Talk:Balagtas Alphabet

gui gue isn't [gi ge]? Boroparkpyro 01:57, 24 Jun 2005 (PDT)

Ooops! I'll correct that. Boreanesia 03:55, 24 Jun 2005 (PDT)

jj = [dʒ]

Isn't jj = [dʒ] a tad Anglocentric? AFAIK since Portuguese and French j = [dʒ] changed into [ʒ] English is the only traditionally Latin-written language with j = [dʒ] -- and the Asian and African Languages *here* that have the mapping under English influence hardly count! IMHO gh by analogy with ch or gg would be more realistic in terms of modern Spanish -- unless Balagtás knew or cared about the letter values of Golden Age Spanish, in which case he would probably have mapped [h] to h and used e.g. k for [?], but note that I consider such a consideration of Golden Age Spanish highly unlikely! BPJ 06:05, 24 Jun 2005 (PDT)

Actually, Castilian as was spoken by Filipinos *here* was closer to the Golden Age pronounciation. This is due to the early arrival of the Spaniards to the archipelago in the 16th century and due to the relative isolation of the colony. They pronounced h as [h] and j as [s]. Now that you mention it, it is indeed more likely that Balagtás would have retained this mapping as he did *here*. He mapped the glottal stop with a zero marker at the beginning of words and after vowels, and with a hyphen after a consonant. I'll redo the article. Boreanesia 08:30, 24 Jun 2005 (PDT)

I have reverted to the original version. The revised versions were simply not working. It occured to me that by the time Balagtás invented the system, there would have been a descrepency between the use of j in old versus new loans from Castilian. On one hand, the j in old loans are pronounced as [s] in modern Tagalog *here*. E.g., jugar ("to play"), reloj ("clock"), and jabón ("soap"), have become [su'gal] ("gamble"), [re'los], and [sa'bon] respectively. With the greater Malay influence on Tagalog *there*, they would have become [dʒu'gar], [re'lodʒ], and [dʒa'bon] respectively. This in contrast to later loans where the j is pronounced as [h] like justicia [hus'tisja] and jamón [ha'mon]. All in all, j would have represented both [dʒ] and [h] by the time of Balagtás. There would also be a similar descrepency with use of h, which could either be [h] or [?], which furthermore means that [h] was represented by j or h. I think Balagtás would have solved this better with the reverted version of the alphabet where: h = [?], j = [h], and jj = [dʒ]. Boreanesia 00:44, 29 Jun 2005 (PDT)

Sure. I didn't know about the different layers of loans. Neither did I know of the archaicness of Filipino Spanish, although I should have suspected it, seing how overseas varieties often are archaic, even Haitian Creole in some respects. Neither is it a phenomenon confined to Romance .. witness Icelandic and American English, even though rhotic "American" probably descends from an Hiberno-English variety. BPJ 04:14, 30 Jun 2005 (PDT)