The Hanunoo Script
The Hanunoo are a Mangyan tribe from southeastern Mindoro, the seventh
largest island in the Philippines. Their homeland
is approximately 300 square miles, bounded by the mountainous home of the
Buid on the northwest and north, and by the Tablas Strait on the east and
southeast. To the south and southwest of Hanunoo-land, live the Ratagnon
people.
The Hanunoo still use a pre-Islamic, Indic-derived
syllabary which they write by incising characters on bamboo. The
syllabary contains only 48 characters, three of which are vowels. Consonantal
codas (final consonants of syllables) and glottal stops are not indicated
in the script, so some reading is context dependent requiring a certain
linguistic aptitude.
Consonants in the Hanunoo script include:
b d g h k l m n ng p r s
t w y
Vowels are
a e/i
o/u
The characters lala' [l]
and rara' [r] differ only when written with "i" or "u" vowel marks. The
Hanunoo script is generally written from bottom to top in columns which
proceed from the left.
Hanunoo Links:
View the entire Hanunoo script.
View a sample of the Hanunoo script in
'amba:han verse.
Map of the Hanunoo homeland
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Source: Conklin, Harold. 1953. Hanunoo-English Vocabulary. Berkeley:
University of California Press. [University of California Publications
in Linguistics 9:1-290]
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