The Decline of the Baybayin Script During the Early Spanish Period and the Spanish Efforts for its Preservation (1593–1703)
Kas 110 (Colonial Philippines I) Research Paper
Authors: Rafael Miguel Maningas, Krymerth Pagapong, Dorothy Joy Santos, John Michael Silerio
Abstract
Baybayin is one of the writing systems used in the pre-colonial Philippines. However, during the Spanish colonial period, the use of Baybayin declined throughout the archipelago. Some perceived that the Spaniards were responsible for the script’s eventual dormancy by destroying all existing native records. However, several sources stated otherwise. Thus, this study aimed to examine the motives that the Spanish had in learning the Baybayin. The study also tried to examine the reasons why the abugida fell out of fashion, and what were the ways that the Spaniards were able to preserve it. To answer these objectives, the methods that were used included the examination of primary sources and secondary sources that assessed the state and condition of the Baybayin from 1593–1703.
Based on the resources, the proponents found out that Spanish priests attempted to learn the native script and used it to teach the Christian religion. Moreover, based on the resources, the proponents concluded that there were three reasons for the decline of Baybayin. First, was the Romanization of the script, second, was the limited to no time for Filipinos to become literate, and lastly, was the preference of those who were educated to use Romanized letters over the Baybayin script. However, because of the limited resources regarding the status of the Baybayin from the late 16th century to the early 18th century, the proponents were not able to find sufficient information regarding the issue. Therefore, further study about it is needed during this period.
Keywords: Baybayin, Spanish colonial period, Tagalog, decline
The Rise of Baybayin
Before the Spaniards arrived in the Philippine archipelago, different systems of writing had already been developed and in use throughout the islands by its inhabitants. The most dominant and well-known among these scripts was the Baybayin, utilized mostly by the Tagalogs but also spread among the regions of Ilocos, Bicol, and Visayas. Belonging to the family of Indic scripts together with other writing systems in Southeast Asia and Indian Subcontinent, Baybayin is classified as an abugida or an alphasyllabary script, which means all of its symbols represent a consonant-vowel sound, in contrast to alphabets where the sound of their symbols represent phonemes.
The earliest mention of the term was in Pedro de San Buenaventura’s 1613 grammar book Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala where “baibayin” originated from a Tagalog root word “baybay” which means “to spell”. The most common variation of the script was composed of 17 symbols, with three vowels (a, e/i, o/u) and 14 consonants (ba, ka, da/ra, ga, ha, la, ma, na, nga, pa, sa, ta, wa, ya). Precolonial Philippine scripts did not have the need to distinguish the ‘i’ and ‘u’ sounds from ‘e’ and ‘o’ while ‘da’ and ‘ra’ sounds are used interchangeably in most southern Tagalog dialects. Each consonant has an implicit ‘a’ sound in them, and in order to make their sound ‘e/i’ (such as ‘ba’ into ‘be/bi’), put a diacritic called “kudlit” (which can be a comma, dot, or slash) above the symbol, and below the symbol to modify it to an ‘o/u’ sound.
The script is also erroneously called “alibata” which was coined by Paul Rodriguez Versoza in 1914 from combining three first letters of the Arabic script (alif, ba, ta), believing that Baybayin descended from it. However, there is no evidence that would support this claim, and plenty of theories have been presented to show where the script originated. The consensus is now that Baybayin–and other ancient Philippine scripts–most likely came from Brahmic script, which is the ancestor of most abugidas in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Being part of the Southeast Asian maritime trade, parts of the pre-colonial Philippines had gone through Indianization, where influences from the Indian Subcontinent, including their writing system, were passed among the inhabitants of some kingdoms and polities.
which was a likely ancestor of Baybayin
The earliest discovered written record ever found in the Philippines was the Laguna Copperplate Inscription, a document that shows a debt transaction between the Javanese Kingdom of Medang and the Kingdom of Tundun (Tondo), dating the time of its creation in the Shaka year 822 or April 21, 900 CE. The writing system used in the inscription, Kawi–which was a Javanese script descended from Tamil-Brahmi and Pallavah scripts–was theorized to have been the most likely ancestor of Baybayin. Evidence of the Kawi script in the Philippines can also be found in the Butuan Ivory Seal, dating around the tenth to thirteenth centuries CE. On the other hand, manifestations of Baybayin are also present in the Calatagan Pot made around the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, but its meaning is yet to be deciphered. Other theories have been presented to explain the origins of Baybayin aside from the Kawi script. One is that its direct ancestor came from South Sulawesi scripts, probably from the Bugis script or from the Old Makassar script. Another is that Baybayin’s ancestry is closer to the scripts of Champa–which is modern-day Cambodia and Southern Vietnam–rather than other scripts of Indonesia.
