Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Baybayin Basic Chart

There are numerous baybayin charts available but some are not original and with extended developed characters which are unofficial and not standard that could mislead someone who is still new to the script. This one is a remake of the iconic Ilocan syllabary chart also known as Kur-itan taken from the Francisco López typefont of the 1621 Ilocan Doctrina Cristiana (Líbro a naisurátan ámin a bagás ti Doctrina Cristiana nga naisúrat ití líbro ti cardenal agnágan Belarmino quet ináon ti Fr. Francisco López, padre a San Agustín ití sinasantóy). The font used for this remake is the Baybayin Lopez font created by Paul Morrow based on the same typefont.
The above chart first introduces by F. López the utilization of the vowel cancelling cross-virama for the Reformed method of writing. In addition to the chart, there are equivalent marks for comma and period but it can also be use to other punctuation marks such as exclamation point and question mark. Another glyph created by the late Dutch anthropologist Antoon Postma is the pamudpod - a vowel cancellation mark virama now accepted by the Mangyan people in Mindoro.

Font creator Norman Delos Santos include pamudpod in his fonts as a proposed replacement for the Spanish cross virama for end/trailing consonants while leaving the +/x virama for leading consonants. This proposed convention further applies to +/x virama to a distinct purpose - for writing foreign words with leading consonants (ex. trabaho, proyekto).

*Note pamudpod glyph taken from Baybayin Modern Sulat font by Norman Delos Santos

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