Type Abugida Time period c. 1300–present | Languages Languages of Palawan Direction Left-to-right | |
Parent systems Proto-Sinaitic alphabet
Phoenician alphabet
Aramaic alphabet
Brāhmī
Pallava
Old Kawi
Tagbanwa Sister systems Balinese
Batak
Baybayin
Kulitan
Buhid
Hanunó'o
Javanese
Lontara
Old Sundanese
Rencong
Rejang | ||
Tagbanwa, also known as Apurahuano, is one of the writing systems of the Philippines. The Tagbanwa languages (Aborlan, Calamian, and Central), which are Austronesian languages with about 8,000 speakers in the central and northern regions of Palawan, are dying out as the younger generations of Tagbanwa are learning Cuyonon and Tagalog.
Contents
Origin
The Tagbanwa script was used in the Philippines until the 17th century. Closely related to Baybayin, it is believed to have come from the Kawi script of Java, Bali and Sumatra, which in turn, descended from the Pallava script, one of the southern Indian scripts derived from Brahmi.
Features
Tagbanwa is a syllabic alphabet in which each consonant has an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels are indicated by a diacritic above (for /i/) or below (for /u/) the consonant. Vowels at the beginning of syllables are represented by their own, independent characters. Syllables ending in a consonant are written without the final consonant.
Tagbanwa is traditionally written on bamboo in vertical columns from bottom to top and left to right. Though it is read from left to right in horizontal lines.
Consonants
Buhid writing makes use of single (᜵) and double (᜶) punctuation marks.
Unicode
Tagbanwa script was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2002 with the release of version 3.2.
The Unicode block for Tagbanwa is U+1760–U+177F: