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The Baybayin
as Written by Filipinos
This chart shows the wide variety of letter shapes as drawn by
Filipinos in the 1600s.
It is from William Henry Scott's Prehispanic
Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History (1984 edition).
Scott traced these examples from Alberto Santamaría's El `Baybayin' en
archivo de Sto. Tomás (1938) and several other documents - one from
Iloilo and the rest from Tagalog speaking regions.
When compared to charts of supposedly distinct regional alphabets (see
links below), it can be seen that the variations in letter shapes
are not due to regional or linguistic differences among the writers but
due merely to individual handwriting styles. As Santamaría wrote in 1938,
after an exhaustive study of the baybayin specimens at the Santo Tomás
archive,
It has been most interesting, for, despite having been
written by Tagalogs, we found greater variations among them than, in
general, among the different alphabets represented as coming from
different regions.
(From Scott's Barangay, 1994, p. 213)
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From Prehispanic Source Materials for
the Study of Philippine History by William H. Scott (1984, p. 60).
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