A survey of indigenous scripts of Indonesia and the Philippines

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A survey of indigenous scripts of Indonesia and the Philippines

Christopher Miller

Montreal, Canada

1 Introduction

Indigenous writing systems of Island Southeast Asia have long been poorly documented and understoodcompared to those of India and mainland Southeast Asia, not least because their social position has beenencroached upon by Jawi and then Latin script, which has replaced earlier scripts for nearly all socialfunctions. Increased scholarly interest in the older scripts over the past century culminated in the

publication of Illuminations: The Writing Traditions of Indonesia (Kumar and McGlynn, 1996), the firstvolume to tell the story of a broad variety of indigenous Indonesian scripts, combining scholarship witha reverence for the beauty of the scripts as expressions of the cultures in which they took root. TheWorkshop on Endangered Scripts of Island Southeast Asiais at once the first meeting dedicated to the topic ofIsland Southeast Asian scripts and the first occasion in which the scripts of the Philippines andIndonesia will be discussed together in a single forum transcending the political boundaries andidentities established during and since the European colonial era.

Great advances have been made over the past decades in understanding the nature and history of thevarious scripts of Island Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, much of this knowledge has not yet becomewidely known. We owe a great debt to researchers, both those from past centuries and those who haveworked in recent decades, for bringing to light details about these scripts that help us form a more

detailed picture of the spread and development of these scripts in the past.This paper sets out to contrast widespread conceptions based on a small set of early reports with the farricher picture now surfacing from the work of these earlier researchers. The next section of this paperwill be devoted to a short survey of the various scripts either known in the region or alleged to exist butstill uncertain. After a discussion of the uncertainties due to our reliance on secondary sources in manycases and the rarity of securely datable original texts, I will concentrate on four specific themes thatunite various of these scripts in relation to what can be described as the general culture surroundingtheir use. The first of these concerns spelling conventions in different groups of scripts, in particularunusual conventions that are an outgrowth of the Indic structure of the scripts but are unique to theregion, with no counterparts elsewhere. This is followed by the related question of certain strategiesused in teaching and learning the scripts, which turn out to be likely sources for the spellingconventions mentioned above. Under the same heading, I will compare the numerous recital or

alphabetical orders attested for the various scripts and put forth a tentative proposal for areconstructed order that may account for the origins of the various orders attested for the Philippineand Sumatran Batak groups, both of which have strayed far from the original Indic var!am"laarrangement that the other groups follow more or less faithfully. The inventiveness of some of theteaching strategies is echoed in the next section, where I show how users of the scripts used them inplayful or artistic ways: on the one hand, calligraphic elaboration of the form of the letters themselvesand on the other, manipulations of letter shapes and orders to encode messages in more or less secretciphers. Turning outward in the final section, I discuss the ways the scripts of the region showed


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openness to influence from other writing traditions, in particular Arabic script and associatedtraditions. This openness to the outside resulted in at least two invented cipher scripts based on Arabic-

Jawi script culture.

2 The scripts

Unlike the present-day situation where Latin script prevails almost universally in everyday usage, with

Jawi Arabic script used in certain contexts, the pre-colonial and colonial eras saw an astonishing varietyof different scripts in use throughout the archipelago. Most of the scripts used in the region are knownto us through original, still existing documents in various media along with second-hand examples ofletters arranged in specific recital orders together with secondary vowel and consonant signs, there aresome scripts whose putative existence is only hinted at by reports without any known original texts toback them up.

The picture of writing systems attested from the last millennium is summarised in Figure 1, wherescript groups or individual scripts centred in Sumatra, Java, Celebes and the Philippines surroundBorneo, which itself appears to have no indigenous phonographic writing system.

Figure 1. Scripts and script groups of Island Southeast Asia


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Borneo

Although the earliest attestation of writing in the archipelago is a set of 7 th-century inscriptions onsacrificial yupa posts in Kutai, eastern Borneo (Kern 1882, de Casparis 1975), and De la Couperie (1894)describes an document on rolled-up bark sent from western Borneo to the Chinese ruler in the year 977,the only later attestations of visual communication systems are restricted to non-linguistic symbolic

systems (Harrison 1965; Kern 1896; Ling Ross 1896; Polunin 1959). Interesting as these visual codes are,they fall outside the definition of writing as a system of visible signs that encode linguistic units,typically syllables and/or phonological segments in some manner.

The Philippines

The earliest known attestation of writing from the Philippines is the Laguna Copperplate Inscription(Postma 1992) from the year 900, written in a variety of apparently Javanese-influenced Old Malay inthe standard Kawi script common at the time in inscriptions found in West Java. Although there are twolater inscribed objects from Butuan in Mindoro, one of them a seal in Kawi and the other a silver stripinscribed with a series of unknown and undeciphered characters, the script observed by Europeans inLuzon and the Visayas at the time of the first contact is very different in appearance and structure. Thisscript, which has come to be known as Baybayin most likely a synecdoche for the sense of an ordering,

here of letters, in sequence (Pardo de Tavera 1884) is found in the earliest printed book in aPhilippine language, the 1593 Doctrina Christiana en Lengua Espaola y Tagala(Anonymous 1593) and in aseries of legal documents preserved in Spanish and Philippine archives that span more than a century:the three oldest, all in the Archivo General de ndiasin Seville, are from 1591 and 1599.

Until the past century, the script was best known through second-hand reproductions of alphabetsfrom different regions of Luzon and the Visayas: these were collected and reproduced (redrawn in manycases) in Marcilla y Martn (1896). These older attestations have led to two kinds of misconceptions.Because of the emphasis on the regions in which these samples were produced, it has come to bebelieved that there were a variety of different though related regional scripts in the Philippines. Onesuch case comes from unusual-looking shapes in samples from different locations in the Visayas thathave led many to believe there was an internally-consistent Visayan script distinct from that used by

the Tagalogs of Luzon. On the one hand, some of the strange shapes are due to subsequent generationsof distortions creeping into hand copies of hand copies, something that can be seen in Figure 2. Theoriginal 1663 examples of letters as written on the island of Leyte are fairly accurate reflections of lettershapes found at the time in handwriting in Manila and elsewhere on Luzon and though written in anoverly formal, careful style, Ezguerra even included alternative basic shapes for some letters thatperfectly reflect the range of variants found in Manila documents alone at the time. The 1747 reprint ofthe same grammar has the same letters inserted by hand, but in a quite different overall style, anddistortions have crept in in the case of certain letters. Marcilla y Martn relied on this edition for hissample of Visayan letters from Ezguerra, and his hand copy introduces further distortions, mostnotable in the shapes of e, i and ga. Such distortions and miscopyings, along with others based onreinterpretations of letter shapes based on European assumptions about handwriting, are found againand again in the so-called regional scripts exemplified in various sources. Nonetheless, careful

comparison with authentic handwriting samples can help to confirm the status of a letter shapeapparently specific to a certain region and nearly without exception, these turn out to be onesalready found in handwriting of people in Manila and nearby regions during the same period.

Secondly, it has been widely believed that there was a single specific Tagalog style because of severalsamples described as such appearing in different sources. These, however, were several generations ofsuccessively distorted reproductions of a preceding reproduction, all going back to a single printtypeface used in Blancas de San Josephs (1610) grammar of Tagalog, San Buenaventuras (1613)vocabulary, and the Lpez (1621) catechism in the Ilocano language (Figure 3). This typeface was a


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reinterpretation of the woodcut letter shapes in the 1593 Doctrina Christiana, adapted to a more or lessitalic contemporary European typographic style, including serifs as on V, ball terminals as in , andcontrasts in line thickness natural to European writing with a calamus or a pen, but alien to theindigenous tradition of writing with a knife on leaves or bamboo.

Figure 2.Letters from Leyte illustrated in Ezguerra (1663). Left: the original edition; centre: recopiedversions in the 1747 reprinting; right: the latter as recopied in Marcilla y Martn (1896).

Figure 3. Baybayin examples in the first movable type Baybayin font inserted into a Spanish text, fromBlancas de San Joseph (1610).


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These misconceptions are beginning to be challenged by the 20th century discovery of originaldocuments with short Baybayin texts handwritten by everyday users of the script, mostly signaturesand short annotations, in the archives of the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. These were publishedwith analytic commentary in Villamor (1922) and Santamara (1938, 2012), and Miller (2011a, b)demonstrates with timeline-based graphs for each letter of the script that most variation is accountedfor over time rather than region.

Nonetheless, there are a handful of regions that did demonstrably develop their own distinct featuresthat eventually evolved into script varieties distinct from the one used generally through Luzon andislands to the south through the late 1600s and early 1700s. One such variety is attested in recentlyrediscovered archival documents with signatures by inhabitants of Pampanga: three in a document oftestimonies in a case for beatification in the Diocesan Archives of Manila, mentioned in Santiago (2002),and in Sagad et al. (1617, 1632), archival documents of unclear provenance collected by Antoon Postma.The 16th-century Kapampangan variety distinguishes itself by the use of simplified forms for severalletters (some of which are also attested in second-hand samples) and, as discussed below, in itsdevelopment of spelling conventions for representing syllable-final consonants, an innovation notfound in any other Philippine varieties.