Baybayin was typically written on bamboo with a knife or palm leaves with a stylus. Instead of using them for recordkeeping like taxes and debts or for writing books and codices, the script was usually used for writing short messages, poetry, and document signing. It was not until the Spanish colonization that the natives began writing Baybayin with pen and ink, or through woodblock printing. It also played a great role in writing legal and court documents throughout the Spanish colony.
The script was first used by the Tagalogs in Luzon, but eventually, through maritime trading, Baybayin reached the Visayan islands. Ferdinand Magellan’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, noted that the natives that they encountered did not know how to read or write, but on the other hand, Miguel Lopez de Legazpi said in 1567 that “they have their letters and characters like those of the Malays, from whom they learned them”. This indicates that Baybayin only arrived in Visayas between the time of Magellan’s arrival and Legazpi’s arrival. Both Pedro Chirino and Antonio de Morga claimed that almost all Indios in the islands, men and women alike, know how to read and write Baybayin, which shows a drastic increase in literacy rate in just a century .
Over time, the Baybayin of Tagalogs developed its own variants and descendants across Luzon and Visayas; for example, Bicolanos called it Basahan, Visayans called it Badlit, and Ilocanos called it Kurditan. Their versions were slightly different from the Tagalog symbols but still had a resemblance. All of these eventually died out over time. But the Hanunuo and Buhid scripts in Mindoro and the Tagbanwa script in Palawan were the only naturally developed direct descendants of the Baybayin that survived the four centuries of Western colonization, with some of them still being used by Mangyans and Tagbanwas to this day. The only Philippine scripts, however, that are completely unrelated to Baybayin are the Jawi script of Tausugs and the Kirim script of the Maranaos, which all descended from the Arabic abjads brought by Muslim missionaries in Mindanao during the fourteenth century. Since Baybayin was not the only writing system in the Philippines, it is advocated to use the term suyat or surat to collectively call the scripts used in the country.
The Spanish Utilization of Baybayin
The Spaniards’ arrival in the Philippines affected the use of Baybayin throughout the archipelago. The use of this script has undergone a series of changes, and there is abundant documentation during this period. As observed by Spanish Jesuit historian Pedro Chirino in his book entitled Relacion de las Islas Filipinas, the natives are very keen on reading and writing. There is hardly a Filipino who doesn’t know how to read or write. Chirino described the rules on how and where the natives wrote them and marveled at their skills to understand each other despite the script’s notoriety of being difficult to read. Based on the structure of the Baybayin, the natives initially wrote from top to bottom, placing the first line from the left and continuing to the right. Fr. Chirino discussed how the natives can easily convey their ideas through the use of Baybayin, and how almost every native in Luzon, both men and women knew how to write the script.
In the Bisayan region, Francisco Alcina’s book, History of the Bisayan People in the Philippine Islands, observed that the natives have a different alphabet. They only have three vowels, which are; A which has a constant pronunciation; E and I which can be used interchangeably when writing but will have a different meaning when pronounced; as well as O and U, which were the same with the E and I. Alcina also observed that the natives have different ways of pronouncing the consonants, such as; the M as Ma, De as Da, and so on with the rest. Another thing Alcina observed was that the natives do not have the letters, F, X, J, C, Q, but have a distinct letter NG, which was pronounced as nga. Alcina’s frustration led him to study the language, as well as, their alphabet.
