mahiwaga

(revised from ”The meaning of syllables”)

In college, one of the guys who held a little teaching session on baybayin espoused this theory that the graphemes actually have ideographic meanings, in the same way that Chinese characters (and hence, moreso with the Japanese kanji which borrow from them) have intrinsic meanings that don’t necessarily exactly correlate with their phonetic meanings.

I was kind of skeptical of the idea, and became more so as I learned about the evolution of the Phoenician abjad into the Brahmic scripts of which Sanskrit and Devenagari are descendants, and from which it is theorized that the Austronesian abugadas are also derived.

But back to the idea. Supposedly, certain syllables have an inherent meaning outside of their purely phonetic meaning. So, for example “ba,” which to some look like a pair of breasts, denotes femininity, while “la,” which looks like a phallus, denotes masculinity. The supporting anecdote that is often cited for this is the fact that babae means woman and lalake means man. Other examples abound, although the only other one I can think of is the explanation of “ka.” I have been told that “ka” is supposed to connote a relationship, used to illustrate a connection. Hence, words like kapatid, kasama, kaibigan, katipunan, and on and on. Others which I remember are “ta” suggesting energy or the act of creation and “ha” reminiscent of current or flux. Unfortnately, I can’t remember any convincing examples of this.

It seems plausible that baybayin is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, just like the Roman alphabet is. Baybayin comes from the Eastern branch, while the Roman alphabet comes from the Western branch. I find this holds some merit because the Brahmic scripts seem most likely derived from Phoenician scripts, and both baybayin and kana are quite probably derivatives of Brahmic scripts. (In the case of Japan, this makes sense, as the script probably went along with the religion of Buddhism.) Hence “ba” is probably related to “beth,” which in Phoenician means house. (After all, whle “ba” may look like breasts, but it also looks like a sideways “b” or “beta”) And “la” is from “lamed,” which is a Phoenician ox-goad, i.e., a sharp object used to poke an ox to make it go forward, often also useful as a weapon. Notice that “la” looks a lot like a kris. (Do you think the people of Mindanao originally used the kris to goad their caribao?)

I can see some other similarities between shapes too—though my derivations may be spurious and are dubious at best. For example, “sa” seems to be easily derived from Phoenician “sin,” “ta” looks just like a stylized “t,” “da”—which at least in Tagalog can also be pronounced as “ra”—from either/or Phoenician “daleth” meaning door (which became Greek “delta”) or Phoenician “resh” meaning head. Both “daleth” and “resh” feature a triangular shape. (Hence the other meanings of “delta”) And while “da” is an open shape, it still essentially has three elements to it. Also, while “na” does not look very related to Roman “n,” it bears some semblance to Phoenician “nun,” meaning fish. But that’s pretty much all I could come up with.

In any case, if you subscribe to the theory of meaning embedded in the symbol, some people have come up with some interesting formulas. For example, writing bakla out as “ba-ka-la” illustrates the feminine joined with the masculine. Even bathala (which can be written out as “ba-ta-ha-la”) shows this duality (while throwing in “ta” for creation and “ha” for flux as good measure.) Another place where you can find “ba” and “la” is Cebuano balaanon, meaning, I think, holy, sacred.

I doubt this will ever be proven one way or the other, but I still find it interesting to ponder.

(revised from ”Cultural Origin of Dualism?”)

When I took a class on Southeast Asian history as a freshman in college, I felt like a veil had been lifted from my eyes. Up until that point, I felt that all Filipino culture was was the food and the language, and that we didn’t really have a culture outside of that derived from the waves of imperial and economic colonization by the Chinese, the Spanish, and the Americans.

All of the sudden, I felt the vast tragedy of the sundering and destruction of cultures that is inherent of conquest. We are quite closely related to Indonesians and Malaysians, and even to Madagascarians, and I knew nothing of these cultures. It was a little like when I discovered, after 18 years, that I had a half-brother that we never talked about. Or like meeting my cousins in the Philippines for the first time in 20 years.

And a lot of weird cultural idiosyncracies totally clicked into place.

For example, I was always puzzled by the tendency of those in the generation before me to dichotomize everything. To label and categorize. To place ideas and people into various cubbyholes, and making the illusion that life was neat and tidy.

Then I learned about the importance of boundaries in Southeast Asian culture.

