Filipino orthography

During the Pre-Hispanic Era, most of the languages of the Philippines were written in abugida, an ancient segmental writing system.

[2] When the Spaniards arrived in 1521 and began to colonize the islands of the Philippines in 1565, they introduced the Latin script to the Catholicized Filipinos.

Until the first half of the 20th century, most Philippine languages were widely written in a variety of ways based on Spanish orthography.

The writing system of the Muslim Filipinos in the different independent sultanates of Mindanao during the Spanish colonization shifted from abugida script to Arabic alphabet while the writing system of most of the Catholicized Chinese Filipinos shifted from Written Chinese to Abecedario alphabet.

Virtually unutilized from the Abecedario were the letters K and W, which are both used extensively in most Philippine languages today due to the imposition of the Abakada alphabet.

Some examples of indigenous Filipino surnames are Macasáquit, Guintô, Bañaga, Guipit, Abucajo, Abueg, Bangachon, Dagohoy, Valarao and Dimaculañgan.

Some examples of Chinese-origin surnames are Guanzón, Cojuangco, Siapuatco, Yapchulay, Locsín, Quisumbing, Tuazon and Yuchengco.

Quite notable are proper nouns wherein the letter Y is written before consonants and is pronounced I. Iloilo and Ilocos were spelled archaically as Yloylo or Yloílo and Ylocos.

Surnames in the Philippines such as Ybañez, Ysagan, Ybarra, Yldefonso and Ylagan are evidences of the Old Spanish writing system.

Archaic use of the letter X in the Old Spanish writing system that is pronounced in a guttural way (quite similar phonetically to H in English even though the sound is different) is evident in surnames such as Roxas.

To represent /k/, "c" was used before the vowels "a", "o", and "u" (i.e. cayo, cong, culang) and at final positions (pumasoc) while a silent "u" was used between "q" and "e" or "i" (i.e. "aquing", "quilala") reflecting Spanish orthography.

A common practice in the orthography of some of the Philippine languages during the Spanish colonial period up to the 1960s was the use of tilde written over g̃, a letter which was notably used to shorten the words nang (ergative case marker) and man͠gá (pluralization particle) into ng̃ and mg̃á respectively.

Due to technical constraints, machine-printed variants of n͠ga emerged, which included ñga, ng̃a, and even gña as in the case of Sagñay – syllabicated as [sa-ngay].

Possible combinations include: á, à, â, é, è, ê, í, ì, î, ó, ò, ô, ú, ù and û. Punctuation marks were also borrowed from Spanish.

The vowels were pronounced in a short vowel length [A (ah), E (eh), I (ih), O (oh), U (uh)] while the consonants were pronounced as B (be), C (se), Ch (che), D (de), F (efe), G (he), H (ache), J (hota), K (ka), L (ele), LL (elye), M (eme), N (ene), NG (nang), Ñ (enye), Ñg or Ng̃ or N͠g or Gñ (ñga or ng̃a or n͠ga or gña), P (pe), Q (ku), R (ere), RR (er-re), S (ese), T (te), V (ve), W (wa), X (ekis), Y (ya or i griega or ye), Z (zeta).

Soon after the first issue of La España, Pascual H. Poblete's Revista Católica de Filipina began a series of articles attacking the new orthography and its proponents.

President Manuel L. Quezon issued Executive Order 134 in December 1937 officially proclaiming this decision.

In 1940, the Balarílà ng Wikang Pambansâ (English: Grammar of the National Language) of grammarian Lope K. Santos introduced the Abakada alphabet.

[18] The Pilipino alphabet was reduced to 28 letters, with the Spanish Ch, Ll and Rr digraphs being dropped from being considered as distinct letters (The Association of Spanish Language Academies itself abandoned the use of Ch and Ll as separate listings in alphabetical collations in 1994.

[19] This document is a result of a series of consultations with various teachers, instructors, linguists and others in the field that took place between 2006 and 2007.

Words that already exist in the language are preferred over a borrowed term, for example, tuntunin vs. rul (derived from English rule).

In short, regarding borrowings from these two languages, Spanish words of common usage are written in a manner consistent with Filipino phonology.