Here is a charmingly patronising prologue page to Philippine folklore stories, published in Boston in 1904. Given the date it was presumably intended as an English instructional aid for Thomasite teachers in the Philippines. Click the image to see the full text. The illustrations and typesetting are marvellous.
I’m reading Sarah C. Gudschinksy’s How to learn an unwritten language, published in 1967. The lessons are still relevant, but some of the examples are charmingly quaint (as is the convention of addressing the prospective fieldworker as ‘he’). Her examples of open-class lexemes must have been considered cutting-edge in their time. This from p25:
An article on my intellectual hero Dr José Rizal is out now in History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. A shorter version of it has been published in Rappler.
It is something of a cliché to assert that Dr José Rizal’s thought is as relevant as ever to the Philippine nation, but it can hardly be denied. His brilliant essay ‘On the indolence of the Filipino’, can be read as a devastatingly witty rebuke to every foreign tourist who complains about poor service or a lack of initiative amongst locals, unaware of the long shadow of colonialism they are projecting. But it was his unflinching critique of the friar orders and their oppressive governance of the Philippines that continues to resonate with such force, despite the freedoms won by the Rizal-inspired independence movement.
Canberra has the look and feel of a city that was constructed overnight in 1992. Without the juxtoposed old-and-new architecture of other Australian cities it’s rare to see anything to remind you that Canberra has existed for ten distinct decades. So I was pleased to come across this 1963 issue of Canberra Weekly for sale on ebay today. My favourite quotes come from the Teenage World section (image 5 below) where the young TV personality Rosalind Doig is profiled:
“Classical music and jazz are her favourites in the music field and she thinks Elvis is a boob […] Of Australian men, the thing she dislikes most is to see them leave their wives in the car, while they are in the bar drinking”
What to make of this crime scene?
First, and most confrontingly, the author has chosen to use Comic Sans, the most socially stigmatised of all fonts. Was the culprit attempting to provoke outrage? Perhaps this indicates repressed feelings of guilt and a latent desire to be ‘discovered’ and punished.
The ‘doughnut’ spelling suggests the culprit is a native of the Commonwealth while the absence of a capital and full stop on the final sentence points to the habitual use of computer code and its lowercase conventions. Or perhaps “lecturer: Dr Paul Sidwell” is the key here! (Sorry Paul!). All this reminds me of the case of the intriguing and unsolved case of the so-called ‘identity killer’:
I’m very excited to be presenting at the International Workshop on Endangered Scripts of Island Southeast Asia in Tokyo, 27 February–1 March. Here is the abstract for my presentation. Comments welcome.
The Eskayan alphasyllabary of the Philippines: history and description of a utopian writing system
Over the course of the twentieth century, leaders of grassroots movements in Southeast Asia have sought to elevate the status of minority languages by rendering them visible in unique scripts. The Pahawh Hmong script, invented by Shong Lue Yang between 1959 and 1971, is perhaps the most celebrated case, but new writing systems are also reported for the Loven language of Laos (1924), and Iban in Malaysian Borneo (1947–1962) among others.
Pahawh Hmong
This paper describes the largely undocumented Eskayan writing system of the Philippines (ca. 1920–1937) and discusses the motivations and practicalities of its inspired (re)creation. Although Eskayan is used for the representation of Visayan (Cebuano)—a widely used language of the southern Philippines—its privileged role is in the written reproduction of a constructed utopian language, also referred to as Eskayan. Held to have been created by the ancestral ‘Pope Pinay’, the Eskayan language and writing system are used by approximately 550 people for restricted purposes in the upland region of southeast Bohol. Eskayan makes use of an inherent vowel in a small set of consonant characters, a strategy reminiscent of the endangered baybayin systems found elsewhere in the Philippines. For the most part, however, its approximately 1000 syllabic characters can be decomposed into what local scribes refer to as an inahan (‘mother’) standing for CV onsets and a diacritic sinyas (‘gesture’) indicating consonantal codas. Although the onset is often predictable from the graphic form of the inahan, coda diacritics are inconsistent, meaning that each syllabic character needs to be acquired independently.
Eskayan letters with dual alphabetic-syllabic values
I argue that the relatively unsystematic nature of the Eskayan writing system, and the redundancy of the majority of known Eskayan characters, is explicable with reference to the circumstances and ideologies that attended its emergence in the 1920s. From its beginnings, Eskayan was promoted by members of an anti-colonial movement that rejected the US occupation of Bohol in 1901 and sought to valorize an alternative indigenous cultural order. In my analysis, the writing system was likely to have been first developed for the cryptic transliteration of Visayan and Spanish text. Later, the syllabary was expanded to accommodate and preempt the exotic syllable shapes of the emergent Eskayan language, while anticipating the fulfillment of a local prophecy that Eskayan would one day be used for writing all the languages of the world. This dynamic between the particular and the universal plays out in traditional Eskayan literature, where written language is presented metaphorically as both a national flag substantiating indigenous difference and independence, and an expression of organic truth emanating from the human body.
