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Baybayin: Accents & Diacritics

1

In the old syllabary, they make all the difference.

Each symbol was pronounced with an a

As in baa baa (black sheep), but with a dot above

 

Or below the character it either became be

Or bo as in better or bottom though these vowels

Could be interchanged with either bi and bu

 

As in bit and buffet or beet and brute. It is not

Easy to show because English comes from

Half a world away and almost fifty years

 

After the 300-year imposition of Castilian

Orthography, while Tagalog comes from

The Austro-Polynesian cauldron of the Pacific,

                     

                                       2

                                       Until Jose Rizal’s Estudios

Sobre de la lengua tagala, written in internal exile

In Dapitan maybe the week before his execution,

Distinguished the e and o from i and u

To accommodate the Hispanic lengua,

And which later Lope K. Santos adopted

And modified for the modern Balarila,

His grammar “ammunition for the tongue.”

 

3

Now with some nostalgia we wish to go back

To the Baybayin, the old and living syllabary

Of the Hanunuo Mangyan on Mindoro island.

 

It is said they wrote their love poems,

Lullabies, and paeans to friendship

By etching seven-syllable ambahan verses

 

On bamboo tubes and leaving these along

Known paths in the jungle where the beloved

Or friend addressed would surely find them.

 

Filipino children in the 60s confess to having

Mastered Baybayin enough to write love letters or send

As secret code to barkada or gangmates but we

 

Wonder if the syllabary would be capable and

Sufficient to speak science or math or philosophy

To millennials whose tongues have been twisted

 

By English.                                      

                 4

                   But the diacritics survive and are

Useful. They make all the difference in some

Words where the glottal release or stop

 

Changes all the meaning: Take the classic

Example of paso: Unaccented and unmarked

If it is the Spanish pass as in mountain path,

 

A transfer or transpiration; but the Tagalog

Variations (no relation to the Spanish) change

With the headwear: pasó means finished

 

Or expired as medicine in the cabinet,

Pasò is to get burned as when touching a flame;

And pasô is a crock or flower pot. The second

 

Has an acute accent, the third a grave,

And the fourth a hat or circumflex

That says to stop air in the throat.

 

                                       5

                                       Baybayin, by the way,

Is also beach in Tagalog, and the verb,

With acute accent, baybayín, means to trace

 

A shoreline by boat, as if giving shape

To island, while the root baybay

Is your wondrous powder in Boracay.

 

But the ambahan of the Hanunuo were

Written not on shifting sands but on hardy

Shafts where baybay is the same word as to

 

Spell, which is also to write according 

To Webster or Oxford as well as to murmur

Like an enchanter the magic of the word.

                   

 

Marne Kilates

1 April 2017

(After Isabel Manalo’s With Syria, 2015)

NOTE:

Balarila, Tagalog for grammar, was coined, it was said, from bala and dila (bullet for the tongue)

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