Megan Thomas
mcthomas@ucsc.edu
23 January 2005
For the Berkeley Conference on Language Communities and Cultural Empires
Draft—please do not cite or circulate without the author’s permission.
Is ‘K’ a Foreign Agent? Orthography and Patriotism in the Late 19th-Century Philippines1
“A true literature can arise, and this for internal reasons of linguistic culture itself, only with a
script that is simultaneously given and comes into use.”
--Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language (1836)2
When Humboldt wrote his great work of comparative philology, he expanded his view
from the explicit subject of his work—the Kawi language—to compare the alphabets, grammars,
and vocabularies of languages of what we now call Island Southeast Asia. Humboldt’s assertion
that a script is necessary for “a true literature” was simply meant to help to identify the
commonalities of scripts as a factor in distinguishing where and when Indic influences could
have found their way to different languages, and so peoples, of what he called the “Malayan
race.” The quotation also betrays, however, the common presumption that written literature
(“true literature”) is somehow superior to oral literature, and that peoples with written literature
are more advanced than those without. This preoccupation with written literature, and the status
that comes with it, is a common theme among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist
philosophers and philologists, whose writings often combined both admiration and disdain for
“the Orient.” Typically, admiration was reserved for what they believed to be the true ancient
cultures, philosophies, literatures, and religions of the Orient (particularly of India), and disdain,
or at the very least scepticism, was reserved for the “Oriental” contemporaries of these European
Orientalists, the then-present-day natives of “the Orient” who were taken to be decayed,
corrupted, inferior versions of their great ancient ancestors.3 It is no coincidence that German
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Romanticism is virtually inseperable from the German Orientalist philosophy of the early and
mid-nineteenth century; both shared the premise that the language and literature of a nation
contained its particular genius.
Humboldt noted that a script—a system of writing—was a necessary part of what he
called “true literature,” but when he referred in this work to words of Asian languages that did
have their own scripts (whether or not these were still in use) he rendered them in the Roman
alphabet, presumeably for the ease of his audience of educated Europeans unfamiliar with some
or all of the scripts in question. In a preferatory note, he explains the method of his
transliteration, which varies according to language, because despite “numerous attempts in this
connection, [he considers] it impracticable to employ the same method of transcription
everywhere, and believe[s] it will serve the reader’s convenience if [he follows] on the whole the
best of what has already become accepted in these matters,” with some exceptions. 4 For some
languages—Sanskrit, Javanese, what he calls “Malayan proper,” and Burmese—he specifies the
rules or the system he has adopted for transliteration. For all other languages, he simply
indicates that he will “employ the orthography adopted by the main writers on each of them,
which normally follow that of their mother-tongue; so that in the North American, some Asiatic,
and most South Sea languages, we must have regard to the English sound-system; in Chinese and
Madecassian, to that of French; while in Tagalic and the languages of New Spain and South
America, it is that of Spanish.”5 Here, then, the linguist, in a note of methodology,
acknowledged that he saw a practical advantage to adopting conventional Romanizations—
themselves based for on the spelling conventions of what were for the most part the colonizing
power.
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Though Humboldt here was faithful to colonial orthographies, his methodological note
calls attention to the fact that many languages native to places either on the periphery or outside
of Europe became rendered in Roman script according to a political-linguistic logic which has
been, since at least the late nineteenth-century, politically contentious. To put it simply:
orthography followed the flag. If one changes—orthography or the flag—should the other
change as well? Did it mean that the other would change as well? Or, more relevant for my
discussion here: was using a new orthography the equivalent of flying a new flag?
Here, languages can be taken as signs, markers, or “flags” of nations: the work of
distinguishing one language from another often has a shadow in which the work of
differentiation is carried on between actual or potential nations, and because of contestations
between those nations.6 As Kathryn Woolard has written, “In countries where identity and
nationhood are under negotiation, every aspect of language, including its. . . forms of graphic
representation, can be contested. . . . This means that orthographic systems cannot be
conceptuaized as reduciing speech to writing but rather are symbols that themselves carry
historical, cultural, and political meanings.”7
In post-colonial contexts, discussions of orthography tend to focus on the relationship
between the (newly) national language and the language of the former colonizer. For instance, in
the nineteenth-century Spanish American states, intellectuals argued over whether there were
distinct American Spanish languages (or an American Spanish language) which had rules of
pronunciation and spelling different than those of the peninsular (Castilian) tongue.8 For these
new American republics, defining the uniqueness of an “American” language (or languages) was
part of a project of defining and codifying difference between the nation (or nations) of Spain
and those of the Americas; differences which were made both more difficult and more pressing
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to define because of the creole nature of the nations and nationalism. In part because these
American nationalisms were creole nationalisms, in which Americans defined themselves as
something different from Spaniards, rather than as an inferior or bastardized version of them, the
discussions addressed both the nature of the language (was the American language Spanish, or
its own distinct language?) and its representation (did it look like Spanish, or should it be spelled
differently?).
More recently, discussions about the orthography of Haitian Creole (or, importantly:
kreyòl) concern whether the language “looks” like the old colonial language of French. 9 Despite
obvious differences between them, in both of these cases discussions of orthography explicitly
address whether a particular orthography makes a language look too much like the language of a
competing nation. This concern, clearly important in post-colonial settings where the competing
nation is the old colonizer, is also salient in areas where neighboring countries’ languages might
be too closely related for comfort. Take, for instance, the simplification of Bulgarian
orthography in the 1890s, which in some patriots’ minds threatened to make the language look
more like Serbian; at issue was the contested region of Macedonia, whose dialects were cited by
both states as evidence for the natural-ness of their competing territorial claims to the region.10
But there is another feature of the science of orthography that becomes the object of
debate for nationalists, and a reason that nationalists often concern themselves with this linguistic
nuance: the “correct” orthography is seen to be an aid in popular education and literacy
campaigns. If an orthography transparently represents the spoken language, the argument goes,
it will be easier for people to learn to write their language. This provides another nationalist
basis for judging an orthography’s worth—one based on practical considerations, rather than
political-aesthetic ones—in which the standard is the utility, or, strictly speaking, the “accuracy”
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of the orthography. The politics of this kind of discussion tend to be caught up in the politics of
education, standardization, and literacy, politics particularly but not exclusively relevant to
nineteenth-century nationalist movements and those that have come since.11
This paper will explore the question of how orthography can indicate patriotism, as it was
asked in the late 1880s and early 1890s by a group of young men born in the Spanish colonial
Philippines. More specifically, this paper traces how the letters w and especially k were
accorded competing historical, cultural, and especially political meanings by the two sides of the
controversy that erupted when they were adopted by a Manila paper in the spelling of its Tagalog
text. As Anderson and Rafael have both shown us, the place of language in the nationalism of
the late nineteenth-century Philippines was complicated by the linguistic diversity of the islands.
Here, the rising local elite did not share a native tongue, but they did share an education at
Spanish institutions (in the Philippines, and sometimes in the Peninsula as well), giving them
access to Castilian as a lingua franca.12 Several of the members of this elite became embroiled
in a controversy about spelling standards for Tagalog (one of the indigenous languages of the
Philippines), and its relationship to the Spanish language. This controversy illustrates the
complicated relationship between the formal qualities of orthographies and the historicalpolitical context in which they are used, particularly in colonial or post-colonial settings.
The debate over the new spellings was conducted primarily among natives of the
Philippines—though not always among native Tagalog speakers—each of whom claimed
authority to judge the worth of the proposed changes. These young men were in practise
colonial subjects, though many of them were part of a group working to promote propaganda in
the Spanish Peninsula seeking full Spanish citizenship rights for the Catholic peoples of the
Philippines. All of these young men—save one, who was executed by the Spanish colonial state
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in 1896—would later become citizens of the (short-lived) independent Republic of the
Philippines in 1898. Those who proposed the changes judged them on the basis of their
scientific accuracy and practical utility, but when those who rejected the changes charged them
with being “traitorous” both to the Tagalog language and to Spain, the debate quickly shifted its
terms and became an argument about whether orthographies or science “belonged” to any one
nation. I argue that in this case, the formal qualities of the new orthography did, in fact, have
subversive political implications, despite the protestations to the contrary of those who proposed
it, but that those subversive implications were different from the ones identified by those who
criticized the orthography. The subversive qualities of the new orthography are located not in
the national associations of the orthographic science by which it was derived, but in the
emblematic nature of the orthography and its ability to visually transform the relationship
between Spanish and Tagalog.
Colonial Inscription: The Hispanization of Written Tagalog
Before the arrival of the Spaniards in the Philippines, Tagalog had its own script, as
did a few of the other many languages indigenous to the Philippines. However, there was, at
the end of the nineteenth century, and remains, to this day, much disagreement about how
many people could read and write this script, and what kinds of texts were written with it.13
Regardless, soon after the Spanish conquest, the old script fell into disuse, because the
Spanish missionary friars, eager to learn Tagalog (whether to convert souls or to be effective
rulers), recorded the sounds of Tagalog in their own Roman script and according to Spanish
rules of spelling and pronunciation, about which we will learn more later. We might say
that written Tagalog was hispanized not only because of its script and spelling rules, but also
because of its content, because for centuries, the only texts written in Tagalog were religious
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in nature: catechisms, prayer books, and devotional poetry, all for use by Spanish friars,
local clergy, and, later, other literate (and devout) locals.14 From the arrival of the Spaniards
until the 1880s, very little non-religious material was published in Tagalog.15
The 1880s saw a significant shift in the kinds of texts published in the Philippines. In
part a result of the economic transformation with the rise of agricultural production for
export and the accompanying transformation of its ports into centers of commerce, Spanishlanguage publications--particularly periodicals--flourished in Manila and a few other major
centers of trade. Many of these new newspapers featured practical instructional articles, in
addition to religious articles, in part because the local press was not allowed to report on
overtly political events (or at least on events that the censors deemed controversial), and in
part because the rising local middle class had growing access to and interest in lay
knowledge such as agriculture, medicine, law, and so forth. By 1888, a few young and
ambitious local newspaper writers put into practice their plans to reach an audience beyond
that which could be reached only in the Spanish language, and an era of bilingual
newspapers began in the Philippines.