More recently, Kapampangan script has been revived in a modern version, Kulitan (Pangilinan, nodate; 2009; 2012), that incorporates further innovative features, including Chinese- or Korean-likesyllable clusters in descending vertical lines that proceed from right to left on the page; the canonicalletter shapes in this version of the script are closely related to those in reproductions by Spanishobservers.

During the 19th century, the existence of a distinct regional script still used by the Tagbanuwa ofPalawan (the main southwestern island in the Philippines) came to the attention of observers, includingMarche (1887) and Marcilla y Martn (1896). This variety, written on bamboo or wood, is distinguishedfrom Luzon varieties by shapes for several letters, most notably k and w that are markedly differentfrom those used elsewhere (but for a single occurrence of w in a single 1591 signature from Taal,Luzon). In the 20thcentury, this script was adopted from the Tagbanuwa by the Palawn further southin the island and described in detail by Batoon et al (1999) and Revel (1990).

In Mindoro, located in between Palawan and Luzon, the existence of a distinct bamboo script still usedby Mangyan tribespeople of the inland mountains was first brought to widespread attention by thedetailed study by Meyer et al (1895). Gardner (1939, 1943) described early 20th-century Mangyan script,and Postma (1971) confirmed the existence of a script variety, with different rounded and square styles,used by northern Buhid Mangyan: this variety is quite distinct from the better-attested variety used bythe Hanuno to their south and some southern Buhid. Postma later published a small primer tosouthern Mangyan script (Postma 1986, 2002).

Entirely different in its form and internal structure from all the other Philippine scripts is Eskayanscript, an elaborated 20th-century non-Indic script that incorporates elements of a syllabary amongother more unusual features. This script, used in restricted domains by the Eskaya, a cultural minorityon Bohol island in the southern Visayas, has been described by Kelly (2009, 2012) and in this volume.

Sulawesi, Sumbawa and Ende

South Sulawesi is the home of one script that was formerly widely used and two others with morerestricted distribution. The Bugis-Makassarese Lontara script is known from numerous old documentspreserved as heirlooms or in libraries and archives in Indonesia and Europe. This script was introducedinto Sumbawa and Ende (Flores), where it took rather different forms adapted to the phonologicalstructures of the local languages. The most complete guide to Bugis-Makassarese script is Noorduyn(1993). Less well-known is the Jangang-jangangor Bird script also used by the Makassarese in the 17th


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century and possibly for some time before and after. This script has not been described in detail, thoughJukes (2006) devotes a chapter to aspects of its form and use. A cipher script, Lontara bilang-bilang, usedfor riddle poetry in the 19th century, is described in Matthes (1883) and Tol (1992), and comparedsystematically with Jawi and Bugis-Makassarese scripts in Miller (2011a).

No direct evidence is known for indigenous writing in Sulawesi outside the southern peninsula,

however the possible existence of a North Sulawesi Minahasa script is suggested by Taulu (1980), whopresents a table of letters in the script and a number of texts apparently written by local chieftainspledging unity among their peoples. Figure 4 shows my redrawings of the letter shapes illustrated in

Taulu. The book is difficult to obtain, and the University of California, Los Angeles microform copy ofthe typewritten original is for the most part nearly illegible. Nonetheless, there is enough informationthat can be recovered that leads me to believe that Taulus book may well describe an authentic butheretofore unknown script.

Figure 4. Characters of the alleged Minahasa script in Taulu (1980) with Philippine equivalents forcomparison.


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It can be seen from Figure 4 that certain correspondences can be made between Taulus charactershapes and equivalent variants found in the Philippines (and in one case, the equivalent Bugis-Makassarese letter). Although they are not exact, they are systematic enough (including the similarshape-for-shape correspondences for -a, p, ng and m with their shallow descending tails in thePhilippines and sharply descending in Taulus characters) that it seems premature to discount TaulusMinahasa writing as inauthentic. It is to be hoped that more evidence can be uncovered in the future to

resolve this mystery.

The offshoots of Lontara script in Sumabwa and Ende are less well known than their parent script,however the Ende variant Lota Ende has been has been described in detail by Roos (1877) and VanSuchtelen (1921), with a recent book by Banda (2005) adding yet more to our knowledge of the scriptshistory and usage. There is very little easily available about the Satera Jontaloffshoot of Lontara used inSumbawa, unfortunately, apart from an example of the scripts letters reproduced in Holle (1882, 1999);however, work by Asako Shiohara presented at this workshop should help lift the veil a little on thefeatures of this script and its relationship to its parent and its sibling script Lota Ende.

North Sumatra

For North Sumatra, the closely related Batak script varieties have been described in detail since the

Toba Batak grammar of Van der Tuuk (1855, 1971). The most extensive descriptions of these scripts andthe complexities of the how letter and vowel signs were adapted to the sound systems of the differentBatak languages are Kozok (1999, 2009) (in Indonesian), together with further information andresources at his web site on the scripts: http://www.hawaii.edu/indolang/surat/surat.html. Manyoriginal manuscripts on tree bark paper and bamboo have been preserved in Indonesian and Europeanarchives.

South and central Sumatra

The varieties of South and Central Sumatra have been described by various authors beginning in the18thcentury. The most detailed descriptions available are for the Surat Ulu group of varieties, also widelyknown as Rencongor, misleadingly Rejang after the name of only one of the ethnic groups that usedthe script a term that has persisted in Unicode usage and elsewhere. Particularly detailed and useful

descriptions, that go beyond listing the written characters and describe details of how the script wastaught to learners as well as ways it was used in playful situations (see below), are the Dutch-languageworks of de Sturler (1843) and Van Hasselt (1881). Voorhoeve (1971) contains two extensivecomparative tables of letter shapes for the varieties attested to that time. More recently, Kozok (2002,2004a, b, 2006) has brought to light a closely related variety found in a six centuries-old manuscriptfrom Tanjung Tanah in Kerinci to the northwest of the previously known Surat Uluarea; this variety hassome interesting peculiarities that distinguish it from the others.

One of the most remarked-on characteristics of Surat Ulu varieties is the angularity and sharp corners ofthe letter shapes. The Lampung varieties to the southeast, closely related to the former, adopt moreflowing, curvaceous shapes that are nonetheless related to the Surat Ulushapes (Figure 5). In general,Lampung shapes seem to be cursive derivatives of their more conservative Surat Ulu counterparts,

sometimes transformed beyond recognition. In some cases though (e.g. variants of a and b),Lampung shapes seem to be independent developments with no discernable equivalents in Surat Ulu.This seems to indicate that the script was not necessarily transmitted directly from the Musi regionwhere Surat Ulu was used (or vice versa): it is equally plausible that both descend from a sharedancestor, perhaps (or better, quite likely) once used on the east coast.
http://www.hawaii.edu/indolang/surat/surat.htmlhttp://www.hawaii.edu/indolang/surat/surat.htmlhttp://www.hawaii.edu/indolang/surat/surat.html


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Lampun samples from van der Tuuk

I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X

k

g

ng

c

j

ny

t

d

n

p

b

m

n

h

l

r

y

w

!

!

!

Figure 5. Letter shapes from different Lampung manuscripts in Van der Tuuk (1886) compared withRejang and Tanjung Tanah equivalents.

Northwest of the Surat Uluregion, a related script was used in Kerinci. Like Lampung, this one is lesswell-described, the only systematic description available being Westenenk (1922), who gives tablesdescribing variant shapes for consonants and vowels along with examples of spellings, some involving acurious metathesis rule similar to ones in other Sumatran scripts (see below). Many inscriptions onbamboo, buffalo horn and bark paper can be consulted online at the Pusaka Kerinci web site, set up byUli Kozok with a grant from the Endangered Archives Project.

The shapes of Kerinci letters are in general quite closely related to those in Surat Ulu, represented inFigure 6 by Rejang shapes. There is a general tendency for loose horizontal line segments on the left-hand side of letters of Rejang letters to disappear in their Kerinci counterparts.


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There have been recent reports online and in the media, e.g. Rais Kamardi (1987), Rinaldi (2010) andSango (no date), of an indigenous Minangkabau Indic script. According to a recent news article (Rinaldi2010), Dr. Herwandi, Dean of the Faculty of Literature at Universitas Andalas in Padang, has foundsimilarities in the Batulih Borobono stone inscription located in the region with illustrations of allegedMinangkabau letters published by Datuk Rajo Darwas Malano and Zuber Usman (no referencesavailable) and with other South

Sumatran scripts. However, thelack of any known manuscriptsin an indigenous Minangkabauscript has made it difficult todetermine the inscriptionsletters accurately.

Illustrations reproduced on theweb sites give fifteen baseletters, four vowel signs and andone virama. The letter inventorycorresponds to the basic Rejang

inventory without prenasalizedconsonant letters, but also lacksa series of palatal consonantletters: this may be a reportingerror since Minangkabau isclosely related to Malay andwould most likely have the sameset of palatal consonants asMalay (namely /c/, /j/, /!/, /y/),increasing the set to 19 letters.

The letter shapes (Figure 6)

appear to be plausibly related tothose in other South Sumatranscripts, though the forms theytake in the drawings are likelydistorted. That said, the regularcorrespondence between Rejangand Kerinci letters is reflected ina similar tendency for loosestrokes in the Rejang shapes tobe deleted in their Minangkabaucounterparts, but this time onthe right-hand side of the letter, rather than the left-hand side as in Kerinci. Some of the alleged

Minangkabau shapes (yellow ovals in the figure) have a more curvaceous shape than their counterpartsin the other scripts, but nonetheless clearly related. I have added four shapes from Kerinci (greenrounded rectangles) that might plausibly be expected if the Minangkabau script is authentic, based onother correspondences between the three scripts. Given the systematic nature of the structuralcorrespondences and the fact that they have not been described elsewhere in the literature (and for mthey involve a likely but unattested earlier variant), it seems a plausible assumption that the imagespublished online reflect a possible authentic indigenous script variety previously unknown. This is aninteresting possibility since Jawi is the only script known to have been used in the Minangkabau region

Figure 6. Comparison of shape correspondences between Rejang,Kerinci, and putative Minangkabau scripts.


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in historical times; between the Surat Ulu region in the southeast and the Batak region to the northwest,it is an unexpected geographic gap for Indic scripts in Sumatra.

A second script is reported to be found in a book from Sulit Air in Solok Regency (Rinaldi 2010, RaisKamardi 1987). From the online reproduction of illustrations in Rais Kamardi, this appears to be aninvented cipher script only superficially related in structure to Indic alphasyllabaries. Letter shapes in

this script are completely unrelated to those of Indic scripts, as are the shapes and positions of vowelsigns. Although these signs are placed above, below, to the left and to the right of consonant letters likedependent vowel signs in Indonesian scripts, these placements are unrelated to those of any Indicscript; there is also a vowel sign for /a/ instead of the unmarked default reading in Indic scripts, and novirama: bare consonant letters are read without a vowel. The script also has a series of glyphs to replaceLatin script punctuation marks such as the comma, question mark and others, as well as a series ofclearly invented signs for arithmetical operations and relations. Since this script appears to be attestedonly from a single source and is clearly an invented alphabetic cipher that superficially mimics theappearance of an Indic script, it almost certainly does not merit further consideration.

Gangga Malayu

Kern (1908) describes a

curious script that wasapparently used as asecret cipher in the Malaypeninsula. Although it isnot from Indonesia or thePhilippines, it is from thesame region and isanalogous to the Lontarabilang-bilang cipher scriptof S ulaw e s i . Whe reLontara bilang-bilang isbased on Arabic numerals

(see below), GanggaMalayu letters are looselybased on Arabic lettershapes and groupings ofsimilar-shaped letters inArabic script (Figure 7).But just as Lontara bilang-bilang grafts the alreadyavailable vowel signs of Bugis-Makassarese script onto its numeral-based letters, Gangga Malayu isbasically Indic in structure, using a set of vowel signs based on ones used in Javanese script.

3 Age, rarity of secure dating

One of the difficulties with tracing the history of the insular scripts is the fact that very few documentsexist that can be securely dated, especially earlier than approximately the 17thcentury. The case of thePhilippines is exceptional, because most of the documents in question are legal documents saved fromthe ravages of the tropical climate by being stored away in the relative safekeeping of archives in Spainand the Philippines as records of dealings with the Spanish governing and ecclesiastical authorities onthe one hand and of the legal land title of the University of Santo Tomas on the other. As legaldocuments, most of these are written in Spanish but also often in Tagalog or Kapampangan in Latin

Figure 7. Gangga Malayu compared with Arabic (from Kern 1908).


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script: a curious consequence is the fact that most of the writing samples in the indigenous script aresignatures, with longer marginal annotations and descriptive cover notes somewhat less common. Onlytwo full documents are known that were written completely in the indigenous script: two land deeds inthe Santo Tomas archives from 1613 and 1625, both barely the size of an average adult hand. Being legaldocuments also means that the vast majority begin with the precise date and place they were writtenand it is the exceptions to this rule that are rare.

Outside the Philippines, clear indications of a documents age are rare. For Lampung script, there is onedocument, a Hikayat Nur Muhammad (story of the mystical light of Muhammad) that can be securelydated to before 1630, the year it was donated to the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Gallup 1991), yet thisstill leaves the date it was written a mystery. For modern Javanese script, four letters from the Sultan ofBanten to the Dutch are known to have been written in 1619 and 1620, when they were received by theDutch and transmitted to the Netherlands (Ricklefs 1976). For MakassareseJangang-jangang, the earliestsecurely dated documents are the 1667 Treaty of Bungaya with its indigenous script signatures, and theChronicles of Gowa and Tallo (in several copies) with its regularly dated entries going back to the early1600s. Yet these are the exception, and most documents from these places, as well as much of Sumatra,bear little to no information that would give a clue to when they were written.

Although archival storage saved the Philippine paper documents from the quick decay that would havebeen their fate otherwise, they have nonetheless fallen victim to bookworms that have eaten tracksthrough the paper: comparing my own 2011 photographs of these documents to the ones in Santamara(1938), it is clear that this took place during or since the 1940s, likely when the archives were still storedin substandard conditions. More serious for the two land deeds, they were damaged during a flood inthe 1940s, when the archives were located on the ground floor of one of the university buildings: bothare now stained turquoise blue across the bottom third of the paper, and one of them has lost several

large strips that were torn out of the right-hand side ofthe paper. Fortunately, all the documents are nowstored in climate-controlled conditions on the fifthfloor of the Miguel de Benavides library.

Even in Spain, archival documents were not immune

from serious damage. Figure 8 shows one documentthat suffered serious rot when these ecclesiasticalarchives were hidden under straw in a barn during theSpanish Civil War. Another document I hoped to consultwas completely unusable, the whole middle of the pagerotted away and several pages so fused together thatthey could not be separated without further damage.

Texts on copperplate, stone or pottery are exceedinglyrare for the Sumatra-Sulawesi-Philippine scripts, unlikethe numerous such inscriptions across Java andSumatra written in scripts of the Javanese group. And

though they have greater chances of survival than thoseon perishable materials like bamboo, palm leaf or paper,the problem of dating them remains. There are a fewstone inscriptions known in Sumatra for Batak scriptand apparently for the as yet unconfirmed indigenousMinangkabau script with notdates and at least onepre-Islamic Malay legend is inscribed on copperplate ina variant of Surat Uluscript (Labberton 1932).

Figure 8. A damaged document. ArchivoFranciscano Ibero-Oriental, Madrid.


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In the case of thePhilippines, it is notc l e a r t h a t s u c hinscriptions are evennecessarily authentic.The Ticao stones,

discovered in 2011 in aschoolyard on Ticao, asmall island off thesoutheast end of Luzon,are written in charactersthat appe ar to bedirectly copied from theprint shapes of the firstp r i n t i n g f o n t f o rBaybayin script, ratherthan using any of therange of shapes found inthe one- to two-hundredd i f fe re nt hand s inarchival sources (Figure9) . Furthermore, i tseparates words European-style with spaces rather than with the double vertical bars normally used inthe script, and uses the cross-shaped vowel killer below letters that was introduced by Lpez (1621).These facts clearly date the inscriptions to after 1621, but it is unclear whether this means the (as yetundeciphered) inscriptions are forgeries. It is quite possible that the Lpez font shapes and writingstyle might have gained some prestige as a model to be followed for formal texts; on the other hand, it isentirely possible that the inscriptions were forged by someone who knew only the Lpez font as anexample and was unaware that it is anomalous compared to authentic indigenous varieties of the script.

There are a number of pottery jars with Philippine script. On 20 September 1638, the Manila GalleonNuestra Seora de la Concepcin was shipwrecked off Guam. From this wreck, six (and perhaps severalmore) shipping jars later recovered,as described in Mathers et al (1990), bore shippers marks in singleBaybayin letters; this alongside four using Chinese characters and many dozens of such marks usingletter combinations from Latin script. It can be safely assumed that these marks were applied shortlybefore the galleons departure from Manila that year: the shapes of the letters are certainly consistentwith the range of letter shapes from that period found in archival documents.

