Indigenous Scripts

Presented at the Panel on Indic Scripts at the 13th International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (13 ICAL) at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan on 2015 July 21.

A fallacy of accent occurs when two words of the same spelling but with different reading are confused as one and the same word. Strictly speaking, words having different accents are not the same word (Bachuber, 1952). The Kapampangan language contains many words that are spelled the same way but pronounced differently when written in the Roman script. Their difference is indicated by diacritical marks that denote stress or accents. This rule was adopted from the Spanish spelling convention into Romanized Kapampangan writing.

A generation after Spanish was replaced with English as an official language and Tagalog was imposed legally as a national language, Kapampangan speakers who are no longer familiar with the Spanish language and its writing convention began writing Kapampangan in the Tagalog or English manner, that is, without diacritical marks. Kapampangan historian Mariano Henson (1965) lamented about this phenomenon in his book on Kapampangan history. In his classic example, Kapampangans can no longer distinguish MASAKIT (adj.) ‘painful’ from MASÁKIT (adj.) ‘difficult’ or MÁSAKIT (n.) ‘sick person’ as these words are now written without diacritical marks. Their meaning is often compromised as readers can not immediately determine the context in which they are written.

In the indigenous Kapampangan script KULITAN however, no two words is spelled in exactly the same way. The lengthening of the vowel sounds and final glottal stops, the stresses and accents in the Kapampangan language, are immediately evident at a glance due to the spelling convention known as KAMBAL SIUÁLÂ ‘twin vowels’. A fallacy of accent cannot occur when a word is written as it should be pronounced. KULITAN seems to have been designed to congruently reflect the phonology of the Kapampangan language in written form. Since the Roman script is currently showing limitations in how Kapampangan words are actually pronounced, perhaps a working knowledge of KULITAN will aid individuals in learning how to speak Kapampangan and thus help in the revitalization of the language itself.

References:

Bachuber, Andrew H. (1952). Introduction to Logic. St. Louis, Missouri, USA: Missouri Province Educational Institute, St. Louis University.

Henson, Mariano A. (1965). The Province of Pampanga and Its Towns: A.D. 1300-1965. [4th ed. revised]. Angeles City, Philippines: By the author.

Writing systems are a form of language that have traditionally been controlled by colonizing forces. In Africa, the South Pacific and even in Native reservations in the United States the legacy of colonialism has been that literacy is taught in the colonizing language and using the Latin script. Unbeknownst to or despite the efforts of the colonizers, some marginalized people developed scripts of their own that are original and not based on an introduced script from missionaries or directly linked to the Latin orthography of colonizers. This Thesis is a case-study of three of these scripts from very different parts of the world in an attempt to synthesize a call to action for future script research and gauge the effect of these scripts in fostering “Ethnolinguistic Vitality” or in-group solidarity This Thesis synthesizes primary and secondary research on N’ko (from West Africa), Cherokee (North America) and Avoiuli (Oceania). It specifically gauges the Linguistic Landscape (public visibility of scripts), apparent literacy statistics from each area and their probable trajectory into the future. Preliminary results suggest that having a natively-derived script can increase subjective vitality among in-group members and may motivate students to become literate in their mother tongue alongside or in place of colonial-language education. I end with a call to action for further research in this understudied aspect of language revitalization, and position scripts as a potential boon in an era of globalization where more and more information is written online.