The Bilingual Press
The Revista Católica de Filipinas (Catholic Review of the Philippines), was the first
of a series of bilingual newspapers that appeared in Manila in the late 1880s and early
1890s. As its title suggests, the newspaper was primarily religious in its content, but it also
carried local news and articles of general education and interest. Half a year later, in July of
1889, a new bilingual periodical appeared in Manila: the weekly Castilian-Tagalog edition
of La España Oriental (Eastern Spain). It had begun life the previous October as a
Castilian-language paper, published every ten days in Manila, with a very secular
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orientation: it was “a magazine of sciences, administration, arts, letters, and interests
preferential to the Philippines.”16 By April 1889, La España Oriental had become a weekly,
and its publisher encouraged a young “native,” Isabelo de los Reyes to pursue his aspirations
to publish a bilingual edition, with articles both in the Spanish language and in Manila’s
local native tongue, Tagalog. De los Reyes was not himself a native Tagalog speaker, but
rather an Ilocano-speaking indio who wrote prolifically in Spanish.17 The first issue of the
bilingual edition led with an article called “Our Aims,” which announced that with this
bilingual edition of the newspaper, the publisher hoped “to transmit to the indigenous people
all that which is within the reach of their intelligence and useful to their civil and political
state. We will endeavor to present to them all of the governmental and administrative
regulations that they need to know . . .. We will give them, in short and easy articles,
readings to popularize knowledge of the arts and sciences useful for practical life,
concentrating above all on agriculture, industry and commerce, likewise on advice about
matters of medicine and hygiene, and on improvements to their domestic life.”18 For
permission to publish this edition, the editor thanked the Spanish Governor General of the
Philippines, who, he said, showed by authorizing the publication of the bilingual edition that
“he has understood with the most elevated judgment the utility and necessity of its
publication, so that the lights of the press pursue the intellectual cultivation of the
indigenous people, just as evangelical lights pursued their religious faith.”19
This brief statement of purpose speaks volumes about the political orientation of its
writer and of the periodical, and indeed would have done so for its readers. By emphasizing
the need for education in “agriculture, industry and commerce . . . medicine and hygiene,”
the writer advocated programs and reforms that had long been a goal of liberal Spanish civil
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administrations and of the emerging local business class. These reforms had taken away
some of the control over education from the friar orders and more generally from the
Catholic Church. Thus, the hope that “the lights of the press [would] pursue the intellectual
cultivation of the indigenous people, just as evangelical lights pursued their religious faith,”
suggested that the work of the Catholic Church had been achieved, and that the work of the
present and future was secular education, in this case, popular education as could be
achieved by a vernacular press. In the guise of a complimentary nod to the Catholic Church,
then, the new paper called for the kind of education most threatening to its partisans.
Unlike the educational reforms pushed by the liberal administrations, however, this
newspaper was dedicated to secular education not only in Spanish but also in Tagalog. With
a Tagalog-language publication, it hoped to accomplish the popular diffusion of modern
knowledge and sciences among people who could not read the articles if they only appeared
in Spanish. Unlike most of the Tagalog-language publications that were available, this
paper was devoted not to religion but to propagating among Tagalogs knowledge and
science that would help the people advance in their “civil and political state.” At the same
time, the bilingual nature of the publication— parallel columns of the same text in both
Tagalog and Spanish— would provide Tagalog-speakers with lessons not only in
agriculture, industry, commerce, medicine, and hygiene, but also in the Spanish language,
the language of education, law, Church, and State.
Despite the fact that the paper proclaimed these politically charged goals, they
elicited not a murmur of response in the local press. Instead, what was most controversial
about the newspaper turned out to be something that might seem to be a detail; indeed, it
was literally a footnote to the opening article, a footnote in which the writer explained to his
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readers how the newspaper would spell words in the Tagalog language, saying that they
would “use the orthography recently introduced by . . . learned Orientalists . . . thinking [or
hoping, anticipating] that it better composes and represents the words of the Tagalog
language.”20 The footnote then briefly outlined the features of the new orthography.
Features of the New Orthography
Quite understandably, the Spanish friars, when learning indigenous languages by ear,
recorded the sounds in their own alphabet and with their own spelling conventions. Thus
late nineteenth-century written Tagalog was “spelled” like Spanish languages were. For
example, a “c” before an “a,” “o,” or “u” would be pronounced as a hard “c” (like “k”), and
a “c” before an “i” or “e”) would be pronounced as a soft “c” (like “s”).21 Those spelling
changes, common to Castilian, were common to Tagalog as well. But Tagalog, unlike
Castilian, relies for much of its grammatical information on attaching pre-, post-, and infixes to a root, a practice which resulted in a plethora of spelling changes when Spanish
orthography was used. For instance, the common verb root “kain” (to eat, spelled with the
new orthography) can take an in-fix “in” to become “kinain” (was eaten)—in the old
orthography, the root “cain” became “quinain” (emphasis added). The spelling of the hard
“c” or “k” sound was not the only change proposed, but it was the central one.22
The new orthography was presented by the editors of La España Oriental as a reform to
rationalize and regularize the spelling of Tagalog words in a way that would make it easier to
identify the root and that would preserve the grammatical footprints of the resulting word, after
various grammatical pieces had been inserted in or appended to the root. The editors also,
however, made the following disclaimer, which acknowledged the fluidity of Tagalog
orthography at the time and anticipated the substance, if not the degree, of the objections that the
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spelling changes would encounter: “However, if our readers think the other orthography more
understandable or convenient, we will comply [with their wishes and use the old
orthography].”23
The Revista Católica de Filipinas Reacts
If the editor and publisher revealed with this comment that they anticipated that not
everyone would accept the new spelling rules immediately, they probably did not anticipate
how strong the objections would be nor in what form and in what terms they would be
articulated. Soon after this first issue of the bilingual edition of La España Oriental hit the
streets of Manila, its sister bilingual publication, the Revista Católica de Filipinas, ran an
article attacking the orthography that La España Oriental had introduced. A regular
contributor to the newspaper and one of its Tagalog translators, Pablo Tecson, wrote in his
article “Orthography of the Tagalog Language,” “To use, then, the k in place of the q or of
the strong c, is only a craze for wanting to overturn everything, as has recently been done in
Tagalog writings that deserve the adjective of ‘German.’”24 Tecson went on to suggest not
only that the new orthography was not precise, but also that in advocating it, La España
Oriental was in effect insulting the Tagalog language and so its speakers. Though Tecson
claimed to be “not currently concerned with impugning the Orientalists” he in effect
dismissed their work by saying that to engage in debate in the terms of the new Orthography
would be “useless polemics.”25 He positioned himself as the champion of Tagalog by
invoking the authority of the great nineteenth-century Tagalog poet Francisco Baltasar
(Balagtas), and told the reader that he would defend Tagalog against the (supposed) charges
of the Orientalist scholars.26 What he meant, of course, is that he would defend the old
orthography, but he phrased his task in the following way:
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[W]e will demonstrate, guided by the intelligent pen of Father Modesto de Castro
and the inspired Muse of Mr. Francisco Baltasar, that Tagalog, just like the other
languages and dialects of the country, is not a whimsical joke or an intellectual
aberration, but that its structure and its mode of being, no less than its writing and
mode of being written, obey certain rules, that they have their interconnections
and interdependencies, and the collection of which, methodically ordered, is what
we call Orthography.27
Here he invented a charge that the Orientalists had never made: that the rules of Tagalog
were “a whimsical joke” or “an intellectual aberration.” In accusing the Orientalist scholars
of making this charge, he conflated the structure of the Tagalog language and the
orthography that was used to represent it. Tecson charged that to tamper with the spelling of
the language was to tamper with the language itself; that to find fault with the accepted
orthography was to accuse the language itself of being illogical and inferior, an insult which
surely would rub off on the speakers of the language. Tecson’s attack succeeded in
changing the nature of the discussion. It had been about the structure of the language, and
how it was best represented in writing; but it had become, in Tecson’s characterization, a
debate about whether Tagalog was a distinguished language. He had become its advocate
and so by implication the Orientalist linguists were its detractors. It is only a step away
from saying that he was a Tagalog patriot and the Orientalist linguists were traitors.
