Alibata
The script is often referred to as
alibata
, a term coined inexplicably to mimic the first two letters of thealphabet of the Maguindanao, used in the southern Philippines, which is derived from Arabic. (The term refersto the first two letters,
alif
and
bet
.) It is also called
baybayin
, which means “to spell” in Tagalog.
3.) Origin of the Baybayin
The word
baybayin
is a very old Tagalog term that refers to all the letters used in writing a language, that is to say, an“alphabet.” It is from the root
baybáy
meaning, “spell.” Baybayin became the specific name for the ancient writing of thePhilippines at some time before the early 20
th
century. Perdro Serrano Laktaw recorded this newer sense of the word in his
Diccionario tagálog-hispano
in 1914 and he used it in this sense throughout the introductory essay of the dictionary.Early Spanish accounts usually called the baybayin “Tagalog letters” or “Tagalog writing.” And, as mentioned earlier, theVisayans called it “Moro writing” because it was imported from Manila, which was one of the ports where many products fromMuslim traders entered what are now known as the Philippine islands. The Bikolanos called the script
basahan
and theletters,
guhit
.Another common name for the baybayin is
alibata
, which is a word that was invented just in the 20
th
century by a member of the old National Language Institute, Paul Versoza. As he explained in
Pangbansang Titik nang Pilipinas
in 1939,In 1921 I returned from the United States to give public lectures on Tagalog philology, calligraphy, and linguistics. I introducedthe word alibata, which found its way into newsprints and often mentioned by many authors in their writings. I coined thisword in 1914 in the New York Public Library, Manuscript Research Division, basing it on the Maguindanao (Moro)arrangement of letters of the alphabet after the Arabic: alif, ba, ta (alibata), “f” having been eliminated for euphony’s sake.
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