Have you seen this script before?

This is a translation of 'Ariel Magno' in 'Baybayin', also known as 'Alibata', a pre-hispanic script that Filipinos where using before the Spaniards came to our soil. Filipinos where still using it up to the first century of colonization until it just slowly disappeared. I'm sure it had very much to do with the foreign influence but this also showed that Filipinos were already literate even before colonization.

Honestly, I'm not even sure if I've learned about this script in high school or college. Perhaps it was mentioned in passing without any visual aids and I may have been doing something else whether I was inside the classroom or not. As I grow older and now living outside the Philippines, I just developed a natural inclination to know more about my home country, especially its past, things that I have taken for granted when I was much younger.



Jose Rizal once wrote:

This language of ours is like any other,
it once had an alphabet and its own letters
that vanished as though a tempest had set upon
a boat on a lake in a time now long gone.




"To My Fellow Children”, 1869
English translation by P. Morrow


Read more about Baybayin and Pre-hispanic Philippines. You'd find them very interesting. Here are some of the links:

Baybayin: The ancient script of the Philippines

How to write the ancient script of the Philippines

Ancient Philippines

Catalog of Filipino Names

Laguna Copperplate Inscription

In the 'Ancient Philippines' link, you'd find out that there are still a few groups of people/tribes in Palawan and Mindoro who are still familiar with the script and can still write it.


If you want to translate your name or any other word to Baybayin, click

Translate to Baybayin.


You just need to keep some pointers in mind like you have to spell the word(s) the same as you will pronounce it in Filipino (i.e. Di-yo-se-pin for Josephine) since some letters that we are using now doesn't have an equivalent letter in Baybayin. All other pointers can be read on the link provided.

Hope this little bit of history lesson has made you appreciate more my/our home country.