While you might easily lay blame on the Spanish and American colonizers, who brought along their own tradition of Manichaeistic dualism, however deeply repressed, there are precedents in our substrate culture.

The animistic beliefs of our ancestors (beliefs which were common throughout all of Southeast Asia before the advent of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Catholicism. They are also similar to beliefs of Native Americans and of the Celts, beliefs which are often referred to as paganism) were based on the notion of boundaries. To have security and safety, you had to categorize all things properly, and you had to avoid crossing boundaries. On the flip side, those things that existed where boundaries merged and became ambiguous were, while dangerous, things of great power. (Some simple examples are the tide, where sea and land meet, and the horizon, where sea and sky meet.) And we also come to the notion of the babaylan. While some theorize that the babaylan was typically a woman, and was basically the spiritual center of the a community, akin to the witch doctor or the medicine man, another version I’ve heard is that the babaylan tended to be of ambiguous gender (and that, supposedly, bakla is a corrupted form of the word babaylan.)Another related anecdote, which I have no way of verifying, is that supposedly only women and gay men are traditionally allowed to play the kulintang, implying some sort of sacredness inherent in the kulintang.) Needless to say, the babaylan were expunged by the Spanish, and we easily thereafter succumbed to alien ways of thinking.

It is sort of interesting to try to rationalize what sort of impact colonization had on our ancestors’ collective psyche, of how they might have tried to fit it into this cosmogeny of the importance of creating distinct boundaries and categories. One might theorize that the fact that many of us are stuck with binary thinking is merely a manifestation of our feelings of powerlessness. Maybe some of us are resigned to the inability to tap the energy inherent in things which are ambiguous, in places where the boundaries fall apart. But, on the other hand, this could just be revisionist mythology and wishful thinking.

(revised from ”Re: response to victor & malaki)

It is interesting to ponder whether or not Southeast Asians had a concept of “god” before the advent of Hinduism. There are quite a few religions where Supreme Beings do not really exist, for example, Buddhism and Taoism, but in these days, we tend to get all riled up about the People of the Book (meaning, Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims)

But the discussion of “god” is hampered because of the vagueness of the term, which I think encompasses at least three different concepts: (1) a single benevolent creator entity found in monotheistic religions: e.g., God, YHWH, Allah, Ahura Mazda (2) mostly human entities with some superhuman powers: e.g., Zeus, Odin, Tiamat, Vishnu (3) spiritual forces associated with natural, domestic, or agricultural phenomenon: kami from Japan, genii from Ancient Rome, elves from Scandinavia.

From what I understand, spiritual beliefs in Southeast Asia were more resonant with concept (3) I’m also not sure that “worship” is necessarily the right term, or more likely, “worship” means different things depending on which god-concept you subscribe to, in which case it seems likely that the people who inhabited what later became the Philippines worshipped spirits that governed nature, home life, and agriculture. I recall that the spirit of rice was very prominent, as were the spirits of the jungle, the river, and the sea. I vaguely remember watching a video about how the forging of the kris blade was a ritual regarding the spirit of the sea, but I may just be making this up now.

Also, I think it is in the Darangen (the definitive epic poem of the Maranao people) that I first came across the word diwata used to refer to such spirits. The same word is found in Tagalog to mean, among other things, according to the dictionary, muse and goddess, and is undoubtedly related to the Tagalog word diwa, which I understand means soul or spirit.

Of note, diwa and diwata look obviously related to the Sanskrit word deva which mean deity, and through the putative Indo-European mother tongue is in turn related to Greek theos and Latin deus, meaning god.

In any case, it’s true that there aren’t any documents from the pre-Hindu era. Which makes sense since it seems generally believed that the writing systems evolved from Indic sources. But a lot of the information is apparently preserved in living culture, if my professor is to be believed. True, there aren’t really any “pure” Austronesian cultures anymore, but, much as Celtic animistic beliefs (i.e., the beliefs of the Druids) persisted in England despite the introduction and dominance of Roman, Scandinavian, and finally Christian beliefs, a prevalent idea is that a lot of the ancient Southeast Asian rituals are couched in terms of Hindu, Islamic, and Christian beliefs. (Like the anecdote that when Catholicism was introduced into the Philippines, saints simply took on the characteristics of whatever local spirits or deities were worshipped.) I immediately think of Maria Makiling, and the Santo Niño.

So, yeah, we will never know, but we can make educated guesses.