The case of the more famous Calatagan Pot, on the other hand, is far more doubtful. This is a pot with anunusual inscription around its neck that was sold to the National Museum in Manila in 1961 by a farmeron whose land an archaeological dig was taking place. The inscription has attracted various attempts ata decipherment, most notably Guillermo (2008), Guillermo and Paluga (2011), and Oropilla (2008),

however the nature of the inscription itself has long raised doubts that it is authentic. Severalanomalous features strike the eye immediately, including the mix of several curvaceous letters clearlyrelated in shape to those in the 1593 Doctrina Christiana, but upside down, oriented away from themouth of the pot, with some others written right way up, oriented toward the mouth, and in additiona number of rectilinear characters that are less easy to identify based on generally known letter shapes,which could be oriented either way. Furthermore, the line of writing gives the impression of beingwritten right to left, the opposite of the normal direction, the end overlapping with the beginning as itreturns clockwise around the pot, so that the final few characters are written beneath those at thebeginning of the inscription (on the assumption that the direction is in fact clockwise).

Figure 9. The larger Ticao stone on display in August 2011 in Monreal,Masbate, the Philippines. (Smaller stone is hidden on the other side of thelarge stone.)


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Though space precludes me going into detail here, I am convinced that the inscription is in fact aforgery, based on close imitation of the anomalous appearance of several left-handed and otherwisedysgraphic signatures in three documents from 1591 and 1599, all in the Archivo General de ndias inSeville. It follows that assumptions that the Calatagan Pot is likely the oldest attestation of Baybayinscript and perhaps a form intermediate between Baybayinand an earlier script, possibly Kawi, cannot besustained.

4 Spelling

The scripts of Sumatra, Sulawesi and the Philippines are particularly interesting among Indic scripts forthe way they innovated unusual spelling conventions not found in the more traditional Indic scripts.These are of two types. One involves a restructuring of the way vowels are represented in syllables withno onset consonant, leading to a single letter taking on the function of a default bearer for dependentvowel signs, with no consonantal value of its own, and the /a/ reading not prespecified as the onlypossible reading for the letter, but provided only as the unmarked default, as with consonant letters.

The second kind of innovation combines vowel signs with base letters in unexpected ways not found inother Indic scripts, and falls into two main groups. The first includes two closely-related kinds ofconventions found in scripts throughout Sumatra, displacing vowel signs away from the onsetconsonant letter; the second is a convention found in both the Philippines and South Sulawesi, whichabbreviates successive syllables beginning with the same consonant and was subsequently extended indifferent ways in Sulawesi itself. Each results in new kinds of akshara, i.e. written syllable units, that arenot found in Indic scripts elsewhere.

4.1 Shift of h to a dummy consonant vowel sign bearer

The Batak script varieties of northern Sumatra have two letters that vary in their phonetic valuesdepending on the language they are used to write. One, whose shape is clearly related to k in Surat Uluand Lampung scripts, has the value /k/ when used to write the northern Karo and Dairi-Pakpaklanguages, but represents phonemic /h/ varying with [k] in certain positions in the southern Toba,Angkola and Mandailing languages, as well as Simalungun in the northeast. The phonemic /h/ value isclearly the result of a sound shift in the latter languages that probably took place after the script wasadopted in the Batak lands. The other letter is closely related in shape to h in Surat Ulu, Lampung andKerinci scripts, as far afield as the Philippines, and in the old Javanese Kawi script. In Karo and Dairi-Pakpak, which never underwent the /k/!/h/ shift, this letter is used to spell the /h/ phoneme. In thesouthern languages, however this letter is not used this way: it is only used as a dummy consonantletter to which vowel signs are added to spell syllables with no onset consonant. In Karo and Dairi-Pakpak, the letter has this dummy consonant function as well as its more obvious function ofspelling /h/. To the extent the analogy can be drawn, and remembering the differences between theLatin alphabet and Indic abugida scripts, this can be likened to the double use of h in English, where itspells /h/ in honey and house, but acts only as an empty consonant (that could just as easily bespelling-reformed out of existence) in very similar-looking words like honest and hour.

This double function is not restricted to Batak scripts, however. It can be found in Javanese-Balinesescript, whether to write those languages or Malay, as in the word baik good spelled ba hik" in one1619 letter from the Sultan of Banten to the Dutch, but ba yi k(pa nge ra n) with y in another, asreproduced in Ricklefs (1976). In both cases, it should have been possible in principle to write themiddle syllable with the already available standalone letter for i. Again to write Malay, it can be foundin Surat Uluscript, as in anak spelled hanak" in a legend inscribed on copperplate reproduced inLabberton (1932). This double function is likely a result of a historical sound change in Malay wherebyan earlier syllable-initial /h/ has disappeared in many words: just as the sound disappeared in Romance


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languages but is still spelled in several such languages, leading to uncertainty as to where it should orshould not be written, this is a likely explanation for these spellings in Malay. With the likelihood thatthe Bataks adopted their script from Malays to the east and/or southeast, it is likely that this doublefunction for the letter was inherited from Malay itself along with the script. Section 5.3 discusses someimplications of this peculiarity in greater depth.

4.2 Sulawesi and the Philippines: vowel sign doubling and outgrowthsAnother spelling convention that uses a letter as a stand-in for the first consonant of a syllable appearsin the scripts of the Philippines and Sulawesi. In this case, no dummy consonant is involved (at leastin the first stage of this innovation); instead, where two syllables in sequence begin with the sameconsonant, they can be abbreviated by writing the consonant letter only once, and combining the vowelsigns for the two syllables on the same base consonant. As far as I have been able to tell, thisorthographic analogue of haplology only occurs as long as both syllables have an explicitly markedvowel, and not the unmarked default /a/.

This is found in both the Philippines and South Sulawesi (and there, in both the general Bugis-Makassarese Lontara and the specifically Makassarese Jangang-jangang script). Although there are farmore examples of this abbreviation in Sulawesi texts than in the Philippines whether because we

have so few long texts in the Philippines or because the abbrevation was already dying out in the 1600s examples from the Philippines serve to illustrate the abbreviation nicely (Figure 10).

a)

b)

Figure 10. The vowel sign doubling abbreviation in Philippine signatures: a) Don Agustn Tiualag;b) Don Dionisio Capulong

Figure 10a illustrates two signatures from separate documents by one Don Augustn Tiualag. The firstshows his name spelled out in full: dua gutitiwala. (Note that in Philippine script, just as in SouthSulawesi, syllable-final consonants were not spelled apart from a later regional developmentdiscussed below.) Just below this signature, one from another document shows how he abbreviatedthe ...tin ti syllables of his name by writing the t only once and doubling up the two -i signs on thesame letter: dua gutiiwa la. In yet a third signature by this person, he actually writes t only once

but with only one vowel sign: its unclear whether he intended (but forgot) to write the full letter plusvowel sign twice, as in our first example, or to write two -i signs on the single t. The second exampleis one of four signatures by Don Dionisio Capulong, a nobleman exiled at one point for rebelling againstSpanish rule and a son of the ruler of Manila at the time of Spanish contact. One of his signatures is justhis last name, but on each of the other three, he doubles up the vowel signs for the Spanish honorificDonand the first syllable /di/ of his name: iduyu nisukapulu.

Apart from these examples, the only other evidence we have from the Philippines is a land deed thatuses it twice, once inside a single word and once abbreviating syllables belonging to two different


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words, just like these two signatures. The first example ispagkatotoproof or confirmation, spelled bydoubling up the -u vowel signs for the third and fourth syllables on a single t (shown between squarebrackets): thus * paka[tutu] u (full spelling) was actually spelled paka[tuu] u . The other example isthe noun phrase nitng tubignof this irrigated land: it would have been * ni [tutu] biga if spelled outin full, but the writer actually spelled n i [tuu] biga, making a single combined graphic syllable from

the last syllable of one word and the first syllable of the next.Noorduyn (1993) contains numerous examples of this kind of abbreviation in the many images of Bugisand Makassarese documents reproduced in that paper including several that combine different vowelsigns on a single consonant, just as in Don Dionisios signature. I will limit myself here to three examplesfrom Makassarese Jangang-jangangscript, otherwise little illustrated in the literature. Figure 11 showstwo examples: the first with the following -o vowel sign doubled up on p, and the second with -idoubled up on top of l.

Figure 11. The vowel sign doubling abbreviation in MakassareseJangang-jangangscript:mapala[poo]ro for *mapala[po po]ro (left); nu paliika for * nu pali lika (right)

This abbreviation had two shortcomings. The first involved cases where two differentvowel signs weredoubled up on the same letter. In this case, there was at least the possibility that it would be unclearwhich was supposed to come first and which second. In practice, this ambiguity would probably havebeen no greater than the question of which unwritten consonant, if any, was to be read out at the end ofa given written syllable. In the case of Don Dionisios signature, for example, the context makes it clearthat we are dealing with Don Di and not Din Du.

