I don’t know how this managed to elude me for so long, and I don’t really know what prompted me to look this up. Somehow I had stumbled upon the word kairos, which up to know I had merely thought of as the high-school retreat that my high school, along with many Catholic high schools, has seniors participate in. At my school, it wasn’t mandatory, so I never went. I hear that it can be quite life-changing and that it’s very touchy-feely. There insider motto is “Live the Fourth.” Since the Kairos retreat is three days long, I have been told that “the Fourth” means the fourth day, which basically means that one’s life should be lived as an extension of the Kairos experience.

But, as usual, I digress.

Kairos is a Greek word that literally means “right or opportune moment,” sometimes also rendered as “time in-between” and “God’s time.” Whereas the Greek concept of chronos denotes linear, quantized time, the time that is measured by clocks and calendars, kairos denotes an unquantifiable kind of time.

I suppose that kairos would be the proper word to use for the Big Bang, and anytime that might have preceded it, since chronos did not exist until the Big Bang. Or perhaps kairos can be applied to the literally imaginary time (as in time quantized by units of i) required by the theory of eternal inflation.

This is still not my point.

Where kairos led me was to the Sanskrit word kālá which sort of means the same thing. But what was interesting is that Kala is also the Javanese god of destruction, the son of Bathara Guru, the high lord of the gods.

The word “Bathara” or “Batara”, which means “god”, specifically referring to a class of gods distinct from dewata and dewa, seems clearly related to the Tagalog word Bathala, and apparently Bathala is an indigenous Southeast Asian concept.

Interestingly, Batara Kala is the consort of Setesuyara, the goddess of the underworld in Balinese mythology. It’s a stretch, but I wonder if she is related to Siginaugan/Siginaguran, the Visayan equivalent.

Anyway, I’m rambling.

(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 an 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 was 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 ”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 Brāhmī 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 Brāhmī scripts seem most likely derived from Phoenician scripts, and both baybayin and kana are quite probably derivatives of Brāhmī 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.

Ang hindi marunong magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa ang amoy sa bulok at mabahong isda — Jose Rizal (Anyone who doesn’t know how to love their own language is worse than the smell of a rotten, stinky fish)

Alibata (or, for a more indigenous term, baybayin) is a name for the ancient writing system used in the Philippines before the Spanish Conquest, and is related to the various abugida systems used in much of Southeast Asia at the time.

Before I was introduced to alibata, I had been trying to learn J.R.R. Tolkien’s tengwar, which is an abjad system, and thus is quite similar to an abugida in that diacritical marks are used to indicate (certain) vowels. The only difference is that an individual grapheme in an abjad without diacritics stands for a single consonant phoneme, whereas an individual grapheme in an abugida without diacritics stands for a consonant-vowel syllable.

So when my girlfriend-at-the-time found this old Filipino History textbook by Gregorio Zaide (whose references were quite suspect, seeing as how it referred to the Code of Kalantiaw as historical fact, and apparently teaching that the Creation Myth in Genesis is also historical fact), I was completely enthralled by alibata, and quickly learned how to use it.

Baybayin was the rage in college amongst us Filipino Americans, and I found myself eventually giving workshops, and teaching other people how to use it. I would even end up coming up with mock-ups of tatoos that people wanted of alibata. Those were fun times.

In my senior year in college, I took a linguistics class on ancient writing systems, and so I ended up writing my final paper on alibata, which I eventually transcribed to a website.

Eventually, I was invited to a Yahoo Group whose topic was supposedly the discussion of Baybayin and other aspects of indigenous Filipino culture. Neat. I don’t remember when I first signed up, but my first post was in January 2003, regarding the meaning and origin of the word diwa.

Initially, it was pretty stimulating, and it was neat to meet people who have a scholarly background in linguistics such as Professor Lawrence Reid and Paul Morrow. There used to be a lot of people in the group, and we touched upon a lot of subjects, such as the continued colonial mentality that seems to prevail in both Filipino and Filipino American culture, and the end-result of the imperial subjugation of the Philippines. It is disturbing to see how the American colonization of the Philippines has quite a bit in common with the U.S. misadventure in Vietnam, and with the current debacle in Iraq. They weren’t kidding about history repeating itself.

And then there were the trolls.