This step was soon taken by another writer, editor, and translator of the Revista Católica
de Filipinas, Pascual H. Poblete.28 Poblete drew the lines more clearly between the defenders of
Tagalog (and Spain) and its attackers, whose foreign-ness he emphasized. He wrote, “I am not a
philologist, but I am a Tagalog, by which I mean to say that with respect to my native tongue, I
can say, without bragging, that I know Tagalog better, simply much better than any Orientalist
gentleman (European or, if filipino, not a pure Tagalog).29 Poblete shifted the focus away from
the reasoning and the content of the arguments, towards the origin of those who did the arguing;
knowledge in this case was not something that could be acquired by force of will, but was
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something possessed by native speakers. None of the cited “Orientalists” were native Tagalog
speakers, and their studies were flawed because “Tagalog is not learned in any book put together
by academic authorities of language, because up until now it hasn’t occurred to us to form a
nucleus of individuals who would [and here he echoed the motto of the Reál Académia de la
Lengua Española (Royal Academy of the Spanish Language)] standardize, purify, and give
splendor to our words. Each Tagalog is an academic of his tongue [language].”30 For Poblete,
the nature of the language of Tagalog was fixed in practice at the moment: written Tagalog was
Tagalog, for Poblete; the spoken language could have no other proper representation than that in
which the great work of Baltasar was composed. To suggest a change in the orthography of
Tagalog was a presumption of foreign academics, applying their foreign and inappropriate
methods to the study of a language that they could never fully appreciate. If the changes
proposed by the Orientalists were to be implemented, he wrote, “almost all the Tagalogs, since
they aren’t Orientalists by virtue of anything other than having been born in the Orient, nor are
they learned philologists”31 would read the new spellings incorrectly. Not knowing the letter
“w,” he said, they would think that it was either a double “u” sound, or like a “u” and a “v”
together—and since the “v” sound in Spanish sounds like “b,” he ventured that “they would read
[karaniwan as] karani-u-ban, [tawo as] ta-u-bo, [kagawian as] caga-u-bian, [giliw as] gili-u-u,
[and wika as] u-bica . . . because their first teachers in the reading and writing of the Phoenician
alphabet . . . were the Spanish, and not the English or the Germans.”32 Here Poblete launched his
strongest attack: he accused the Orientalists of being a pernicious foreign influence—not simply
non-Tagalogs, but traitors to Spain because they were in the intellectual bed of the enemy,
England and Germany. He drove this point home later in the article when he called on his
Tagalog “compatriots” to defend, in effect, the Spanish flag:
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Furthermore, Tagalog compatriots: If our religion, our laws, our customs and our
entire mode of being are Spanish, why do we have to use some letters that are not
genuinely Spanish, and why do we have to pronounce the syllables ge and gi like
the Germans do and not like our brothers across the seas? Are the letters that
have been taught to us not enough for us to express our ideas and thoughts? Then
let us invent those that would be precise: better yet, let us revive our primitive
alphabet, before we use a letter of origin foreign to our Mother country.33
Here Poblete addressed his “Tagalog compatriots,” yet these Tagalogs were profoundly
Spanish, Spanish in their “entire mode of being.” Tagalog was, in effect, a sub-set of
Spanish; Tagalog was a Spanish language, and he believed this was rightly so. If the
Spanish alphabet was not sufficient for spelling Tagalog, then it would be preferable to
revert to a pre-Spanish Tagalog alphabet, rather than employ letters which were of foreign,
particularly of German, origin.
Pardo de Tavera’s Contribucion para el Estudio de los Antiguos Alfabetos Filipinos
In a sense, the Tecsons and Pobletes were correct about the foreign origins of the
new orthography. Their efforts were directed against the “foreign” origin of the letters “k”
and “w” that the new orthography employed, but the origin of the new orthography itself
was in Orientalist scholarship and research, an enterprise which was variously French,
English, and German, but never before Spanish. Let us retrace the origins of the
orthography advocated by La España Oriental. In 1884, T. H. Pardo de Tavera, born in the
Philippines of mixed Spanish and Tagalog descent, published a study called Contribution to
the Study of Ancient Philippine Alphabets [Contribucion para el Estudio de los Antiguos
Alfabetos Filipinos]. The work was the result of his applying the training he had received
from the School of Oriental Languages in Paris to the subject (much under-studied, in his
opinion) of Philippine languages. In this work, he faulted the Spanish for the lack of any
systematic scholarly study of the old Philippine alphabets, indeed of any ethnographic study
of the Philippines at all, and accused them of being less interested in this far-off part of their
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own country than the Germans were: “Philippine ethnography, which owes so much today
to Germans and Austrians, has received so little contribution from Spanish pens that it seems
to be a question of more interest to the former than to the latter. Even in the huge collection
of [Spanish] histories of the Philippines, generally long, generally filled with miraculous
events and stories of divine punishments, the ethnographic question is barely touched on by
authors whose favored occupation has been to relate politico-religious events.”34 Pardo de
Tavera criticized Spanish writing on the Philippines as religious and pre-modern. The
events of history, for the Spaniards, were those of the government and of the Church; he
would have preferred histories that told more about the people of the Philippines, in this
case, particularly of their languages. He complained that “the question of the alphabets has
been treated by almost all of the historians of the archipelago, but in such a light way, and
with such contradiction between them, that in our opinion it was necessary to contribute
these notes in order to clarify this interesting subject.”35 The scholarship of Spain had failed
the Philippines; he was arriving, with the help of the Germans and the Austrians, to fill that
void. His study was not dedicated to any Spaniard or even to a fellow native of the
Philippines: it was dedicated to Ferdinand Blumentritt, a German-speaking subject of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and “Philippinologist” with whom Pardo de Tavera was to have a
long-lasting scholarly exchange and friendship. For Pardo de Tavera, loyalty to the
Philippines did not mean blind praise for all things having to do with the Philippines,
including its Spanish scholarship; neither did criticism of things Spanish, or praise for things
German or Austrian, mean that one was a traitor of Spain. Pardo de Tavera’s patriotism was
rooted in a concern for the Philippines and for Spain, a concern that resulted in harsh
criticism of Spanish authors of histories of the Philippines. Though Pardo de Tavera would
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deny that such criticism was unpatriotic, unpatriotic is how Poblete was later to characterize
his critique.
After Pardo de Tavera’s Alfabetos
Studying the ancient alphabets of the Philippines gave Pardo de Tavera ideas about
how to improve the system of spelling of Tagalog that was used during his time. In
comparison with the old syllabic alphabets, the Hispanic Romanization of Tagalog seemed
needlessly illogical; it “disfigure[d] the physiognomy of many words,” as he later noted. 36
Pardo de Tavera saw in the old syllabic alphabets a way of spelling that more naturally fitted
the languages of the Philippines than the hispanized Roman orthography. But to revert to
the pre-hispanic script would make no sense given the Tagalog language as it was used in
the late-nineteenth century and as it needed to be used in the future. Tagalog was a dynamic
language; what had been appropriate for the past was not necessarily so for the present or for
the future. He could come to this conclusion because his Orientalist training, which required
him to study languages comparatively and as things that evolved, helped him to think of the
languages of the Philippines not as static entities, but as living things, things that had
origins, dynamic histories, and, importantly, futures.
Using Roman characters to spell the Tagalog language made sense for any number of
reasons. The characters were already familiar to those who could read and write (and the
old characters were familiar to no one but a few scholars). Furthermore, Roman characters
held the key to the present and future communication between Tagalog speakers and the rest
of the world—Tagalog spelled with them could be typeset using the same character sets
used to print the Spanish language,37 making it possible to mass-produce Tagalog texts.
Finally, using Roman letters made it easier for Tagalog speakers to learn to read and write
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Spanish (and any other language that used Roman letters); likewise it made Tagalog more
accessible for those who read and wrote other European languages that used Roman letters.
The obvious solution, then, for Pardo de Tavera, was to devise a better way of representing
the Tagalog language using Roman characters.
Rizal’s Guillermo Tell
The same question and solution occurred to José Rizal, a young, highly educated
doctor by trade, who was among a group of ambitious, politically-oriented young men from
the Philippines who were living, working, socializing, studying, and writing in various cities
of Europe. Many of these young men, like Rizal, identified as a “native” of the Philippines
despite a mixed (native and Chinese) ancestry. Rizal would later would become
immortalized as “father of the Filipino nation” when he was put to death at the hands of
Spanish after being charged as a “subversive.” When Rizal first read Pardo de Tavera’s
Contribución, he was inspired to think about working out and promoting a new orthography.
In the years that followed, he developed, independently of Pardo de Tavera, some of the
same spelling reforms. Indeed, the first work to be written in Tagalog using a new
orthography was a translation that Rizal made of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, and the German
connection is not accidental.38 The attacks in the Revista Católica de Filipinas against
German influence might largely have been attacks against Rizal, without mentioning his
name or anything that might specifically identify him. Rizal had spent much of 1886 and
the first part of 1887 in Germany, a country whose people and progress he openly admired,
and where he wrote much of his first novel, Noli me Tangere.39 Rizal’s admiration of
Germany had already been a point of political accusations; Vicente Barrantes, a Spanish
official of the Civil Administration of the Philippines, and a conservative occasional
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contributor to Manila’s press, had already accused Rizal of having a soul that had been
“twisted” by the Germans, in reply to which Rizal said that if his soul was “twisted” it had
happened in the atmosphere of Manila, not Germany.40 Rizal’s translation of Wilhelm Tell
into Tagalog was testament to his admiration for the German writer and for the advances of
the German nation and its sense of self-worth. The example of progress and pride was what
Rizal hoped to convey when he translated the play.