The second shortcoming is the fact that the abbreviation only works well and you can only tell forsure there is in fact an abbreviation as long as neither of the vowels involved is /a/. Since /a/ itself isnot marked, but only read off the consonant by default if no other vowel is overtly spelled, trying to

double it up with an overt vowel on the consonant letter only results in a reading with the writtenvowel sound: if a single vowel sign on a given consonant could in principle be read as that voweldoubled with an unwritten /a/, then every case of a consonant plus a single marked vowel would beambiguous between a single-vowel reading and a reading with the marked vowel plus /a/, and thesecondary problem of which vowel comes first would also arise: clearly an unworkable situation.Similarly, but for some possible limited contexts (such as specific words with a structure where little orno ambiguity would arise), it seems unlikely a single unmarked letter would often be used to stand fortwo subsequent syllables with the same consonant followed by /a/. Francisco (1973) does give anexample where Tagbanuwa script users write down the letters of their script in a specific order, endingwith the letter w (see section 5.3) and three of them, giving mnemonic sentences for that order, readthe final letter as the word wawa child[ren], with two syllables. Nonetheless, using an unmarkedconsonant letter this way is inherently ambiguous in a way that combining two vowel signs on a single

letter is not.

Although the details remain to be confirmed, there seems to be evidence that at least some scribes usingthe Makassarese Jangang-jangang script developed a way around this problem. There are numerousexamples in the copy of the Chronicles of Gowa and Tallo (KITLV Tropenmuseum 668-216) of whatappears to be the borrowed Arabic numeral 2 always following a preceding consonant letter,sometimes with a vowel sign marked on the consonant letter itself, sometimes on the sign itself, andsometimes without any sign marked on either. This distribution of vowel sign marks certainly seemsconsistent with a character being used diacritically as a dummy stand-in for a repeated consonant.


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Interestingly, most scribes in the document who use it do not use it with the letter n which, beingformed with a simple peaked arch shape, is the simplest letter in the script.

This is appears to be the angka that is used to mark word or root reduplication in Jawi, adapted tomarking reduplication of a syllable onset to make up for the above-mentioned shortcomings of thevowel-sign doubling convention. Figure 12 shows six examples of this sign in use (out of the 22 or 23

found on the 9 pages from the document that are available to me).

Figure 12. Borrowed Arabic 2 2 apparently used to repeat the consonant of the preceding syllable

where one or both have the unmarked vowel /a/ inJangang-jangang script.The first example on the first line appears to be another occurrence of the word nu paliika found inFigure 11, but with an added angka: nu pa liika2 . This is plausibly a case where the word has beenextended by an -a , possibly either the first person singular suffix -a or the definite suffix -a, bothdescribed in Cense (1943). The second example is one of the rare ones I have seen of this angkaoccurring after n, the simplest letter in the script: ana2 .

The examples on the second line show uses of an unmarked angka following a letter bearing a vowelsign: paru2 ngama and taenata u2 luba. The third line illustrates two examples where the angkaismarked with a vowel sign but none is marked on the preceding consonant letter : na2i ka ma seya and ni pa la2o wa nga se ngi . Though I await definitive readings from someone with knowledge of

Makassarese, the distribution of written characters is strongly consistent with the account of adummy diacritic character standing in for the preceding letter when one or both is to be read withthe unmarked /a/.

Further extensions of the vowel sign doubling convention are mentioned in Salim (2003) and deserve tobe cited here for greater exposure. Figure 13 reproduces data given by Salim, reorganised to show moreexplicitly the phenomena he describes.

Abbreviation as used in specific words (square brackets) Orthographic abbreviation

!["#$%#$] " !["#%#"#%#] "#%#"#%# ! "#$%#$

ma [nyii lii] ma [nyi nyi li li] nyi li nyi li nyii lii

&'!([)*]

"

&'!([++*]

++*

!

)*

cadamu [yo] cadamu [ao] ao yo

!('([)#],# " !('([++#],# ++# ! )#

mu du [yi] wi mu du [ai] wi ai yi

!'-#[)#] ./!01 " !'-#[+#+] ./!01 +#+ ! )# madagi [yi] re mata na madagi [i a] re mata na i a yi

Figure 13. Extensions of the vowel sign doubling abbreviation, after Salim (2003)


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Salim describes various difficulties with reading and interpreting the text of the Bugis epic La Galigoandgives four examples of puzzling, exotic abbreviations found in the text. I identify these abbreviationswith square brackets and enclose them in double quotes to render what superficially seems to be theirreading. The first of these involves repeated vowel signs on top of a single letter, but in this case withfour letters in sequence. In principle, the sequence manyiilii would expand as in the second column,with possible syllable-final consonants left untranscribed. But this is not what the abbreviation refersto. Instead, it is to be read as the sequence nyi li reduplicated as a whole, as shown in the third column.

Not only did scribes extend the vowel sign doubling convention to render longer reduplications likethis, but they carried it over into the dots that are part of letters themselves. Bugis-Makassarese scripthas five vowel signs overtly marked on letters (see section 5.2, Figure 17 for an illustration). Of these,two are dots, one written above a letter -i to spell a following /i/ and the other written below -u for afollowing /u/. As mentioned above and illustrated in Figures 11 and 12 forJangang-jangang script, thesedot-shaped signs could be doubled above or below a letter just like the -e and -o signs that wereplaced to the left and right of a letter, respectively. Now, although -i and -u take the form of plaindots (at least in the versions of the scripts that have come down to us), dots also function as integralparts of individual letters, placed inside the counters, i.e. enclosed white space formed by the archesin individual letters (and in the case of d, the trough or upside-down arch that forms that lettersbody). Apart from d (visible in the second line), a dots are an integral part of the form of several otherletters visible in Figure 13: under both arches of y (or what is easily misread as y) in the second, third,and fourth line; under the right arch of the zero consonant vowel bearer also in the same three lines;and under the initial arch of g, in the fourth line.

The abbreviations in lines 2 through 4 all treat the dots inherent to letters themselves in a wayanalogous to the vowel dots for -i and -u. In each case, what appears to be the letter y plus a vowelsign (-o in line 2; -i and -u in lines 3 and 4) is actually intended to be read as a doubled occurrence ofthe null consonant vowel bearer with either the first or second occurrence read with the markedvowel. Which syllable has the marked vowel is left up to the reader to guess, a problem that theapparentJangang-janganguse of angkaseems designed to circumvent. It is curious that the scribe(s) whoused this letter-internal doubling of dots chose to double the dots on by placing one inside each arch,exactly the choice that leads to possible confusion with y, when in principle they could have placed adouble dot inside the right-hand arch. Be that as it may, this and the Jangang-jangang angka exampleboth illustrate how the creativity that led to the vowel sign doubling abbreviation in the first placecontinued as part of the scripts writing culture over later generations.

4.3 Sumatra: non-iconic displacement of vowel signs

A perhaps even more exotic case is a pair of related spelling conventions found in Sumatra, from theBatak scripts in the north down to Lampung in the south. Both conventions have the effect of moving avowel sign away from its base letter so that it is more closely associated with the sign or letter for asyllable-final consonant. Examples of these are illustrated in Figure 14; the examples in MandailingBatak script are taken from van der Tuuk (1971); in Lampung varieties, from van der Tuuk (1868); and in

Kerinci Buffalo horn writing, from Westenenk (1922). Each example begins with an image of text in therelevant script, followed by an orthographic transcription showing the relative order of each of thewritten signs, and below that a phonological transcription of the actual reading.


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Mandailing, Toba Batak Kerinci Lampung

s!o/so$/

taghi/tagih/

pr"/p%r/

p!i/pi$/

sirhi/sirih/

sni n!i

/sin/ /ni$/

tpu" spi"/tup/ /sip/

&i ktu"/&ikut/

Figure 14. Two vowel sign displacement conventions in Sumatran scripts.

The top two rows illustrate displacement of the vowel sign outside a dependent final consonant sign inBatak, Kerinci and Lampung varieties. In each case there is a dependent final consonant sign above ordirectly to the right of the onset consonant letter, and a vowel sign normally written above or directlyto the right of its base letter, rather than appearing closerto the letter, appears further awayfrom it,either above the final consonant sign or to its right. In the two Mandailing Batak examples, for syllablespronounced song and ping, the -ng sign is written directly above the onset consonant letter and thevowel sign appears to the right of the initial+final consonant combination. Elsewhere in Batak varieties,the -ng is written above the vowel sign to the right of the consonant letter, in a more iconic orderreflecting the actual order of pronunciation more closely.

A similar convention is found in Kerinci, but Westenenk only mentions it for the two dependent signswritten to the right of the onset consonant letter: -i and -h. In a bark book text reproduced inVoorhoeve (1970), the same generalisation holds, though the shape of certain written characters differs,most notably -i, which is a circle to the right of its base letter as in most Batak varieties. In the buffalohorn examples given here, the -i sign appears to the right of the final -h sign, rather than to its left.In the bark book examples there is an extra change: the -h, which is normally a double vertical baridentical to the shape shown here, is reduced to a single vertical bar when it appears to the right of -i.That is identical to the shape of the " sign used elsewhere, but there is no danger of confusion because" itself is never followed by a vowel sign.

