The Eskaya

I first encountered Hector Santos's Philippine Leaf website about 10 or 11 years ago (man does time fly!). I don't remember seeing his page about the Eskaya script, though. Just recently, a fellow Wikipedia editor brought to my attention an article she has been working on about the Eskayas of Bohol and their language.

She also sent me a URL of a blog here on Blogspot with pictures of a person's trip to visit the Eskaya in Bohol. The photos by Perez Sez really caught my interest. They show the Eskayan script being used in everyday Eskaya life. The skeptical side of me wonders if these are real or doctored photographs, but I am leaning towards believing they're real barring any future research on them. The photographs are amazing, though.

According to Santos, the Eskaya claim their language is not related to any other. A look at the script reveals that there are a lot of consonant clusters (ble chda bro cro) which are not characteristic of most other Philippine languages. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of Tboli and Blaan with their unusual clusters in words like sdo (fish), kdaw (day), mkik (cry), and tnilos (to cut meat).

I tried deciphering the script so I can see if there are any relations to other languages, but it was rather confusing. Fortunately, one of the photos have some Romanized Eskaya which reads:

Samnet yo Bantilar
Samnat yo aantilac, Datong con bathala ya abeya chda cloper meboy siewes, menti chdi loning ya moy beresagui samnat eela-bolto, gona yonoy dolerkido.
bentod ya hondo yel moy sebar, chda adniam yel kenampay.
Cho
Ediac este mesesabla lo-o ya bac robas cheti ri esto ebitangki chda laraker ???? ya droser ya ?? do-o moy sam tener-go y ?? chda carno ya lacya ya bohol.

Interesting. I cannot make out any words. It does not appear to be related to any of the languages I know. However, it does remind me of Tboli, as I said.

Back to the script. It seems rather random to me. The origins of the script are unknown. Frankly, I believe the script to have been created by someone who happened to look at writing from either Americans or Spaniards and simply stole the letters from there while assigning them totally different phonetic values. I see letters like A, R, d, f, O (which is pronounced the same in Eskaya!), and u. I also see the letters 2, 4, and 8. There are also groups of letters like iss, Das, go, gn, leA, led, Ath, and Aas. Then there are syllabic characters which resemble Greek letters (φ, γ), Cyrillic letters (э), and something that even resembles the Japanese hiragana syllabic character お!


(Click to enlarge. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Do you know what this reminds me of? The Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah. He just took random letters from the Roman alphabet and gave them different sounds:


(Click to enlarge. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

So was there an Eskayan version of Sequoyah? Hopefully more research can shed more light on this mystery.

Baybayin & Coca Cola

I made this partly out of a fit of boredom as well as a picture made by online friend Viktoro Medrano.

The English version of the Coca Cola thing says "Enjoy Coca-Cola" but I decided to use the French & German version which say "Drink Coca-Cola."

So, it says "uminom ng Kuka-Kula."

After many failed attempts doing it by hand (I suck at computer graphic design, apparently), I used Paul Morrow's stylized Tagalog Baybayin font.

Hack?

Looks like someone may be hacking me.

I wonder what they're looking for, though. There's no secret Philippine language stuff in my account. WYSIWYG here, folks. :-D

This email is a response to your request for information about your Blogger account. To regain access to your account, please click on the
following link:

http://www.blogger.com/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Clicking on this link will take you to a web page that will let you choose a new password.

Filipino Classes at UH feel pinch

My friend Kalani sent me the article in the link below.

http://starbulletin.com/2004/09/07/news/story4.html

I'm a bit surprised that this is happening at University of Hawai'i where leading linguists on Philippine languages have taught and continue to teach. Linguists such as Lawrence Reid and Bob Blust.

Here's hoping that things will work out. There don't appear to be programs like that in the states.

Nominated

I've nominated this blog at Philippine Blog Awards, and now it's part of the list. Click on the link to see or you can nominate a blog (even your own) on that site.

Wish me luck? ;-P

New Tagalog blog

A new Philippine language blog has arrived on the blogging scene. The main subject and, incidentally, the name of the blog is Tagalog translation.

The author is Joseph Rosaceña, a native of Manila now living in Cornellà de Llobregat, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. I met him on the Seasite Tagalog forum.
Joseph's an accomplished professional translator who works with English, Tagalog, Spanish, & Catalan.

He already has some interesting entries now and I look forward to many more.

His blog is now linked to the right sidebar.

Miscellany

This blog is now listed on Tanikalang Ginto. I've been visiting that site for 9 years now. Check them out!

I've also added an icon to the blog. if you're not familiar with it, it's in Baybayin and the word is "salita." Baybayin is the syllabic script that Filipino ethnic groups used before the arrival of the Spaniards. The script is no longer used except by Hanunoos & Tagbanwas on Mindoro Island.

You may find more information about Baybayin in the links below:

A Philippine Leaf by Hector Santos. This site was the first to introduce me to Baybayin 9 years ago. Beforehand, I had no idea it existed.

Sarisari, etc. by Paul Morrow. An excellent site which talks about Baybayin. Paul is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

And you can also read Omniglot's entries about Baybayin as used by Tagalogs, Tagbanwas, and Hanunoos.

Also, I've added some links on the right margin of this blog. They're links worth checking out.