The growing number of practitioners and enthusiasts of baybayin which now expanded its uses and transcend the boundaries of its tradition to blend with the outside world leads to the proposed modification and expansion of baybayin characters. Some had created their own new baybayin glyphs to match the Latin letters C, F, J, Q, X, V, Z and even the Ñ. The ‘Ra’ character has variations, the Bicol Mintz and the recent one developed by Norman Delos Santos for his fonts. As of this time, there are no settled standard new baybayin characters yet. On the other hand, this prompted me to do my own little experiment. Using the Baybayin Lopez truetype font (by Paul Morrow), I merged the two baybayin characters and created a new one based on the fuse of two glyphs. The ‘Ja’ character was already proposed by Kendrick Salting a year ago which seems that it agreed well with the two glyphs.
I do not recommend this as a proposal but just to show how the two characters look like when combined and evolved to a new one. My experiment did not include the letter C, V and Z since they can be transliterate either ‘Ka’/’Sa’, ‘Ba’ and ‘Sa’ depending in pronunciation. Only the letter J, F, X and Q are my focal point.