The Lampung examples illustrate the same convention, but with -n and -r. With -" after -r, the

vowel sign appears to the right of the consonant sign in the example provided by van der Tuuk, but inthe examples he gives with -i, we see the kind of variation that is normal in the bark and bamboo textshe reproduces: -i can appear either to the right of the final consonant sign as in sni, where -i is aconcave semicircle, or directly above the final consonant sign as in n!i , where it has the moreconservative full circle shape. A similar example is reproduced as an example of Lampung dependentsign combinations in Crawfurd (1852). Although I have not reproduced any examples here, the sameconvention appears variably in Surat Ulu: it is reproduced in texts in Van Hasselt (1881) and occurs in


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numerous places in the copperplate text in Labberton (1932). However, the signs are also ordered in amore iconic, pronunciation-based left-to-right order at least as commonly in both texts.

The bottom row illustrates a more complex displacement convention related to the first. In this case,when a syllable is closed by a consonant letter marked with ", the vowel sign moves off the onsetconsonant letter and groups with the final consonant letter instead. In Batak script varieties, it is

written either directly on the final consonant letter instead (cf. tpu") or directly to its right in thecase of -i (cf. spi") and -o/%, which are always written in their own space directly to the right oftheir base letter. In Lampung, the vowel sign is written either directly on the final consonant letter (cf.&i ktu" ) or, in the case of -i and -%, both of which are normally written above the base letter, abovethe space between the two consonant letters.

Van der Tuuk mentions this only for -i, but it can be observed for both signs throughout the Lampungmanuscripts he reproduces. Nonetheless, it is clear that the vowel sign is grouped with the finalconsonant letter just to its right: in van der Tuuks Lampung texts, when a line break occurs after asyllable-initial consonant letter, the vowel sign consistently appears at the beginning of the next line

just before the syllable-final consonant letter marked with a following ". Figure 15 illustrates this with

an example drawn from the oldest approximately dated Lampung document, a Hikayat Nur Muhammad(story of the mystical light of Muhammad) that was donated to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1630and thus was written in or before that year.

h#ndakku h'n" da k" ku h#ndaknya h 'n" da k" nya

Figure 15. Shifted vowel sign in Lampung grouping with the syllable-final consonant letter at a linebreak, symbolised by the arrow. Redrawn from Bodleian Library, MS Jav.e.2, p. 1-2, in Gallop (1991).

This, along with the examples in van der Tuuks texts, shows clearly that the displaced vowel sign wasperceived (like in Batak) as being written with the following syllable-final consonant letter, even if itsactual position was above and to the left of the letter in question. Although this particular conventionappears not to exist in Surat Uluor Kerinci texts, it occurs in nearly identical form in the Batak scriptvarieties at the north end of Sumatra and in Lampung at the very south of the island. Given that it is ahighly counterintuitive way of spelling, it seems unlikely it would have been borrowed from one to theother, and especially given its relationship with the slightly less strange convention affectingdependent vowel + dependent final consonant sign combinations in all four major script areas fromnorth to south (but only in Sumatran scripts), it seems plausible that both conventions descend from acommon ancestral proto-Sumatran script. In section 5.2 I discuss an intriguing method of teaching

spelling in the Surat Ulu region that is quite likely the origin of these two conventions and, moreindirectly, of the vowel sign doubling convention in Sulawesi and the Philippines.

4.4 Other conventions and observations

Although the conventions discussed above are certainly quite curious and exotic, there are otherinnovations motivated by practicality that deserve at least brief mention. These are of two kinds:innovations in the Philippines and Ende to write syllable-final consonants overtly, and similarinnovations in Sumatra and Ende to make a distinction between /a/ and /%/ where neither has its ownvowel sign.


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Almost as soon as the Spanish began writing texts on the languages of the Philippines, they pointed outthe lack of any means in the indigenous script to write syllable-final consonants. Very quickly, in Lpez(1621), the second major catechism printed in a Philippine language, the author/editor introduced ameans to do so: a small + sign below a letter to signal that the normal vowel reading did not apply.Unless the Ticao stones are authentic early texts (section 3/Figure 9), this appears not to have survivedbeyond that catechism in normal indigenous usage. Certainly, the surviving Tagbanuwa-Palawanscripts of Palawan and Mangyan scripts of Mindoro, which descend in an unbroken line from the periodwhen the indigenous script was still widespread in the islands, continued the practice of writingwithout representing syllable-final consonants.

Nonetheless, there have been a series of attempts to introduce vowel-killer signs of one sort or anothersince that time, most of them during the 20th century, and without exception, by persons notthemselves members of the indigenous script-using community. There have been a couple of attemptsto introduce such a convention in Tagbanuwa-Palawan script, a particularly complicated proposed inRomuldez (1914) and a more recent, simpler one reported in Batoon et al (1999), but the only suchproposal that has actually come into use in a native script-using community is thepamudpdtrimmer,based on the shape of the Kawi vowel killer and the downward chopping stroke of a knife, introduced insouthern (Hanuno) Mangyan script by Antoon Postma (Postma 1986).

More interesting is the evidence for a set of strategies taking form in the early 1600s among script usersin the Pampanga region northwest of Manila. The only surviving early indigenous script texts that I amaware of from that region are signatures in two deeds for the sale of slaves (Sagad and Lacsamana 1617;Sagad and Alo 1632) and in three individual testimonies in a case for beatification of a Catholic nun in1631. The signatures, in five different hands, share four specific strategies for dealing with syllable-finalconsonants. Where the consonant is similar or identical to the following consonant, it is not written.Otherwise, in one case where the final consonant of the honorific Don precedes a vowel, the n iswritten as the initial consonant of the first syllable of the name Alonso. In absolute final position ineach signature, the final consonant is written overtly, with no special marking, and obviously intendednot to be read with a default /a/. Otherwise, in non-final positions in most of the signatures, a syllable-final consonant is marked with -i, clearly not meant to be pronounced. It bears mention that these

strategies are used both to spell the Spanish given name of each individual and the Kapampangan namethat follows. Considering the fact that syllable-final consonants were dealt with in four distinct ways, itseems likely that this was a period of experimentation and that no single consistent convention had yettaken root in the community of Kapampangan script users. Kulitan, the modern Kapampangan script(Pangilinan no date; 2009; 2011), also signals a syllable-final consonant with an overt letter with noadded signs at the end of a syllable block, but given the unclear origins of other non-Indic aspects ofKulitan orthography, it remains an open question whether this descends from the 17th-century practiceor derives instead from the Sinitic model that informs the central structure of the modern script.

A different problem arises in matching a script with insufficient resources to the sound system oflanguages that have a neutral /%/ or pepet vowel contrasting with /a/. Comparable means seem tohave been adopted in Lota Endeon Flores and Surat Uluin southern Sumatra. According to van Suchtelen(1921), the default vowel read off bare consonant letters is /%/; to spell /a/, users of the script developedthe convention of following a bare consonant letter with the smooth onset letter !, itselfunmarked for any vowel. According to Voorhoeve (1984), a similar strategy is to be found in Surat Ulu(Rncongin his text):

The rncongscript has no sign for the e(pepet) sound. A syllable without a vowel signcan have the vowel a or e (pepet). In many Middle-Malay texts a distinction is madethrough writing ah for a in open syllables and no vowel sign for e (pepet). Jaspanshelpers found another solution by inventing a new sign for e(pepet). This sign is neverfound in old manuscripts.


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5 Teaching strategies

The spelling innovations described in section 4 are unique in themselves, but they are only part of alarger picture, a usage culture around their writing systems that includes various strategies forteaching and learning to use the scripts. We are fortunate to have several descriptions from observers

over the centuries that tell us how their users passed their knowledge of the scripts on to others. Theseinclude names for the various written signs and set orders for reciting them as aids to memory, as wellas pangrams, i.e. mnemonic phrases made up out of the sequence of characters to help rememberthem in order. We have seen that spelling conventions clearly divide into separate Sumatran andeastern groups, and in what follows a similar division will emerge in the strategies used to teach andlearn the scripts but with an additional cross-cutting division between northern and southern scripts.In both cases though, the divisions appear to grow out of an earlier single way of doing things, withgradual changes leading to the differences that we now know of.

5.1 Character names

At first glance, the various scripts and even varieties within the same group use an enormous variety ofdifferent names for equivalent characters. Nonetheless, there are some unexpected similarities that area clue to an common heritage that has since been obscured by later changes.

For individual letters, the general practice is simply to name the vowel letters with the sound they makeand the consonant letters by the consonant plus a following /a/. The Philippines seem to be unique inreduplicating these single syllables. This is seen both in 17th-century sources and as recently, in the caseof Palawan script, in Revel (1990), where the whole written CV combination is reduplicated, with aglottal stop at the end of each syllable: thus the letters a, u and letter + vowel sign combinations s,so, si, are named aa, uu, sasa, soso, sisi.