By using a new orthography in translating the German play into Tagalog, Rizal was
responding to two needs that he believed that Tagalog people had. The first was for an
example that it might provide, because of “the relatively few works in Tagalog.”41
Apparently Rizal also shared that belief with his brother, who had himself tried to translate
into Tagalog another of Schiller’s works, Maria Stuart, from a Spanish translation.42 For
Rizal it was important that Tagalog have its own literature, even if at first this meant
translating great works of other languages into Tagalog. This literature, again, was oriented
to the young. Rizal wanted children to have a literature in their own language to learn from,
to be fascinated by, and to be inspired by. To this end, he also translated the children’s
stories of Hans Christian Andersen into Tagalog during the same time that he was working
on Schiller’s work.43
But the need of the Filipino youth was not only to have works written in Tagalog;
they also needed a new way of spelling the language that was, as he characterized it and as
we have seen before, “more rational and logical, that would be, at the same time, in harmony
with the spirit of the language and of its siblings [related languages].”44 The reform was
inspired in part by “the study that I was making at that time of the primary schools in
Saxony where I saw the great efforts of the teachers to simplify and facilitate the education
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of the children.”45 Rizal strongly emphasized the utility of the reform for teaching purposes,
“to alleviate the work and facilitate the first steps of the children” 46 by simplifying the
orthography, because he, like the publishers of Manila’s bilingual newspapers, believed that
the future of the country lay in education—a future which he had witnessed during his time
in Germany, and one which he believed could be duplicated with proper effort in the
Philippines.
Rizal introduced his friends and family to his new orthography and encouraged them
to adopt it. When he sent his brother Paciano the manuscript of the Tagalog Guillermo Tell,
which was apparently the first time that his brother had seen the new orthography, Paciano
remained skeptical, though he echoed his brother’s feelings about the need for the
orthography and for translation work. Responding to the new orthography, Paciano wrote:
“I don’t dare do it. Will one’s name be enough to establish it, like the authority of an
Academy does? Will it be accepted universally? I doubt it, but if one can introduce this
change, it is time to do so, because Tagalog still lacks good books.”47 Rizal later wrote that
by 1887, he had urged his friends to adopt the new orthography and apparently at least some
of them had already done so.48 In 1888, he wrote to one of his friends that “[t]he new
Tagalog orthography that we are using is perfectly in harmony with the ancient writing
according to what I find out from some books that I find in the British Museum, and
according to the Sanskrit origin of many Tagalog words. Adopt it; Pedro Serrano has
already published a pamphlet in this new orthography and a dictionary will be published.”49
This friend replied to reassure Rizal that he and his family had already adopted the new
orthography, that they were writing in it, and that his friends were adopting it as well.50
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Notably, however, these letters were written in the Spanish language, the language in which
he and his friends almost always corresponded.
Rizal’s first published work using the new orthography was his Noli me Tangere,
which came out in 1887. In it, he captured the interruptions of Tagalog into the often
mediocre Castilian spoken by native Tagalog speakers. That Rizal used a new orthography
in this novel is often lost among today’s students of the novel; the novel’s other innovations
and consequences were vast enough that the orthography does not stand out among them.
This is no surprise especially because what was new at the time has since become standard
(more on this later), so the newness of the orthography disappears before the eyes of the
modern Tagalog reader. But in introducing this new orthography, he was hoping that the
general public would see its advantages and come to accept it, as he later wrote.51 The novel
was forward-looking in more than its use of the new orthography, but the new orthography
was for Rizal part of the forward-looking project of the novel, part of the project to make
visible the problems of the Philippines so that its people would be motivated and able to fix
them.
Pardo de Tavera’s El Sanscrito en la Lengua Tagalog
Without being aware of each other’s work, then, during the years that followed the
publication of Pardo de Tavera’s Contribución, both he and Rizal developed a new
orthographic system that each believed would be more appropriate for the present and future
nature and needs of the Tagalog language and its speakers. Rizal undertook this with his
translations of Schiller and Andersen, using the new orthography in his novel, and in urging
his friends and family to adopt the spelling reforms. Simultaneously, Pardo de Tavera was
working on his next contribution to the study of Philippine languages, one which again
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shows his Orientalist training. Sanskrit in the Tagalog Language [El Sanscrito en la Lengua
Tagalog] was published in 1887, shortly before Rizal’s Noli me Tangere.
The body of this work consisted of a list of Tagalog words that he believed had a
Sanskrit origin, with a brief explanation of the Sanskrit root and its likely transformation
into Tagalog for each entry. Preceding the list of words were two introductory chapters, the
first a brief history of Sanskrit and Hindu culture in the area (mostly in Java), and the second
a brief explanation of the new orthography that he advocated for the Tagalog language.
Relatively few of the words in the list required any spelling changes to comply with his new
system, but this publication was a logical place to introduce and to advocate the new
orthography. For the words which would be spelled differently under the old (Spanish) and
new orthographies, Pardo de Tavera offered the new spelling in parentheses after the old
spelling which would have been more readily recognized by Tagalog readers at the time.
The new spelling was written “with Latin characters that correspond more accurately to the
orthography of the word, according to the ancient Tagalog characters, than do the letters
now used according to Spanish orthography.”52 As the Tagalog words sit side by side with
their Sanskrit counterparts, the Sanskrit words Romanized according to the standard
convention of the time, one can easily recognize the regularity of the Sanskrit spellings, and
the regularity of the new orthography when compared to the old. Sanskrit’s own script was
a syllabic one, as the ancient Tagalog script had been. Romanization of Sanskrit was a way
of recording Sanskrit syllables for Europeans who were not familiar with the Sanskrit
alphabet; likewise, the new Romanization of Tagalog proposed by Pardo de Tavera was a
way of representing Tagalog syllables for those who were familiar with Roman letters, not
the ancient Tagalog script. The comparative method of Orientalist science allowed Pardo de
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Tavera to see a new possibility for representing the Tagalog syllabary with the Roman
alphabet, in a process that paralleled how Orientalist scholars of Sanskrit represented the
Sanskrit syllabary with Roman characters. Again, the suspicions of Poblete and Tecson
were, in a sense, correct: Pardo de Tavera was able to recognize the structure of Tagalog and
suggest a new orthography for it, not because he studied Tagalog to the exclusion of other
languages, but exactly because he studied Tagalog in comparison with foreign languages.
Serrano Laktaw’s Diccionario
Shortly after Rizal’s Noli me Tangere and Pardo de Tavera’s Sanscrito appeared,
Pedro Serrano, a young schoolteacher, secured permission from the authorities in Manila to
publish his Diccionario Hispano-tagalog. The first volume, Spanish-Tagalog, appeared in
1889.53 Pardo de Tavera later noted that this was the first dictionary to be published using
the new orthography, and it was path-breaking in other ways as well.54 Unlike Pardo de
Tavera’s Sanscrito and Rizal’s Noli me Tángere; in Serrano Laktaw’s book, whole entries of
Tagalog prose appeared in the new orthography, not just single words of Tagalog. As Pardo
de Tavera noted, “even the second last name of the author, that had been written in a way
that is imperfect (Lactao), presented an opportunity to apply the newly-introduced two
consonants that he did not let pass.”55 Indeed the book was by “Pedro Serrano Laktaw,”
Serrano Lactao’s name as it was written in the new orthography.56 The work began with
notices to the reader, some in Tagalog, and others in Castilian. The last notice to the reader
of Castilian announced, in words very similar to those used by La España Oriental in the
same year, that the author would employ the new orthography:
We hope to make a contribution to philology by adopting the orthography
employed by the learned Orientalists such as the Abbé Favre, D. Manuel Troyano,
Humboldt, Jacquet, Pardo de Tavera, etc., and, finally, by the M. R. P. Toribio
Minguella, Agustinian Recollect, learned philologist, author of various works in
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Tagalog, and to whom we owe the curious and no less thorough comparative
studies of Tagalog and Sanskrit. In this manner [of employing the new
orthography], it is easy to distinguish the root and the affixed components of each
word, writing is less complicated, and the spoken word is represented more
accurately, none of which is true with the orthography which has been used until
now.57
The emphasis in making the change was on the ease with which Tagalog could be read and
written. There was no question of loyalty to the Spanish orthography; no sense that
anything was lost by employing a new orthography. Indeed, the question of loyalty was
only relevant to the Tagalog language as it was spoken: the new orthography would more
faithfully represent “the spoken word” than the Spanish orthography. By simplifying the
process of reading and writing, Serrano Laktaw believed that the orthography was in line
with the aims of his dictionary, aims which were perhaps most clear in the dedication and
the prologue of the work.
The work was dedicated to Benigno Quiroga L. Ballesteros, who served in Manila
under the liberal administration as director of the Civil Administration, and to the
“development of education” in the Philippines. 58 For Serrano Laktaw, it was important to
develop public instruction in the Philippines, to improve students’ ability to read and write
in Castilian as well as in Tagalog. The prologue to the book was written by Del Pilar y
Gatmaytan (formerly Del Pilar y Gatmaitan, and more famously known for his writings in
Solidaridad), who emphasized the importance of teaching Castilian to students in the
Philippines. Del Pilar praised the “aspirations of the government” to teach Castilian to all
schoolchildren, and he hoped that the book would “contribute to the diffusion of Castilian in
this archipelago, that [being] a part of Spain, should be Spanish in its language, just as it is
Spanish in its government, Spanish in its religion, in its sentiments, in its habits and in its
aspirations.”59 The new orthography clearly did not in this formulation represent anything
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un-Spanish. Indeed, in helping students to learn to read and write their own mother tongue,
it would help them to learn with more ease the national language of Castilian, which would
bring them closer to peninsular Spain itself; a peninsular Spain that, for Del Pilar, Serrano
Laktaw, and the rest of the young propagandists in it at the time, had more liberties and
more opportunities for debate and criticism, especially of the friar orders, than did their
home country.
