Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 441

THE ALPHABET
Origin of Philippine Scripts
I frankly admit that this problem has been made more complicated than it is actually. The Spanish writers of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries had already connected the origin of the Philippine scripts with those of the Malayan archipelago. The great German scholar Humboldt and other contemporary scholars proved that
connection.
A new suggestion, however, was made in 1852 by an authority on the Malay languages, the Englishman Crawfurd (in Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language). According to him, "The Malays... have at present no native alphabet; and the Tagala alphabet is peculiar and bears little resemblance to any native written character of the nations of the western part of the Archipelago." Crawfurd's opinion was, in brief, that "the Tagala alphabet... has all appearance of an original and local invention; and, at all events, there is assuredly no evidence to show that it has been derived from a foreign source." This opinion, rightly, was not shared by any other scholar. The connection between the Philippine characters and the native Malay scripts was generally accepted; see, for instance, Meyer, Schadenburg and Foy, Die Mangianenschrift von Mindoro, and Constantino Lendoyro, The Tagalog Language.
A new suggestion has been made quite recently by the great authority on the Philippine scripts, Dr. Fletcher Gardner. In his opinion, the Philippine scripts do not depend on the characters of the Malay Archipelago, but they were devised in very ancient times by Indian priests, who based their invention on the Kharoshthi and various Brahmi characters. These priests were familiar with some or all of the ancient systems of writing, and it may be presumed that they picked their letters from those which were common in the various ancient Indian characters, including the Kharoshthi alphabet. It was very easy, because "They had at most 17 letters to consider out of the 40 or more to be found in each of the Asoka series."
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The curious theory of Dr. Gardner, which to him "seems to be well supported by the fact that in the three living Philippine Indic languages the letter forms are all simple and capable of rapid writing," is a good example to show how slippery can be the ground of the history of the alphabet if one does not keep to the safe track. The plain facts are: (1) There is no indication whatever that in the times of Asoka (third century B.C.) the Indians were in direct contact with the Philippine Islands. (2) No complete Philippine system, ancient or modern, can be considered as directly dependent on any ancient Indian script. (3) Comparisons are possible of single letters of the different Philippine scripts, ancient and modern, not only with single letters of the different Brahmi and Kharoshthi writings (as Dr. Gardner tries to prove), but also with single letters of different types of the Aramaic or the mediaeval Latin alphabets;