time it was known as the baybayin, this was eventually known as Alibata as it is now known in 1914.

The script is very basic and only represents two types of syllables, namely V and CV where C= consonant and V = vowel, whereas the language itself had V, CV, VC and CVC types of syllables. This just means that only syllables like a, bi or ku using the script would not be able to be written down accurately. The other syllables like pit, kam, ak or ting (with ng as one consonant) could not even be represented in the system, as Tagalog did not have consonant clusters such as the CCVC, tram.

The Missing Final Consonant

When the ancients Filipinos came to writing down the syllabes of the CVC type, they for simplicity just dropped the final consonant. In essence ak was simply written down as a, pit as pi, and so on. Eventually however, the missing final consonant made its way back and this was returned to the text later using a techniwue that is still not understood until this day. This mystery will likely remain as such as no records of how this evolved was ever recorded. There may have been so many elements and circumstances that brought about this changethat we may never know about which allowed the ancient people determine the value of the missing consonant even though those with training in literacy perhaps think of context when trying to link clues to the reasons behind it.