With these observations and their encounter with the fluency of the natives towards Baybayin, the Spanish authorities felt compelled to study this system of writing in order to communicate with the natives. Several decrees have been issued concerning the appropriate language that the missionaries will utilize. Numerous laws governing linguistic practices were issued to the colony by the Spanish authority, and one of them is the Royal Decree of 1603, which demanded that the friars should study indigenous languages, likely because some of them were unwilling or unable to do so. Unlike in Latin America where the policy was to teach the Spanish language to every Indio as possible, the Spanish friars studied and utilized the Baybayin script and local languages to teach the Catholic religion in the Philippines. This was primarily due to the lack of Spaniards in the islands who were available and/or willing to teach their language to the natives, and can also be attributed to their eventual deliberate ploy to intentionally not teach Spanish to Indios for the purpose of keeping them ignorant. Early on, missionaries documented what they learned about the local people and their languages. In this way, the missionaries somehow preserved this writing system being the ones who duplicated it and even described it in their writings. This is evident with the Doctrina Christiana, the first printed book in the Philippines published in 1593. Doctrina Christiana includes several pages that are written in the indigenous script, for instance, the Hail Mary Prayer is written in Baybayin characters together with the Spanish and Tagalog translation.
Additionally, the emergence of grammar books such as the Arte y Reglas de la Lengua Tagala and Arte de la Lengua Bisaya-Hiligayna shows the missionaries’ efforts to study the Baybayin and the local languages. The first published grammar book in the country, the Arte y Reglas de la Lengua Tagala, became the guide of other missionary grammarians in the Tagalog region and succeeded in identifying the characteristics of the tongue. i.e., those it shares with all of the island languages, those that are unique to it, and those that are similar to and different from Spanish and Latin. No claim was made that the descriptions were flawless, but it can be said that this pedagogical or teaching grammar reveals a good understanding of the Tagalog mental grammar despite the objective limitations of linguistic methods in use at the time. This observation can also be stated in the book Arte de la Lengua Bisaya-Hiligayna. The emergence of these grammar books reveals that in order to fulfill their mandate of evangelizing the people, the missionaries, at first, chose to study the native vernaculars rather than teach their own language. These were said to be helpful for the missionaries to effectively communicate with the natives.
Because the Filipinos could learn the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary in a script they could identify, the Baybayin was immensely helpful in the early years of evangelization. Nevertheless, translating from Spanish into Baybayin was quite challenging. Therefore, in 1620, Fr. Francisco Lopez made the decision to include the krus kudlit, a diacritic shaped either like an ‘x’ or a ‘+’ that can be added below the fundamental symbol to eliminate the implicit ‘a’ sound in each consonant. This solved the conundrum of Spanish writers where the traditional rules of Baybayin remove the trailing consonants in their words, which made reading the script more confusing. For example, “bu-n-do-k” (mountain) was written in Baybayin as “bu-do,” eliminating the ’n’ and ‘k’ since there was no vowel-killing diacritic in the pre-colonial writing rules. These changes can be seen in his book entitled Libro a naisurátan amin ti bagás ti Doctrina Cristiana. During the early period of Spanish colonization, full recognition must be given to the efforts, perseverance, and dedication of early missionaries in acquiring and studying the native dialects.
The Fall of Baybayin
To explain the reason for Baybayin falling out of fashion during the 18th century onwards, some ethnographers and anthropologists speculated that it was because Spanish authorities and clergy conducted a mass campaign of destroying all of the living traces of the indigenous scriptures as they believed it to be the language of the Devil. H. Otley Beyer, for example, claimed in his book “The Philippines Before Magellan” in 1921 that there was once a priest who boasted about how he destroyed around 300 Baybayin manuscript scrolls in Southern Luzon. However, there is no evidence of any mass destruction of any indigenous script in the islands by Spaniards, and if there was any, it was not as widespread as the eradication campaigns of Nahuatl and Quechua scripts in Spanish America. Furthermore, the precolonial natives never wrote on scrolls but on leaves, tree barks, and bamboo. The fact that they wrote on such perishable materials can also be an explanation of why there are no pre-colonial traces of the script.
By the 1600s, indigenous Filipinos had adopted Spanish customs and accepted the Spanish legal system for proceedings such as those for the purchase and sale of land titles. Archivist Regalado Trota Jose analyzed several documents regarding one such case in 1629 which was of Don Luis Castilla, a Tagalog and a member of the principalia, who was selling lands to the Colegio de Santo Tomas. The Don was able to sell these lands as a result of his marriage with Doña Francisca Longar who held these titles.
