Baybayin The Syllabic Alphabet Of The Tagalogs

When the Spaniards conquered the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571), they noticed several of its nations had a writing system of their own, called Baybáyin in Tagalog. It was a king of short-hand that did not make it possible to record closing consonants; thus i-lu in Baybáyin could represent í-log "river", i-lóng "nose" or it-lóg "egg", so much so that, while easy to write, it was difficult to read. Because of this shortcoming, it gave way to the Latin alphabet in the course of the 17th century. Nowadays Filipino graphic artists are reviving Baybáyin to express their philippineness.

Baybayin (incorrectly known as Alibata) is a pre-Filipino writing system from the islands called as the "Philippines". Baybayin comes from the word "baybay", which literally means "spell". Alibata was a term coined by Paul Versoza in the early 1900's. Written by Baybayin artist and translator, Christian Cabuay who runs Baybayin.com.

This book is a provisional essay, followed by a vocabulary and an index, on the Tagalogs' world view in the Sixteenth Century. It is mainly based on the entries of the earliest dictionaries of the Tagalog language. These were written by Spanish lexicographers about half-a-century after the conquest of the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571). Additional data are drawn from Spanish chronicles. Many of the recorded beliefs and customs were already obsolete at the turn of the Seventeenth Century. Some are extremely surprising, starting from the primeval myth according to which the world had no solid land at its beginning, but only two fluids, water and air.

This book is the list of printed documents I have collected about the Philippines in general and the Tagalog language in particular. The entries are followed by an index of the themes involved.

No doubt this book will meet the demand of historians, linguists, mathematicians, numismatists, philippinologists and tagalists as well as all the readers interested in the unusual. Like the 1992 article on which it is based, this book is the first one in English to broach the difficult subject of numeral expressions in Old Tagalog and the various concepts and measures associated with them. The book is about ten times as long as the article because it comprises a lexicon that deals with gold, money, taxes, usury, units of measurement, etc. Examples are numerous and generally drawn from such classics as the grammar of San Joseph (1610), Pinpin's manual (1610), the dictionaries of San Buenaventura (1613) and Noceda & Sanlucar (1754, 1860). Differently from the majority of publications on Tagalog, all the terms and examples are fully accented according to a precise system developed by the author, and explained in an appendix.

Percival Stuffington, nicknamed ?Stuffie?, is a good-for-nothing, a womanizer and a crook. He belongs to the theatre of the grotesque. His ignorance and dishonesty is exposed when he poses as a teacher of English to foreign students in a London private school. He flies to California, where he tries to pass as a golf instructor. Finally he plans to extort money from a former fellow student by poisoning him, and promising the quick delivery of the antidote against a staggering sum.

A promising teenage British athlete with a weird sense of humour, admired for his strength, his handsomeness and the beauty of his face, becomes a hoodlum against all expectations.

This is a study of the coinages propounded for the development of Tagalog / Pilipino / Filipino in the scientific fields and the humanities.