Accusations of Foreign-ness of the Revista Católica de Filipinas
We do not know how much of Pardo de Tavera’s work was familiar to Tecson,
Poblete, and whoever else from the staff of the Revista Católica de Filipinas might have
been contributing to the orthography debate; but the fact that so much of their attack focused
on the foreign and especially the allegedly German influence of the orthography and its
advocates suggests that they knew something of the scholarship and scholarly connections
of Pardo de Tavera and Rizal. Their criticism included both the repeated claim that the
letters “k” and “w” were particularly German and definitely not Spanish (and therefore not
Tagalog), but also included gratuitous and petty reminders of the supposed German origins
of the new orthography. For instance, one article was signed, in the Tagalog column, with
the pseudonym “hindí aleman” (“not German”)60, and in another article, Tecson used as an
example of a root, the word “aleman” (German), adding Tagalog components to make it into
verbs “umale-aleman” and “inaleman” and “alemanin,” words which apparently would
mean something along the lines of “to do German,” “was made German,” and “to be made
German.”61 Of course “aleman” itself is a Spanish word, not Tagalog, a problem to which
we will later return. The point here is that the critics of the Revista Católica de Filipinas
never missed an opportunity to make the new orthography seem as foreign and especially as
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German as possible, rather than admitting it to be “natural” to Tagalog (which would be the
view of its advocates).
Merger of La España Oriental and the Revista Católica de Filipinas
The heated exchanges between La España Oriental and the Revista Católica de
Filipinas continued for several months. Nevertheless, in January of the following year
(1890), the bilingual editions of La España Oriental and the Revista Católica de Filipinas
merged, because both recognized that neither could afford to continue publishing in
competition with the other. The merger represented not only the failure of the bilingual
publications, as they found the reading public was not willing or able to consume as much as
they could produce, but it also indicated, despite the fierce debate in the pages of these
publications about Tagalog orthography, that the goals of the two papers were similar. Both
papers considered themselves advocates of Tagalog education and vehicles for uplifting the
Tagalog people; the argument about orthography underscored a deep rift in how they
believed these goals could best be achieved, but the fact that they could merge into one
bilingual paper is testament to the urgency that both camps felt for the project of having a
bilingual paper, no matter what the orthography employed.
The new bilingual publication was called La Lectura Popular [The Popular Reader
or Popular Reading] and unlike its two predecessors it was not connected to a Castilian-only
edition of a periodical of the same name. It was its own operation, run by de los Reyes, the
same editor who had run the bilingual edition of La España Oriental, but the major figures
from the bilingual edition of the Revista Católica de Filipinas were contributors and editors
as well. The pages of La Lectura Popular contained a continuation of the series of articles
that the Revista Católica de Filipinas had begun during the orthography debate. The
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continuation of “Ortografía Tagala,” a letter from D. Villanueva that P. Tecson had been
publishing in the Revista Católica de Filipinas, appeared in the third number of La Lectura
Popular. Curiously, although the article was meant to be continued, no further installments
appeared. Whether this was a result of strife between the different camps or an indication
that the moment of the debate had passed and interest had died down, we do not know.
Nevertheless, this magazine did not further pursue the orthography issue in its pages. In
practice, however, some of the Tagalog articles used the new orthography (or certain aspects
of it), and some used the old. The inconsistency in its own pages seemed not to trouble the
editorial board.
Rizal’s Letter to his Countrymen
But the orthography issue had not died down completely. In April of the same year,
1890, an article appeared in the Madrid-based periodical La Solidaridad (“Solidarity”),
authored by José Rizal. He published “Sobre la Nueva Ortografia de la Lengua Tagalog:
Carta á Mis Paisanos [On the New Orthography of the Tagalog Language: A Letter to my
Countrymen]” in which he outlined the history of the new orthography, its logic, and his
answers to the criticisms that had been lodged against it. Rizal’s piece was a response to
Tecson and especially to Poblete, not only because he addressed their criticisms, but also in
that he explicitly addressed the issues of patriotism and language, and encouraged his
readers to think of the question of orthography as a political question. The responses of La
España Oriental to the criticisms of Tecson and Poblete had focused on the logic of the new
orthography and its utility; whether due to the censorship of the Manila press or not, La
España Oriental did not overtly push the political implications of their position. Rizal had
more room to advocate a political program, however, in La Solidaridad. The fortnightly
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newspaper had clearly allied itself with the Republican factions of Spanish politics, it was
consistently hostile to the Catholic Church and the friar orders in particular, and was also
critical of any administration in Madrid or Manila that it saw as a puppet of the Church.
Though the politics of the paper were generally more reformist than the more radical
political leanings of some of its contributors, it was nevertheless clearly allied with the
Republicans (and so a bit more radical than the Liberals, with whom it had some sympathy),
and did not shirk from possible controversy. It was in this venue, then, that Rizal outlined
his position on the new orthography and gave voice to its political meaning.
Rizal opened the article with a picture of a classroom in the Philippines, painted to
accentuate the problems that he believed were holding back the country:
When you were attending the town’s school to learn your first letters, or when
you had to teach them to the littler ones, your attention must have been drawn, as
mine was, to the great difficulty that boys encountered when they got to the
syllables ca, ce, ci, co, ga, ge, gua, gue, gui, etc., because they didn’t understand
the cause of these irregularities or the reason that the sounds of some consonants
change. Whips rained down, punishments were repeated and repeated. . . . And
finally I considered that those syllables, that caused the boys such tears, would be
of no use to them at all, since in our spoken language and in the ancient
orthography, we had neither ci, nor ge, nor gi, etc., syllables that belonged to
Castilian, which only three in a thousand of the boys were going to learn in
Manila by dint of hearing it and memorizing volumes upon volumes. And
however much I inwardly questioned the reason that they studied it, if ultimately
they were not going to speak anything but Tagalog . . . . I kept quiet about it,
because I had the presentiment that in those parts to attempt to reform something
is to embark on a difficult journey. 62
He opened with this image of pain, punishment, and frustration for Tagalog boys, to
heighten the sense of urgency and also of waste; this was all unnecessary, because it was the
result of the improper, old orthography, to which he and others were offering a solution. He
also opened with this image in a way that invited his readers, “countrymen [mis paisanos]”63
to identify both with the suffering boys and with him. He reminded the readers that he was
himself a native Tagalog speaker, he had been a Tagalog student in the classroom; this
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established the same kind of authority for Rizal that Poblete denied to Pardo de Tavera and
the other Orientalists. He was a Tagalog who admired the Germans, but he believed that
this made him no less of a Tagalog.
The facility of the new orthography for teaching purposes would not only benefit
Tagalog children; Rizal noted that one goal of the new orthography as “to make its
[Tagalog’s] study easy and attainable, even for foreigners.”64 Again, for Rizal, Pardo de
Tavera, and in general for the editors of La España Oriental, making the Philippines easier
for foreigners to study could only have positive consequences. Rizal was optimistic about
the potential contributions of foreigners because he believed that modern science and
scientific method held the key for the advancement of knowledge and of mankind in general.
Rizal emphasizes that both he and Pardo de Tavera were simultaneously working on a new
orthography, without knowledge of each other’s work, arriving at more or less the same
conclusions. When Rizal found out about the new orthography proposed by Pardo de
Tavera, an orthography very similar to but “more perfect than” the one he had developed,65
he
rejoiced because I saw that I was not the only one with that idea, that it had
appeared almost simultaneously in our minds . . . and because the authority of Dr.
Pardo de Tavera made my aspirations considerably stronger. The great proof that
both attempts occurred independently and almost simultaneously in our minds,
without any consultations or explanations passing between us, is the practice by
Dr. Pardo de Tavera of using the “w,” which hadn’t occurred to me in my work, a
practice that I immediately adopted when I saw it, because I understood its perfect
utility. 66
Scientific method had confirmed the accuracy of the findings: they were duplicated by
someone else. This was important for Rizal because it served as proof of the new
orthography’s legitimacy, and countered the claims of its detractors that there was nothing
logical about the new system. Likewise, the fact that the two arrived at the same
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conclusions simultaneously served as an example of the benefits of scientific investigation.
Two men independently used their knowledge of languages (Tagalog and foreign) to
construct a system that held great promise for future Tagalog-speakers.
