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As each old culture has it's ancient writings and communication techniques such as hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt or sanskrit in ancient India, so too does the Philippines and for the Filipnos their ancient form of writing is known as alibata which is believed to have originated somewhere in 14th century. Alibata was widely used by the inhabitants of the islands as their form of writing until the arrival of the Spaniards in 16th century.

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

This Tagalog script which eventually became known as Baybayin and later Alibata was syllabary, meaning that each of the symbols represented a complete syllable. This in contrast to the standard Latin alphabet as it is today, the symbols represent a phoneme or the smallest unit of speech. This distinction is what made it difficult for many people especially from the west, who have been familiar with the alphabetic system, understand the correct usage of the Tagalog script.

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 being a very basic one only represented two levels of syllables, and these are the V and CV where in the C is a consonant and the V is a vowel. However the language in general had V, CV, VC and CVC sysllables and this meant that syllables such as ku and bi would not be wriiten down with the script as accurately as it should be. The syllables like, kam, ting (ng considered as a single consonant) and pit could not even be written at all using the system owing to the fact that Tagalog did not have in its system consonant clusters such as CCVC which would have solved the problem.

The Missing Final Consonant

Writing down syllables of the CVC type of syllables, the ancient Filipino natives just dropped the final consonant for simplicity. So ak would just be written as a, pit as pi, ting as ti, kam as ka, and so on. The missing final consonant eventually made its way back and was added back as the text was later read using a technique which to this day is not understood and will perhaps forever remain a mystery. For those who have had initial training in literacy with alphabets would perhaps think only of context as the means to give clues as to the reason behind the missing consonant, however there may have been other elements or circumstances that we may not be aware of that enable the ancient peoples to determine what the missing consonant was.