Doña Francisca Longar held several land titles, two of which are written in Baybayin, two written in Romanized Tagalog, and one written in Spanish, four of these land titles were transferred to her as a result of her marriage with Don Andres Capiit who is assumed to have died hence the Doña marrying Don Luis Castilla who would sell these lands to the Colegio de Santo Tomas. Don Andres Capiit’s earliest land title dates back to 1613 with the selling of Doña Catalina Baycan’s land to Don Andres Capiit, the Don would then buy more land in the following year of 1614 from the married couple Don Agustin Caso and Doña Maria Guinto, followed by another land acquisition in 1619 from Doña Maria Ganda and Don Gabriel de Mercado, his last purchase documented was in 1620 from Don Augustin Juica. In Doña Francisca Longar’s case, she purchased a land title in 1625 from Doña Maria Silang.
Don Andres Capiit’s land title from 1613 is written in full Baybayin, as well as Doña Francisca Longar’s 1625 purchase. These were the only two documents written in full Baybayin in the study; the fact that these documents were written in Baybayin wholly is proof that documents written in this script were recognized as legally binding by the Spanish colonial government as far as 1634 when the transaction was completed, “We see how the Spanish legal system had already been implemented and how it functioned. The Spaniards accepted documents and signatures in the local scripts and languages as legal and binding.”
Don Capiit’s two land titles acquired in 1614 and 1619 were written in Romanized Tagalog with signatures signed in Baybayin. The 1614 document was written by Juan Tembang and showed that natives were able to write their language in a Romanized format, and while both the 1614 and 1619 titles were in Romanized Tagalog, the witnesses from the principalia affixed their signatures in Baybayin.
What can be said about these documents is that they involved members of the principalia and natives with surnames such as Banaag, Silang, and Guinto, which were able to write Baybayin to a certain degree that they used it for their signatures and some have learned to use romanized Tagalog. In fact, only one document from the land titles was not written in Baybayin and this was the 1620 document which was written by a scribe named Alonso Gomez.
With regards to the documents regarding the selling of the land, the first document dated February 16, 1629, was Don Luis Castilla’s reasoning for his intent to sell the lands to the Colegio de Santo Tomas. It is possible that this first document was written by Don Luis himself as it is written in first person, he also signed this in Baybayin despite the document being in Spanish, though it may have also been written by a scribe named Juan Vasquez de Miranda. The next document with the same date as the first one is written in Spanish and serves to legitimize Don Luis Castilla and Doña Francisca Longar’s claims to these lands and as such the witness, Don Alonso Taas, affixes his signature in Baybayin; this is written by the scribe mentioned in the first document. The next document dated February 25, 1629, nine days after the offer by Don Luis Castilla, details the reactions of the residents of Tondo regarding the sale of the land, those who opposed affixed their signatures in the document and these were not in Baybayin anymore. The 1631 documents involve Don Miguel Nuñez Talimbao, a native and member of the principalia who is fluent in Spanish, representing the opposition. Don Talimbao was also part of those who opposed the sale in the 1629 document and similar to that document, he would not affix his signature in Baybayin.
By 1629, it would have seemed that Baybayin was falling out of fashion among the native elites, the documents from 1613 to 1625 showed that it was still used to write documents and as signatures by the natives even with their knowledge of the Spanish language and the Romanized version of Tagalog. However, the documents post-1629 only had two documents that contained Baybayin and that was Don Luis Castilla’s signature in his offer and Don Alonso Taas’. None of the other natives mentioned affixed their signatures in the indigenous writing as it was not indicated in the study.
So if the Baybayin was accepted legally by the Spanish authorities, what other reasons might there be for the natives to ditch this way of writing? In Ignacio Villamor’s La Antigua Escritura Filipina, he remarks how difficult it is to read and write the Baybayin script; a particular difficulty he found, as well as the other authors before him, was the lack of a mute consonant. The absence of these stand-alone consonants meant the readers of the script had to already know the words were read beforehand. The Spanish themselves remarked that the “awkward and so confused” Baybayin script was beginning to improve when it was being translated for the catechism. As stated earlier, Father Francisco Lopez’s innovation to allow the Baybayin to keep up with the Spanish writing was the introduction of the krus kudlit (+), where “…the writing becomes, as full and complete as the Castilian writing…”. Although this new character solves the problem of the mute consonant, the Tagalog writers rejected the innovation on the basis that it went against the whole essence of their language derived from God.