After a long section where he detailed the technical features of the old and the new
orthography, he then addressed the important question of patriotism, and what spelling had
(and had not) to do with it. Again, he invoked the reader’s sympathy for their former selves,
as Tagalog boys struggling in the classroom, and for their own sons, actual or imaginary,
who would toil continually up this mountain unless a new orthography was adopted:
Why torture the boys into learning [Spanish syllables] when they have to speak
nothing other than Tagalog, because Castilian is completely forbidden to them? If
later they have occasion to learn this latter language, then they will study these
combinations, as we all do when we begin to study French, English, German,
Dutch, etc. No one in Spain learns as a child the French or English syllabary:
Why, then do the children of the towns have to kill themselves in learning the
syllabary of a language that they will never have to speak? The only thing that
they can gain is a hatred of their studies, seeing that they are difficult and
useless.67
Rizal made it clear that it was not for the sake of the privileged few who studied Spanish and
who went on to study other languages that the reforms were introduced: it was not merely
for the “Orientalists,” but also for the children of the towns in the countryside (pueblos),
who would likely never become literate in Spanish. What he proposed, he stressed, was for
the learning of Tagalog in the Philippines to be more like the learning of Spanish in Spain:
in other words, that Tagalog should become more “like” Spanish by becoming less Spanish,
that it should become its own language rather than a strange local version of another
language.
Rizal rebuked the provincialism of Tecson and Poblete, objecting to the supposed
“foreign-ness” of the letters “k” and “w,” by making analogies that pointed out how
ridiculous it was to base patriotism for a country on the supposed origin of a letter:
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It is, then, exceedingly childish . . . to reject the use [of the letter “k”] saying that
it is of German origin and taking up the issue in order to make boasts of
patriotism, as if patriotism consisted of characters of the alphabet. ‘We are
Spaniards above all!’ say its opponents, and with this they think that they have
performed an act of heroism; ‘We are Spanish above all! And we reject the “k” of
German origin!’ I am sure that nine tenths of these patriots of my country’s
alphabet wear hats that are genuinely German and perhaps genuinely German
boots, too! What? Then where is their patriotism? Do Germany’s exports rise
when we use the “k,” more than when we import and wear German things? Why
not wear a chambergo [Spanish slouch hat], a salakot [native Philippine hat], or a
hat made of buntal [palm fibers], if they are such protectionists? Does the “k”
impoverish us? Is the “c” a product of our country? It is very easy to be a patriot
thus.”68
With the comparison to headgear and footwear, Rizal expressed his frustration with
what he perceived as narrow-minded chauvinism, and contrasted it with what he saw
as an enlightened patriotism. He closed his piece with an invitation to “those who do
not adopt [the system] from the very beginning, without first a prudent
consideration,”69 that is, with an invitation to the detractors of the new orthography,
to join the men who are interested in “the free sphere of scientific facts,”70 and he
wrote that “we don’t doubt, therefore, that in the end [the reform] will come to be
generalized . . . we are sure that, convinced of its advantages, [the skeptics will] have
to consider it to be nothing but the national script, rational and easy, of our
harmonious language.”71
Spanish and Tagalog?
Why would a debate about orthography produce such strong sentiments? At the
most basic level, the debate reveals just how strongly language is associated with patriotism.
That is, the question for some of these writers was whether Tagalog was, in effect, a
“Spanish” language. It was perfectly understood that Tagalog was not the same as Castilian,
but it somehow made sense that Tagalog was nonetheless a “Spanish” language, Spanish in
the sense that it was spoken by Spanish subjects, that it was spoken in Spanish territories,
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and that it was written with Spanish letters. Perhaps it is not so strange if we consider the
status of other languages of the peninsula: Basque was putatively a Spanish language
(though not the Spanish language), despite the fact that it was completely unrelated to other
languages of the Peninsula; less drastically, Catalan, for instance, had its own separate
traditions and literatures. Those on the other side of the debate, however, argued that
Tagalog was not a Spanish language, in the sense that it was not related to Castilian
linguistically, but they believed that this fact in itself bore no political threat to the threads
that bound (or that were supposed to be binding) the Philippines, and Tagalogs in particular,
to Spain.
More of an issue, however, was the question of the origins of the orthography itself.
The detractors of the new orthography argued that it emanated from foreign, i.e. nonSpanish (German) sources, and that it was unpatriotic to abide by its (foreign) rules. The
orthography was foreign both because it employed characters “foreign” to the Spanish
alphabet, and because it was proposed by people who were trained in foreign academies in
the “foreign” science of Orientalism. To the orthography’s detractors, the substance of the
science of Orientalism was not itself particularly objectionable; what was objectionable
about the science was merely that it was practiced almost exclusively by non-Spaniards. To
Rizal and Pardo de Tavera, to accuse science of being “national” was absurd: it was true that
some nations were ahead of others in the way that they used science, and in this respect
Spain did not fare well in comparison with some of its European neighbors. This both Rizal
and Pardo de Tavera made much of. But this did not mean that science “belonged” to
Germany, France, or England. Science was available to all, a realm of free exchange where
political boundaries held no sway, and it was just as much available for use by the Tagalogs
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as it was for the Spanish, German, or French. Both Pardo de Tavera and Rizal wanted to
take advantage of the benefits that science had to offer for their homeland, the Philippines,
for the sake of its future.
For both the advocates and the detractors of the new orthography, the Tagalog
language had an important place in the development of the Philippines as a whole. As the
language of Manila, Tagalog was one of the languages of the most “advanced” Philippine
peoples. Whether because of chauvinism or out of sincere and disinterested admiration,
Tagalogs were seen as a model of what people of the Philippines could be—the most
educated of them were as educated as anyone in the world. Education, true modern
education, in the Tagalog language was essential to the uplifting of the rest of the Tagalog
people; and this would provide a model for the other peoples of the Philippines. In this
sense, Tagalog was seen to be important for the progress of the Philippines; but Tagalog was
not, and would never be, a true national language.
All of those who participated in the orthography debate argued that they were deeply
loyal to Spain, but they disagreed on what kind of Spain that was: whether it was traditional
or modern. At the same time, they were loyal to Tagalog and to the Philippines. These
loyalties were not incommensurable, they argued; to be loyal to the Philippines was to be
loyal to Spain; to be loyal to the Tagalog language was to be loyal to the Philippines and to
Spain.
Curiously, however, one characteristic of the new orthography was never pursued in the
debate: the new orthography “erased” Castilian from the Tagalog language. This erasure might
be seen as the most politically significant feature of the orthography, the feature that would have
made it a traitor to Spain and the Spanish language. Why did neither the advocates nor the
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detractors of the new orthography mention this feature? To answer this question, we first need to
understand how the new orthography erased the Castilian from Tagalog.
Spanish in Tagalog
As with most languages, the origins of many of Tagalog’s root words can be traced to
other languages. In the Tagalog that is spoken today, roots can be traced to Sanskrit, Malay,
Arabic, Chinese (Fukien), English and Spanish—but the great majority of the foreign roots in
Tagalog are Spanish. The Spanish words that have become part of the Tagalog language are
sometimes terms that have no Tagalog equivalent (such as relo or relos for “watch,” from the
Spanish reloj), but technical terms were not the only Spanish words that became Tagalog roots.
Some of the most common Spanish roots in informal spoken Tagalog are hard to pick out as
being “Spanish,” thanks to the eventual success of the new orthography: the Spanish ¿Cómo
está? (how are you) has become kumusta; the Spanish puede (is able to) has become pwede,
used both to mean “is able” and also to mean “maybe,” or “it’s possible,” in reply to a suggestion
or question; the Spanish sigue (follows) has become sige, a word that pops up in almost any
conversation, to mean “okay” or “go ahead.” While the Spanish roots would not have been
considered by purists to be part of the Tagalog language until relatively recently, they would
have entered the spoken language by the time of our story.
The bilingual periodicals used a more formal written Tagalog that would have excluded
these informal words of the spoken language, so we cannot see their transformation, from the
Spanish spelling to the new orthography, in the pages of La España Oriental. It is instructive,
nonetheless, to look at how Spanish words were treated in the Tagalog text of that periodical.
Many of the Spanish words for which there were no Tagalog equivalents were printed in italics,
which had the effect of marking them as “foreign.” To take examples from the first page of the
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33
first issue, we find prensa (press), Evangelio (gospel), gobierno (government), administracion
(administration), and ciencia (science). But there were other Spanish words and words of
Spanish origin in the Tagalog column that were not italicized—they simply meld into the
Tagalog words around them, in many cases with letters added according to rules of Tagalog
grammar. These words, then, were different from the italicized Spanish words—the Tagalog
writer/translator of the article wrote them fluidly into Tagalog text in a way that showed that they
were already in use in the Tagalog language. To draw examples from the same page of La
España Oriental, we find the following words, either Spanish or of Spanish origin, seamlessly
inserted into the Tagalog text without any italic type: kastilang (meaning “Spanish,” from the
Spanish Castilla), arteng (meaning “arts,” from arte), and industria, (“industry”). The first of
these examples is the most instructive: the new orthography changes Castilla to kastila. While
the new orthography might have made it easier to identify the Tagalog root of a Tagalog word
(to paraphrase Pardo de Tavera’s characterization of its utility), it did not make it easier to
identify the Spanish root of a Tagalog word. The “k”s and “w”s masked the Spanish origins of
Tagalog words.