Vowel signs (and final consonant signs in Sumatra) tend to have generic descriptive names in thePhilippines and Sulawesi. In Bugis and Makassarese, the vowel signs are described generically aschildren of writing and each is then described by its position on the letter child below, child infront and so on; the one exception is the sign above a letter for / %/ in Bugis and (inconsistently) for asyllable-final nasal in Makassarese, which is named ecce in Bugis and anca in Makassarese. In thePhilippines, where there are only two vowel signs, one above and one below the letter (or to the left andright if looking at the line oriented upward away from the body), they are both named by genericterms such as tulsok, ulit, kudlit, that mean scratch, mark, puncture, tick and the like.

The sole exception to this generalisation is the term kahulon recorded as caholoan in de Lisboa(1754) for the Bicol language of southeastern Luzon. This term is unrelated to any other term in thelanguage the root huloitself occurs only in this word but is clearly related to several terms used inSumatra for the -i vowel sign written above a letter in Surat Uluand Lampung scripts and to the rightin Kerinci and Batak scripts. These related terms are also the most widespread for any of the vowelsigns: ulanin Lampung, luan in Kerinci, keluan/kaluan,kalawanin Surat Uluregions, and variously uluwa,hauluan, haulian, haluan, kelawanand kaloanin different Batak languages. The most plausible source for

all these terms would be a reconstructed (likely Malay) *(ka)huluan, which is also most directlyreflected in the Bikol kahulon.

5.2 Combining vowel and other signs with consonant letters

The defining feature of the Indic script family is the fact that consonant letters written on their own areread by convention with a default, unmarked vowel, usually /%/ or /a/, and any other vowels arewritten not with independent vowel letters but dependent vowel signs that can only be writtenattached to a base letter, to the left or right, above or below. As far as I can tell from the literature, the


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scripts of Sumatra, Sulawesi and the Philippines use a set of unique strategies for teaching andmemorising how these combinations are made, combining several such signs at a time that togethercannot be read as a single pronounceable syllable. In the Philippines and South Sulawesi, the vowelsigns are combined together on an individual base consonant letter, while in Surat Uluseveral such signsare combined together either with the base letter alone or with the sign (or following letter plus vowelkiller) that spells a syllable-final consonant.

Sumatra

Figure 16 shows Marsdens (1834) schematic description of how dependent signs are combined withconsonants in Kerinci script, using t as the example base letter. There are two parts to the

description: the description written in Latin script, and under the name of each dependent sign, the tletter combined with that sign in the form of a dot above the letter for tulang, to its right for luan, belowfor tampun,and two dots to the right for the final consonant sign kajinan.

Figure 16. Recitation of dependent sign combinations with t tuain Kerinci script in Marsden (1834)

His words they are thus expressed by the native teachers show that the written character plus signcombinations were recited out loud, first naming the letter (tua), then the combining sign (tulangetc.),and finally the syllable they spelled (tangetc.). This teaching strategy reinforced the written signs in thelearners mind by reciting their names plus the resulting reading.

Marsdens observations are reinforced by the even more detailed description in Van Hasselt (1881) ofhow learners were taught the combinations of vowel signs with individual final consonant signs on abase letter (my translation):

When teaching spelling the native puts various signs together on the letter, and the

learner reads kakejujung kar, keluan kir, kebitan kur; kaduwa di atas kan,

keluan kin, kebitan kun; kaketulang kang, keluan king, kebitankung.This is similar to Marsdens account, but introducing the final consonant sign adds an additionalcomplication: the letters name is followed first by the name of the final consonant sign and the result isrecited with the default vowel /a/; after this, the names of other individual vowel signs are added insequence, each followed by the reading that corresponds to that vowel sign plus the final consonantsign.

Reciting the final consonant sign first and a vowel sign after of course inverts the actual order of thesounds. The teachers of the script could have begun by adding an individual vowel sign and following itwith the available consonant signs and the resulting readings, which would have followed the actualorder in speech, and why they did not choose this particular way to teach the combinations is not clear.In any case, the inverted order they did choose reveals a likely explanation for why vowel signs are

written outside(above or to the right of) final consonant signs in so many Sumatran scripts, from northto south: this is a natural result of writing down a letter and the combining signs following the order ofthis recitation.

Van Hasselt further describes how a following consonant letter with the membunuhvowel killer signis combined with vowel letters in a similar way, this time giving examples of how students would recitethe spelling of individual number words (my translation, intended italics on his te added):


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The following examples will serve to illustrate spelling practice: []

da membunuh wa: dau (= one).

tamungguh te,lamembunuhwa, lau: telau (= three).

a membunuh ma, am, pamembunuh ta,pat: ampat (= four).

namembunuhma,nam, kebitannum: num (= six) [].

In his example, Van Hasselt uses italics to illustrate what was read off the spelling itself, apart from thefinal resulting word, and adds the names of the combining signs in ordinary upright letters. I havereproduced only the examples with the bunuhan vowel killer and have placed the English versions ofthe translations he gives for each number in parentheses. The term mungguhwas used for a consonantletter read with /%/ instead of /a/.

The first line shows the simplest case of adding a letter followed by bunuhan. Key to understanding howthis worked is that the letter (in this case w wa) plus bunuhan was not read out as w, " wabunuhan, in other words naming the vowel killer the same way other dependent vowel and consonant

signs are named individually. Instead the combination was read out as a single unit w" membunuhwa, literally kill wa: in other words, a consonant letter plus " is treated in exactly the same way as-r kejujung, -ng ketulang and -n duwa di atas, the dependent final consonant signs that are addeddirectly above a letter.

The second and third lines show essentially the same thing, with an additional syllable preceding orfollowing. The complication of an added vowel sign shows up in the fourth line: the initial consonantletter n is named na, then the combined final consonant m"is added and named nam; only afterthe final consonant is added (just as if it were duwa di atas, for example) is the required vowel sign -ukebitanadded and the final reading num given.

The result is the same as for individual final consonant signs: a final consonant is spelled first, thenfollowed by the vowel for the syllable, even though this reverses the actual order in speech. Just as inthe earlier case, this is a very likely explanation for the appearance of the strange spelling rule in bothBatak and Lampung, where a vowel sign is shifted rightward onto a final consonant letter followed by". Again, if a word is spelled out by writing down the signs in the order they are recited, thedisplacement of the vowel sign from its logical base letter onto the following letter occurs almostautomatically. This can be illustrated by bracketing the successive stages of the recitation and how aword would be spelled out following the recitation order: from an original order that iconically follows

the order in speech, namely [[[k]i]n] and [[[[n]u]m]"], following the recitation orders described in de

Sturler gives the written equivalents of [k[n[i]]] and [n[[m"][u]]].

Despite the complexities that result from combining final consonant signs or a C" killed consonantcombinationwith vowel signs, the basic case where a vowel sign is combined with an initial consonantletter remains straightforward, and there is evidence from Sulawesi and the Philippines of a similarpractice, which nonetheless seems to have led to its own quite different set of spelling conventions.

The Philippines

The first known written evidence of a recitation order in the region comes from the Philippines in theform of the Tagalog abc. printed in the 1593 Doctrina Christiana(Wolf, 2005) to illustrate the letters ofthe script (Figure 17). I will examine this order further below; here it suffices to pay attention to themarks that accompany all but the first three letters, which are the independent vowel letters a, u, i.


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The rest are consonant letters, with the vowel signs -i and -u added above and below respectively,giving a u i ihuipuikuisuiluituinuibuimuiguiduiyuinguiwu.

Figure 17. El abc. en l(gua tagala. Anonymous (1593) Doctrina Christiana recitation order withdependent vowel signs on base consonant letters.

By itself, this tells us nothing more than that these vowel signs were used and were added in thosepositions (with the help of other evidence that says which is which). Conklin (1991 [2007]) adds somefascinating new information that bears on this purely visual information, however. From his fieldworkon Tagbanuwa writing practices in the 1940s, he recounts how the people he worked with would write

down the letters of the script in a specific order with vowel signs on all the consonant letters but w,therefore u a i iluimuiduiguituinuikuibuisuipuiyuinguw , and:

[a]fter pronouncing the three vocalic signs, a common way of reading this exercise aloudwas to point to each basic or diacritic sign while chanting as rapidly as possible, langlylu-langlyli, mangmymu-mangmymi, etc., ending with ngangngyngu-ngangngyngi, wawa.

Just like the South Sumatran practice described by Marsden and de Sturler, the written combinations ofdependent signs with letters are reinforced in memory by chanting out the combinations and, asConklin tells us here, pointing at the relevant characters at the same time. Almost the same practice isdescribed in Marcilla y Martn (1895), but with some slight differences. Figure 18 shows his schematicdescription of how letters were combined with vowel signs.

Marcilla adds that a mark to the left of a letter adds the vowel e-i insteadof /a/; one to a letters right adds o-u and clarifies that this is done whenreading upward, in other words, outward away from the body along alength of bamboo, which is indicated by the two small arrows in the image.

He comments on this image with the following description (mytranslation):

Expression or manner which the Tagbanuwas recite, when theyread their alphabet, to say for each sign or letter its three endings ina, e-i, and o-u: pointing with their finger, when they say the i ending,at the mark on the left; and similarly on the right for o.