This rejection of innovation might have contributed to the obsoleteness of Baybayin during the Spanish administration of the Philippines as well as the Romanization of the Tagalog language. Evident in Regalado Jose’s study is that Baybayin was still known and in use both in 1613 and 1625. While the natives at that time affixed their signatures using Baybayin, the use of Romanized Tagalog was also present. Members of the principalia as well as other natives may have seen that the Romanized script was an easier way to advance themselves by adopting the ways of their administrators, the Spanish. However this is not to say that the use of Baybayin was totally gone, there is a glimpse of its use in the Visayas in 1647 regarding a divorce between Bernardino Dimabasa and Maria Mutia. The document was written in Spanish but the signatures by the couple were written in Baybayin. By the mid-18th century, however, the state of Baybayin in the islands could be summed up with:
“What is more, it seems that from that time the Filipinos began to abandon their old writing in order to adopt the Latin, so much so, that in 1745 Father Totanes, speaking about the Tagalog characters in his ‘Arte de la Lengua Tagala y Manual Tagalog’, said: ‘There were few Indians who knew how to read it and fewer yet who could write it’, to which the authors of ‘El Archipiélago Filipino’, added that: ‘Today it goes without saying that it is not even remembered.’”
Even though Baybayin itself became unpopular to most natives by the end of the 18th century, its descendants, Hanunuo and Buhid, were still being used by the Mangyan tribes in Mindoro to this day, although they are now also using the Latin alphabet to keep up with the rest of Filipinos. By the 19th century, the script and its variants around the islands were documented not for practical use but for scholarly means, such as the ethnographic studies of foreign scholars like Eugene Jacquet and Sinibaldo de Mas, as well as of Filipino ilustrados like Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo delos Reyes, and Pedro Paterno. The Baybayin letter “ka” was also often featured in some of the flags of Katipunan as a part of the revolutionaries’ attempt to resist colonial influence. Baybayin may not be practically used by the public at this point, but its capacity to generate nostalgia and longing for a national identity still lingers to the Filipino people.
Conclusion
Plenty of factors contributed to the eventual obscurity of the Baybayin script in the islands during the Spanish colonial period. Some would believe that the Spaniards were responsible for the script’s dormancy by destroying all existing native records, but several sources stated otherwise and showed that Spanish missionaries were able to preserve the Baybayin in several ways. First, they learned the Baybayin to utilize it in the process of converting the natives to Christianity. Second, they published several books, including those of the Baybayin, containing the grammar rules and characters of the script. Third, there is an insufficient amount of evidence to prove that the Spanish authorities had actively tried to eradicate the native writing system in the archipelago, in fact, it would point towards the Spanish accepting the scripts as legitimate.
With the facts discussed above, the researchers believed that the death of Baybayin was caused by the introduction of the Roman alphabet which led to the Romanization of the languages including Tagalog. The use of the script began to falter because it stopped being practical to the natives, and ceased to keep up with the constant evolution of their languages. The adoption of the Romanized alphabet could be attributed to its use for education and ease of use compared to the Baybayin script. Another possible explanation for its demise could be Filipinos having less time to study the script due to the strains of the workload placed on them by the colonial government through polo y servicio and bandala system. Further research can examine this facet if the work imposed by the Spanish had affected the literacy rates of Filipinos.
The turn of the 21st century saw the revival of Baybayin in the Philippines through popular culture, modern scholarly publications, and civic promotions. This system of writing has become rampant in social media and has served as a design in clothing, mugs, and accessories, as well as incorporating indigenous characters in official government logos such as those of the National Museum of the Philippines, National Historical Commission of the Philippines, and Cultural Center of the Philippines. Meanwhile, Senator Loren Legarda passed Senate Bill №433 in 2016 and Representative Leopoldo Bataoil passed House Bill №1022 in 2018, both all about making Baybayin the national writing system of the Philippines. However, issues of regionalism and Tagalog supremacy became the main objections to the bill, which are the reasons why they were still pending in Congress. The New Generation Currency series also features the word “Pilipino” written in Baybayin in peso bills, as well as the symbol “Pi” in coins. With these recent developments, our country is now given an opportunity to reconnect to an aspect of our past, the revival of this once-lost script that has been actively advocated by several cultural groups, scholars, and artists, offers the nation a means to promote the Baybayin not at the expense of other scripts, but as a gateway to the various Philippine scripts and to our past.
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Originally passed on January 9, 2023