In this sense, the new orthography was a “traitor” orthography, a traitor to Spain and to
the Spanish language. The new orthography did not refuse everything that was Spanish—it
accepted Spanish words, but it accepted them as Tagalog words, hiding their Spanish origin. It
made it easier for Tagalog, the language that borrowed words from Castilian, to have its own
vocabulary, its own terms, different from Spanish terms (in spelling, at least). It enacted a
separation between the Spanish language and Tagalog, a separation that was the result of
severing the very real links that had been visible in the shapes of words. Poblete and Tecson
protested that the new orthography was disloyal to Spain; but they never complained about this
mct 1/23/05
34
separation. They complained that under the rules of the new orthography, the language became
more like the foreign languages of German, French or English, but perhaps the bigger threat was
that Tagalog became itself a language foreign to Spain—not more like German, French, or
English, but just less like Spanish.
Why did Poblete and Tecson, so loyal to Spain and the Spanish-ness of the Tagalog
language, not lodge this complaint? Perhaps it was their patriotism to Tagalog that kept them
from doing so. To complain that Spanish words would no longer be recognizable as Spanish
would, after all, require one to acknowledge that Spanish words were a necessary part of the
Tagalog language—necessary because “pure” Tagalog did not express the range of terms that
one would need as an educated Tagalog in the advanced and cosmopolitan city of Manila. To
complain about the de-hispanization of Spanish roots would only call attention to their
importance in the contemporary Tagalog language. It would only call attention to the fact that
Tagalog was no longer “pure” Tagalog, and could not remain “pure” in a world of technological
change and economic development. The Tagalog so loved by Poblete and Tecson was the
Tagalog of Baltazar’s “Florante at Laura”—“classical” Tagalog, fit for metrical romance poetry,
but not for describing the new penal code for the Philippines or the latest agricultural techniques.
The new orthography, then, offered Tagalog a way to appropriate new terms from
Spanish, in a sense giving the language an ability to update itself.72 The new orthography, then,
made Tagalog able to compete with Spanish as a language of progress and science. Those terms
could have been and in fact were inserted into Tagalog in the old orthography, of course—
remember that many Spanish words had already become incorporated into the language by the
time that the first issue of La España Oriental appeared. But in changing the spelling of those
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35
words, the new orthography made them not Spanish, whereas in the old orthography they
appeared more visibly as “borrowed” words.
Perhaps, then, the protestations of loyalty to Spain were exaggerated, on both sides of the
debate. Those who advocated the new orthography claimed that they did so because the changes
were logical (according to scientific inquiry) and practical (for education and so for
advancement). These goals, they claimed, were themselves patriotic, towards both the
Philippines and the mother country of Spain. But their cries of patriotism to Spain might have
distracted a listener from a quieter call for patriotism towards something that was not Spain, but
was local to the Philippines: a language distinct from Spanish, which was both unique to the
Philippines and capable of functioning in an advanced world.
The new orthography’s critics, on the other hand, declared a different kind of loyalty to
Spain: loyalty to Spanish ways of recording the sound of speech, and loyalty to letters used in the
Spanish language over those used by other European languages. But behind those protestations
one might have found a loyalty to the Tagalog language that required one not to acknowledge the
contributions that Spanish made to it. In fact, then, loyalty to Tagalog might not have been so
commensurate with a loyalty to Spain and to things Spanish.
In a sense, then, the two sides were closer to each other than they might have appeared,
but not because both sides were deeply patriotic vis-à-vis Spain. The fact that each side could
position themselves as the representatives of patriotism toward Spain might be one way that we
can understand the different visions of Spain that were competing for power, both in the
Peninsula and in the Islands. Poblete and Tecson could employ the xenophobic rhetoric that
reflected the hostility of some elements in Spain towards philosophies and religions that other
countries represented. At the same time, Rizal, Del Pilar, and Serrano Laktaw could advocate a
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36
reform with separatist overtones, but could characterize their reform as being in support of the
programs advocated by a liberal Spanish civil administration. These competing “patriotic”
displays were possible in an environment where Spanish loyalties were themselves divided. In
this case, an argument was enacted on two levels. On one level, the argument displayed the
differences in patriotic sentiment among Spaniards themselves—and on this level, there was
nothing un-Spanish about the argument. It could be carried on in the public pages of the press,
under the censor’s nose. One another level, an argument was taking place about the nature of the
Tagalog language, an argument among Tagalog-speakers, not for the benefit of Spain, but for the
benefit of Tagalogs. That argument was filibustero, or subversive—but it took place at a level of
suggestion that the censors could not touch. In this sense, Spain produced her own Tagalog
subversives.
The patriotism espoused by those who would reform the Tagalog orthography was a
patriotism first towards an international, universal human progress in which they believed
Tagalogs, and others from the Philippines, could and should participate. They could participate
as Tagalogs, as Filipinos, and as members of a Spanish nation, but to do so they could, should,
and would need to use knowledge with origins outside of both the Philippines and Spain. At the
same time, whether they intended it or not, the effect of their proposals, or the implementation of
that extra-Spanish knowledge, was to make less visible the linguistic ties that bound the
Philippines to Spain. The severing of these ties was completed under American administration,
when the English language became far more widely used than Spanish ever was.
Spelling controversies have not subsided in the post-colonial Philippines, but they have
taken a different form, in part because the states and would-be states in competition have shifted.
In the late nineteenth-century, the Spanish state competed with a nascent Philippine state, or
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37
perhaps just the idea of one. In the contemporary Philippines, the Catholic- and Tagalogdominated, Manila-centric Republic competes with nascent political identities in its contested
regions; the highlands and in Muslim areas. Interestingly, perhaps, for us, is the integration of
non-Tagalog languages into the “Filipino” national language. Filipino was, ostensibly, a
compromise between different indigenous languages of the Philippines, but Visayan—the
language with the most native speakers—lost out to Tagalog—the language native to the area
around Manila—as the basis for that language. However it is not Visayan, but highland
languages which have posed challenges to the “national” orthography of Filipino. Filipino, or,
what was until recently technically speaking “Pilipino,” was based on languages (like Tagalog)
which had no indigenous f sound; thus “Filipino” becomes “Pilipino.” But in some highland
languages, less closely related to lowland languages, the f sound is indigenous. Thus in
contemporary debates, the question of “Filipino” versus “Pilipino” is not one primarily between
the Spanish- or, later, English-associated f sound against the challenge of the indigenous p;
rather, it became a challenge of the relatively disenfranchised f sound against the tyranny of the
lowland p. In an interesting twist, the letter once identified with the oppressor has become
identified with the oppressed, and so that which was a symbol of the exclusive now has become
inclusive.73
1
I owe so many people thanks for their help with this research and writing that I can not possibly thank them all
here; the biggest debt is clearly to Benedict Anderson, both for sparking my interest in this era of Philippine history
more generally, and for being a challenging, helpful reader of an earlier version of the text. All the errors this
version must still contain are of course my own.
2
(Humboldt 1988)
3
See for example (Herder 2002; Schlegel 2001; Hegel 1975). For explanation and interpretation, see (Olender
1992; Schwab 1984).
4
(Humboldt 1988)
5
(Humboldt 1988)
6
This formulation is inspired by the much richer accounts of the representation of nationalism in chapter 10 of
(Anderson 1991), and (Billig 1995)
7
(Woolard 1998)
8
(Velleman 2002; Bello and Jaksic 1997; Bello 1890)
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38
9
(Schieffelin and Charlier Doucet 1994)
e.g. in (Guentcheva 1999)
11
For example, in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century China, reformers advocated a new
orthographic system based on Japanese kana as part of a movement to implement popular education. See (Tam
1990) Compare with the efforts to develop a new Romanized orthography for Shinzwani documented in
(Ottenheimer 2001)
12
(Anderson 1998; Rafael 1999)
13
(Lumbera 1986)
14
See (Rafael 1988) for the definitive account of the translation of Spanish Catholicism into Philippine languages;
Rafael shows us that in many ways fact Tagalog was not made Spanish, but instead the Catholic religion was made
Tagalog. A very concise account of the Spanish codification of native languages of the Philippines, in the context of
an article about nationalism among the propagandists, see Rafael’s newer piece, (Rafael 1999)
15
The two most important exceptions are Baltazar’s Florante at Laura and the Diariong Tagalog.
16
The banner reads, “La España Oriental. Revista de Ciencias, Administración, Artes, Letras é Intereses preferentes
de Filipinas.”
17
De los Reyes certainly would have known Tagalog, though he never published any significant works that he had
written in that language himself—if a Tagalog version appeared, it was with credit given to a translator.
18
“Nuestros propósitos [son]. . . trasmitir al pueblo indígena todo aquello que esté al alcance de su inteligencia y en
las conveniencias de su estado civil y político. Procurarémos ponerles al tanto de todas las disposiciones
gubernativas y administrativas que necesiten conocer. . . . Darémos en cortos artículos fáciles lecciones para
popularizar el conocimiento de las ciencias y artes útiles á la vida práctica, fijándonos sobre todo en la agricultura,
industria y comercio, asi como en consejos de medicina é higiene y perfeccionamientos en su vida doméstica.”
(Nuestros Propósitos 1889)
19
“ha comprendido con elevadísimo criterio la utilidad y necesidad de su publicación, para que alcancen las luces de
la prensa al cultivo intelectual del pueblo indígena, como alcanzaron para su fé religiosa las luces evangélicas.”
