Alibata

Origin of Alibata

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Alibata script originated in India; it came to use around AD 1000-1200 and it became extinct in the late 18th century. Although the major languages of the Philippines are now written using the Roman alphabet, the languages were first represented by a script from India called Alibata. Alibata is an elderly system of writing that was used in the Philippines way back centuries ago. Despite of the immense influence brought about by the Western colonization, variants of Alibata are still increasingly used by Filipino youths as a way to express their identity in some parts of Mindoro and Palawan.

Introduction to Alibata

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Alibata or Baybayin is known in Unicode as the Tagalog script and originated from the Javanese script Old Kawi. Alibata is a pre-hispanic Alibata Philippine writing system. The writing system is a part of the Brahmic family and believed to be in use as early as the 14th century. Alibata pursued to be in use during the colonization of Spain to the Alibata Philippines until the late 19th century. Baybayin is a term literally means spelling Alibata.

Usage of Alibata

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Alibata writing system is an abugida system which is a segmental writing system that uses consonant-vowel combinations. Each letter represents a consonant accompanied by a specific vowel. Each character, written in its basic form, is a consonant ending with a vowel “A”. For producing consonants that ends with the other vowel sound, 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. Kudlit does not apply to stand-alone vowels. Vowels have their own glyphs. Glyphs are symbolic figure that is usually engraved or incised. For D or R there is only one symbol as they were allophones in most languages of the Philippines, wherein D fell in initial, final, pre-consonantal or post-consonantal positions and R in intervocalic positions.

Alibata is a stand-alone consonant (consonants not ending with any vowel sound), in its original form cannot be produced, in which case these were simply not written and the reader would fill in the missing consonants through context. The Spanish priests who were the ones translating books into the native language find this method particularly hard. Father Francisco Lopez introduced his own kudlit in 1960 that eliminated the vowel sound because of that incident. The kudlit was in the form of a “+” sign, in reference to Christianity. The cross-shaped kudlit operated precisely the same as the virama in the Devanagari script of India. In fact, Unicode calls this kudlit the Tagalog Sign Virama.