The small words placed to the left and right of each letter ( b k d g reading

in the direction of the arrows) are thus the expression in his writtendescription, to be read out in sequence. At first glance, these paired three-syllable nonsense words are very similar to the ones described by Conklin,but two significant differences need to be taken into account. First, theorder of the letters is not an indigenous Tagbanuwa order like the onedescribed by Conklin, but the common Abakada order used in thePhilippines that was inherited from the way the Spanish described the 17letters of the indigenous script by arranging them in the order of the Roman

Figure 18. TagbanuwaConsonant plus vowelsign combinations.Marcilla y Martn (1895)


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alphabet with the default vowel /a/: a e-i o-u ba ca da ga ha la ma na ga pa sa ta va ya.

Second, the shape of the nonsense words, though similar to the ones described by Conklin, is morecomplicated. In Conklins description, the three syllables of each word all begin with the consonantcorresponding to the letter they represent: CangCyC{u/i} and differ only in the final vowel. In Marcillasdescription, only the first two syllables of each word begin with that letter; the third syllable, the one

that actually has the vowel being referred to, begins with /r/ for the three voiced consonants in hisexample and with /s/ for the voiceless /k/, though it isnt clear whether this is a typographical error ora clue that this kind of difference in the third syllable is found for other consonant letters as well.Whichever is the case, this is less expected than the shape of the words Conklin describes: in hisexample, at least the final syllable of each paired word corresponds to the actual reading of the letterwith the vowel sign being pointed at. Third, unlike Conklins description, where it is clear that thepeople he worked with recited the -u word before the -i word in each pair (following the order ofthe two independent vowel letters in the script), it isnt clear from Marcillas description which wordnormally came first or whether this actually varied from person to person.

All this being said, this sheds new light on the 1593 Tagalog abc in the Doctrina Christiana: it is notunlikely that the Tagalogs used a similar recitation, and quite likely, given the status of Manila as themajor port in the region, that it may even have spread from there to Palawan to its southwest. Someinteresting evidence bearing on this possibility comes from South Sulawesi.

South Sulawesi

Figure 19 illustrates the discussion in Marsden (1834) of how the vowel signs combine with a base letterin Bugis-Makassarese Lontarascript. His discussion applies specifically to Makassarese usage, since thebreve-like mark ( ) above a letter is given the value of -ng following a vowel, rather than -%, theneutral or pepet vowel it represents in Bugis. At the bottom right of the image, he shows howteachers combined all five signs on a single letter as the equivalent of ei"tuo , presumably as a way toteach these combinations.

Figure 19. Dependent signs combined with base consonants in the Makassarese variety of Bugis-Makassarese Lontarascript, from Marsden (1834)

Although these five signs far exceed the two that combine with any consonant letter in the Philippines,or even the three vowel signs combined with one final consonant sign in de Sturlers description forSurat Ulu, the combinations are clearly reminiscent of these other two cases. Unfortunately, Marsdenonly gives us a visual description here and no clue, unlike his description for Kerinci, as to whether a

verbal recitation was used to read out the five signs off the same base consonant.

However, there is reason to believe that learners in Sulawesi would follow the same kind of practice asin the Philippines and Sumatra. The most obvious argument is that doing so would help to reinforce thecombinations in memory in the same way as in Sumatra and the Philippines. But there is a second, morecomplex and in my view more convincing argument that reveals a connection between the Philippinepractice and the combinations illustrated by Marsden.


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Fox (1979) gives one of the more solid arguments in the literature to argue that the Philippine scriptwas probably introduced by users of a South Sulawesi script. Although a syllable can end in almost anyconsonant in Tagalog and most Central Philippine languages of Southern Luzon and the Visayas, theBaybayinwriting system provided no way to write final consonants: on the face of it, the writing systemgave the appearance of languages with only open (CV) syllables. This is clearly not an ideal matchbetween the scripts resources and the sound systems of the languages it was used to write down. Had

the script been introduced directly from Sumatra, Java, Bali, mainland Southeast Asia or India itself, itwould have automatically inherited a vowel killer and other final vowel signs, as well as the conjunctconsonant forms used in some scripts, allowing it to spell final consonants overtly. For ease of reading,that would have been as obvious a choice to people in the Philippines as it has been in all other placesthat use a similar solution. The one and only place other than the Philippines where the indigenousscript lacks a means to write final consonants is South Sulawesi (Ende and Sumbawa having adopted andadapted the script), and in this case this is not as inexplicable: in South Sulawesi languages, the only twopossible consonant endings for any given syllable are a nasal consonant that varies depending on whatfollows or a non-nasal consonant, whose nature again varies depending on what follows in the word.Although this means that there is some guesswork involved in reading a sequence of written characters,this is a far less serious problem than for Philippine languages in general. It follows, in Foxs argument,that it is highly unlikely that the script used in the Philippines could have been adopted from anyoneother than literate speakers of a South Sulawesi language likely either Bugis or Makassarese.

On this basis, it is plausible to assume some relationship between the way vowel signs were combinedfor teaching purposes on individual letters by Tagalog and Tagbanuwa users and the similarMakassarese practice Marsden describes. These may plausibly have been recited in a way similar toTagbanuwa and the South Sumatra recitations. The first clue to a likely direct causal link is the strangenature of the Tagbanuwa recitations doubled words (using the simpler and more intuitive wordsreported by Conklin rather than Marcillas). There is no immediately obvious reason why a user had togo through two full nonsense syllables in order to pronounce each of the two syllables (lu, li) thatactually corresponded to what was written. Instead of langlylu-langlyli mangmymu-mangmymidangdyru-dangdyri and so on, it would have been much simpler to say lu-(la-)li mu-(ma-)mi du-(da-)ri and so on. Yet each vowel sign had to be recited with these more complex three-syllable

nonsense words and although the two preceding syllables containedthe default /a/ vowel, both alsoended with an intrusive consonant (ng, y) not found in the written combination being recited.

The ei"tuo combination illustrated by Marsden has five signs combined on the letter: togetherwith the default vowel this makes six additions to the initial consonant. One plausible way to recitethese would be to start with the default vowel (as in Sumatra), then proceed clockwise beginning withthe -e sign on the left, moving up to the -i dot directly over the base letter, then to the crescent -%written above and after the -i, then to the -o to the letters right, and ending with the -u dot writtenbeneath the letter. This results in an initial reconstructed recitation ta te ti t%to tu. This bears a morethan superficial resemblance to the Tagbanuwa chant.

That I chose the Bugis vowel value for the ecce/anca ( ) sign above the letter, instead of the

Makassarese -ng value, is no accident. Doing so leads to some interesting consequences. Cense (1943),Mills (1975), and Noorduyn (1955) all describe the operation of a historical process that doubled aconsonant following /%/ in Proto-South-Sulawesi. Modern Bugis reflects the old process transparentlysince it still has the vowel, but in Makassarese it merged with /a/ so that Bugis / %/ followed by adoubled consonant corresponds to Makassarese /a/ plus a similar doubled consonant. It makes sensethat the /%/ sign would only be borrowed to write a language with that sound, and the shape ofecce/ancais clearly a simplification of the ) shape still found in various Sumatran scripts.


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Either Makassarese still had a distinct /%/ at the time writing was adopted in South Sulawesi or writingwas first adopted by the Bugis: in either case, it can safely be assumed that /%/ was the original valueand the Makassarese -N nasal value used only sporadically in any case, according to Noorduyn(1993) is a later development. The most plausible cause of this development is the geminationfollowing /%/: at least with a following nasal consonant, this leads to a nasal final in the syllablecontaining /%/, and although his description leaves the details open, Noorduyn states that /%/ is

followed either by acluster or geminated consonant. Since the only clusters allowed in Bugis are nasal-initial (NC), I assume this is what he is referring to; Cense is silent on whether NC clusters exist inMakassarese following an /a/ that was originally /%/.

Taking into account the preceding information, I reconstruct the following plausible Bugis/Makassareseorigin for the Tagbanuwa chant. We begin with the clockwise reading of the vowels off the writtencombination (which interestingly enough is approximately mirrored by the progression of tonguepositions in the mouth frontward and upward, then downward, backward and upward in the back as thesix vowels are pronounced, starting with [a] and ending with [u]): ta te ti t%to tu. This resolves itselfeasily into two three-syllable words, adding a rhythmic, rhyme-like quality: tateti t%totu. At somepoint, a Bugis speakers feel for their language demands that the consonant following /%/ be geminated,resulting in tateti t%ttotu. A second possibility, following Noorduyns hint, is that this might have

resulted directly in tateti t%ntotu or this may have simply appeared by analogy with mamemim%mmomu and the corresponding sequences for the other nasal consonants.

In any case, once this took place, the mirrored, rhyme-like structure of the two words would haveencouraged the NC sequence to spread to the first word: tanteti t%ntotu, and in Makassarese thiswould eventu

Documents

A survey of indigenous scripts of Indonesia and the Philippines