A great article by Miya Tokumitsu (‘In the name of love‘ Jacobin January 2014 and republished in Slate 16 January 2014) is doing the rounds of social media, and it’s timely that Crikey has just done a short feature on the brilliant Sarah Kendzior who has a similar schtick.
All this puts me in mind of one of the best articles I’ve ever read in Harper’s. As far as I know, it’s only available in the print edition but long ago somebody lovingly typed it up and republished it online at which point I copied it to a document and stored it on my hard drive. I’m now releasing it back into the web. Enjoy!
by Garret Keizer (Harper’s, February 2006)
I’m sure I was only supposed to be motivated, but I fear that I may accidentally have been enlightened, that day some years ago when my fellow teachers and I were treated to a videotaped lecture by the then reigning “National Teacher of the Year”. None 
of us thought to ask how such a distinction had been or could be determined. It was enough to know that he was in a different league from ours. He had recently shaken hands with the President of the United States.
Squeezed into our student’s grubby desks, the underpaid servants of a grossly underpaid working-class community, we listened to his depiction of the future with our eyes uplifted to the screen. Eventually there were going to be only two kinds of people: those who deal in information and those who serve their needs. In such a society, many of the facts and crafts we taught would be obsolete. Teaching students to write essays was irrelevant, we were told, when what they needed to know was how to write good memos. As befitting an oracle, the alpha teacher delivered his news in a tone of gleeful authority. There were but two choices open to us: pointless defiance of the inevitable and creative acceptance of the brave new world (the one that Thomas Friedman has since announced is flat). Teachers who chose the latter would endeavor to make their better students into players, with the possible reward of becoming players themselves. Like the man on the screen.
I forget if “players” was the word he used, but it was implicit in all he had to say. It has become increasingly explicit in the American vernacular. The internet was still a novelty then, so the chosen few already “dealing in information” would not have been able to tally the more than five million hits that presently appear for a phrase like “key players,” among which you can learn who really counts, counted, or will count in such diverse domains as “the left’s war against conservative judges,” the global economy, the Kuomintang, World War III (as predicted in the bible), and the cheese industry.
But my colleagues and I had no trouble getting the point. It wasn’t necessary to hear the word; we knew the game. In one form or another, we had been teaching it for years. The touted “promise of education” always comes down to a veiled threat: those who fail to be players in the classroom will never amount to players later on. Yes, they also serve who only stand and wait, but mostly they serve burgers.
Or listen to motivational speeches while squeezed into grubby desks, as the case may be. There was the rub, and the National Teacher of the Year and the patrons for whom he spoke knew just how to rub it in. What message could have moved us more, with our HoHum State diplomas and our Payless shoes, that the promise that we could be players too?
…..
A friend recently drew my attention to an extraordinary article published by the GMA network with the intriguing title ‘Four things you may not know about our Baybayin‘.
You can follow the link about but I’ve reproduced the full text below in full in case this curious social document gets lost in the shifting sands of online media.
What strikes me in particular is how neatly the mystic researcher Bonifacio Comandante distills and amplifies folk views on writing in general and baybayin in particular. Namely, that writing has the ability to effect supernatural change, characters are always iconic even if their sources of inspiration are hard to discern, writing is the primary communicative modality while speech is secondary, and that Philippine writing is ancient. There is no empirical evidence for any of this, but the very existence of such theories is itself evidence for the social meanings people attribute to writing.
Iconicity is a feature of Eskaya attitudes to writing as treated in the the traditional story ‘The Spanish and Visayan alphabets’ in which Visayan (ie, Eskayan) letters are associated with parts of the human body while Spanish letters resemble ordinary things: a candlestand for the letter ‘I’ the tail of an animal for the lower case letter ‘g’ and a pair of scissors for ‘X’.
Extract from ‘The Spanish and Visayan alphabets’ with Roman transliteration.
But what all this really puts me in mind of is the gloriously eccentric ilustrado Pedro Paterno, who reflected way back in 1887 that the baybayin symbols ᜊ and ᜎ as in ᜊᜑᜎ (<bat><ha><la>, ‘god’) were imitative of male and female sexual organs, and that ᜑ represented a kind of divine ray of light uniting the two. Comandante on the other hand, likened to ᜊ a clam shell (see below). What is it about that syllable?
From Pedro Paterno [1887] 1915. La antigua civilizacion Tagalog. Manila: Colegio de Sto Tomas. p.34 [click image to go to book]
In preparation for archiving recordings with PARADISEC I’ve been doing a lot of tidying up. I came across this lovely magazine that I picked up in a Manila market some years ago.
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
And for the record, here are my favourites from 2012 and earlier, in no particular order:
2012 (and earlier)
Brave new words 