148. The East Indies: Philippine Alphabets
The spread of the Hindu alphabet within India, over southeastern Asia, and into the East Indian archipelago, cannot be followed here because it is an intricate story, interwoven with the history of Brahmanism and Buddhism. It may be said that in general, with the chief exception of China, Hindu writing followed where Hindu religion penetrated. But it may be illuminating to touch briefly on one of the extensions.
In the early centuries after Christ, Hindus began to reach the East Indies, especially Sumatra and Java. Here they established principalities or kingdoms and their religion. Many arts were also imported by them, such as iron working, batik dyeing, sculpture, drama, and writing. From perhaps the sixth to the fifteenth centuries, the Malaysian population of Java lived under a heavy layer of Hindu culture (§ [104], [126], [262]), and literacy evidently became fairly widespread. Greater or less portions of this culture were transported to the other East Indian islands and with them went writing. In the Philippines, the Spaniards of the sixteenth century found several related alphabets, one to each of the principal nationalities, which seem derived from Bengal some eight hundred years before.
The Malayan languages are unusually simple in their array of sounds. Hence the greater part of the elaborate Sanskrit alphabet was discarded by them. But the salient characteristics of Sanskrit writing were retained. A consonant was read as consonant plus A. Points were provided if the consonant was to be read with other vowels. Of such points, the Philippine alphabets employed only two. One, put above the consonant, served indiscriminately for I and E, the other, below, for U and O. The position of the points connects them with the Sanskrit vowel signs. In this way the Philippine languages were adequately rendered with a set of about twelve consonantal letters, three for the independent vowels, and two vowel points.
At the time of the Spanish discovery, the native Philippine alphabets were already meeting Arabic writing, which had shortly before been introduced in the southern islands with Mohammedanism. The Spaniards of course brought the Roman alphabet. Under this double competition the use of native writing soon began to decay. The most advanced of the Filipino nationalities, such as the Tagalog and Bisaya, have long since given up their old letters. Yet it has recently been discovered that two varieties of the native writing still survive—both of them among backward tribes: the Tagbanua of Palawan and the Mangyan of Mindoro. Here in the jungle, among half clothed savages living under rude thatches and without firearms or government, the remotest descendants of the ancient Sanskrit alphabet linger.
Three widely different descendants of the primitive Semitic alphabet have therefore met in this archipelago. One, beginning its journey some twenty-five hundred years ago, traveled via Arabia and northern India, probably reaching the Philippines by 800 A.D. The second evolved in the Semitic homeland, finally poured out of northern Arabia with Mohammedanism, was carried across India to the Malay Peninsula, and thence leaped across the sea to Borneo and the Philippines about 1,400 A.D. The third followed the longest journey: from the Phœnicians to the Greeks, to southern Italy, to Rome, to Spain, and, after Columbus, to Mexico, and then across the Pacific ocean to Manila shortly before A.D. 1,600.