Typophile

The Lost Abugida

John Savard

In a recent web search, inspired by the thread here about a Devanagari font from Adobe, I came across this fascinating web site:

http://nordenx.blogspot.ca/2012_04_01_archive.html

In the 1600s and before, the writing system used in the Philippines for Tagalog was, like those of Thailand, Burma, and Tibet, an abugida derived, like Devanagari, from the ancient Brahmi script.

EDIT: My first search result was probably

http://istoryadista.blogspot.ca/2011/09/baybayin-way-of-writing-in-our-own.html

Another important site, with different fonts, is

http://www.mts.net/~pmorrow/bayeng1.htm

Bendy

It is fascinating to me too. Buhid is another one derived from Kawi; it hasn't died out and is still apparently in use in the Philippines. Needless to say, these abugidas and those of Indonesia (Batak, Balinese etc) are extremely under-represented in the type world. Hopefully that will change in time to stop these scripts from fading into obsolescence.

Bendy

A couple of images from Nakanishi's Writing systems of the world, which includes Tagalog amongst others:

Hrant H Papazian

Nothing is cooler than Buginese.

hhp

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 19 Apr 2015. original URL