(Nuestros Propósitos 1889)
20
“Usaremos de la ortografía modernamente introducida por los sábios orientalistas . . . por creer que se componen
y se representan mejor así las palabras del dialecto tagálog [Aming gágamitin ang bagong ortografía nang pahám na
mañgá Orientalista . . . sa pagasang itô ang lalong mabuting paraan nang pagsulat nang wíkang tagalog.] [sic]”
(Nuestros Propósitos 1889) I give the Spanish version first and the Tagalog version in brackets afterwards. Anyone
familiar with Tagalog might consider how similar this “new” orthography is to the contemporary language. When
the two versions differ, my English translations derive primarily from the Spanish version.
21
In Spanish, when a verb ending changes to indicate tense or person, at times the preceding consonant changes,
with “c” becoming “qu” or “z,” to preserve the hard or soft sound, respectively. For example, “busca” (s/he looks
for), with a hard “c” sound, becomes “busque” in the subjunctive, and “cocemos” (we cook), with a soft “c” sound
in the middle of the word, becomes “cozamos.”
22
Other changes included introducing the “w,” about which we will hear more later.
23
“No obstante; si nuestros lectores creen más inteligible ó conveniente la otra ortografía, estamos dispuestos á
complacerles. [Gayon man, kung sa akálâ nang mangá magsísibasa sa amin ay lálong malínaw ó dápat yaong isáng
ortografía, gayak naming pagbigyang loob silá.]” Notice the substitution of bold “k”s for what was apparently a
scarce letter in this particular type set. Apparently they had run out of regular “k”s and had to resort to bold and
(elsewhere) italicized ones to complete the page. Poblete would later use this as an opportunity to make fun of the
orthography and its practitioners, see below.
(Nuestros Propósitos 1889)
24
“Usar, pues, la k en lugar de la q, ó de la c fuerte, es sólo una manía de querer trastornarlos todo, como lo han
hecho recientemente en escritos tagalos que han merecido el calificativo de aleman.” (Tecson y Santiago 1889)
Tecson himself is a prominant historical figure; he became secretary of the Revolutionary Congress in Malolos at
the end of 1898.
25
“No tratamos ahora de impugnar á los orientalistas . . . porque no somos amigos de polémicas inútil.” (Tecson y
Santiago 1889)
26
Francisco Baltazar (Balagtas) author of the epic poem “Florante at Laura” referred to above.
27
“[D]emostrarémos, guiados de la inteligente pluma del P. Modesto de Castro y de la inspirado Musa de D.
Francisco Baltasar, que el tagalo, así como los demás idiomas y dialectos del país, no es juguete del capricho ó
10
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39
aberración intelectual, sino que su estructura y modo de ser no ménos que su escritura ó modo de escribirse,
obedecen á ciertas reglas, que tienen su conexión y dependencia las unas de las otras, y cuya colección,
metódicamente ordenada, es á la que llamamos Ortografía.” (Tecson y Santiago 1889) In this case I believe that
“idiomas y dialectos del país” refers to “languages and dialects of the area,” meaning languages and dialects local to
the Philippines, just as products “del país” referred to local, that is domestic, products.
28
Poblete is another interesting figure; a writer in his own right, he later became a collaborator with Isabelo de los
Reyes. He was also the first translator of both the Bible and Rizal’s Noli me tangere into Tagalog.
29
“No soy filólogo, pero soy tagalo, con lo cual quiero significar que, con respecto á mi lenguaje nativo, puedo
decir, sin jactancia, que lo poseo mejor, mero muchísimo mejor que ningun señor orientalista (europeo ó filipino no
siendo tagalo puro).” (Poblete 1889)
30
“El tagalo no se aprende en ningun libro hecho por autorizados académicos de la leng[ua?], porque hasta ahora no
se nos ha ocurrido formar un núcleo de individuos que fije, limpie y dé esplendor á nuestras palabras. Cada tagalo
es un académico de su lengua.” (Poblete 1889) Of the Orientalists mentioned by name, only one, Pardo de Tavera,
was born in the Philippines, but he was not a native Tagalog speaker.
31
“casi todos los tagalos como no son orientalistas por más que hayan nacido en el Oriente, ni sábios filólogos . . .”
(Poblete 1889)
32
“. . . leerían [karaniwan as] karini-u-ban, [tawo as] ta-u-bo, [kagawian as] caga-u-bian, [giliw as] gili-u-u], [and
wika as] u-bica. . . pues sus primeros maestros en la lectura y en la escritura del alfabeto fenicio. . . fueron los
españoles, y no los ingleses ni los alemanes.” (Poblete 1889)
33
“Además, paisanos tagalos: Si nuestra religión, nuestras leyes, nuestras costumbres y todo nuestro modo de ser
son españoles, ¿por qué habrémos de usar unas letras que no son propias y genuinamente españoles, y pronunciar las
sílabas ge y gi como los alemanes y no como nuestros hermanos de allende los mares? ¿Es que con las letras del
alfabeto que nos han enseñado no tenemos suficiente para emitir nuestras ideas y nuestros pensamientos? Pues
inventemos las que sean precisas: mejor aun; resucitemos el alfabeto primitivo nuestro, antes que utilizar una letra
siquiera de procedencia extraña á nuestra Madre pátria.” (Poblete 1889)
34
“La etnografía filipina que tanto debe hoy dia à (sic) los alemanes y á los austriacos, ha recibido tan poca
contribucion de las plumas españoles, que parece que es una cuestion de mas interés para los primeros que para los
últimos. Aun en esa misma coleccion enorme de Historias de Filipinas, mas ó menos largas, mas ó menos cargadas
de sucesos maravillosos y de relatos de castigos divinos, la cuestion etnográfica es ligeramente tocada por los
autores cuya ocupacion predilecta ha sido el relato de los sucesos político-religiosos.” (Pardo de Tavera 1884)
35
“La cuestion de los alfabetos ha sido tratada por casi todos los historiadores del Archipiélago, pero de una manera
tan ligera, y tan en contradiccion unos con otros, que nos ha parecido deber contribuir con estas notas para la
aclaracion de tan interesante sugeto [sic].” (Pardo de Tavera 1884)
36
“desfigura la fisonomia de muchas palabras.” (Pardo de Tavera 1887)
37
This was true for the most part, though as one of the writers for the Revista Católica later teased, “They [the
publishers of the bilingual edition of La España Oriental] don’t have enough “K”s or “W”s in their press for all of
them to be written with those letters, ‘because they originated from types according to the requirements of the
Castilian language.’ [No tienen suficientes K ni W en su imprenta para que todo él se escriba con esas letras,
‘porqué se ha provisto de tipos segun las necesidades del idioma castellano.’]” (Sueltos y Noticias 1889)
38
For Rizal’s Guillermo Tell, see (Rizal 1961)
39
For examples of Rizal’s admiration of Germany and things Germa, see the letter to him from his brother Paciano
(dated June 16, 1885), and the letters from him to his sister Trinidad (dated March 11, 1886) and to José María Basa
(dated September 21, 1889) in (Rizal 1930) See also his letters to Blumentritt (January 12, April 13, April 24, June
6, and July 20 1887) in (Rizal and Blumentritt 1961) Rizal’s first novel, whose title refers to the biblical passage in
John 20:17, began with a quotation from Schiller and was originally published in Berlin in 1887. The novel features
a young hero who himself admires certain advances that Germany has made, and the educational system it provides
for its youth. (Rizal 1958)
40
(Rizal 1890)
41
“el poco número relativamente de las obras tagalas.” (Rizal 1890)
42
From a letter to José Rizal from his brother Paciano Rizal, July 18, 1886. “If you have finished the translation of
any of Schiller’s works, and don’t need it, send it to me here in order to look into getting it to press. Last year I
amused myself by translating the “M. Estuardo;” .. . . but finally because of the poverty of the language or because
of my limited skills of Tagalog and Spanish, in two days of laborious work I didn’t finish more than half a page, and
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40
that badly; I had to give it up. [Si tienes concluída la traducción de cualquiera obra de Schiller, y no lo necesitas,
mándamelo aquí para ver de mandarlo á la prensa. El año pasado me entretuve en traducir la “M. Estuardo”; pero ya
por la pobreza del idioma ó por mis pocos conocimientos del tagalo y español, en dos días de trabajo asiduo no hice
más que media hoja y mal; tuve que renunciar.” (Rizal 1930) Thanks to Benedict Anderson for pointing out that
“M. Estuardo” was Maria Stuart.
43
The stories can be found in (Rizal 1961).See mention of these projects in (Rizal and Blumentritt 1961; Rizal
1890)
44
“más racional y más lógica, que esté á la vez en armonía con el espíritu del idioma y el de sus hermanos.” (Rizal
1890)
45
“Animéme á acometer esta empresa, por una parte, el estudio que yo hacía entonces de las escuelas de Instrucción
primaria en Sajonia, donde veía los esfuerzos de los maestros en simplificar y facilitar la enseñanza á los niños.”
(Rizal 1890)
46
“para aliviar el trabajo y facilitar los primeros pasos á los niños, simplificando la ortografía . . .” (Rizal 1890)
47
“En cuanto á la modificación de la ortografía no me atrevo á hacerla. ¿Basta el nombre de uno para imponer,
como impone la autoridad de una Academia? ¿Será aceptada universalmente? Lo dudo—pero si se puede
introducir esta variación es tiempo de hacerla, porque el tagalo carece aún de buenos libros.” From a letter to José
Rizal from his brother Paciano (original in Tagalog and Spanish), dateline December 8, 1886. In this letter Paciano
used the old orthography when he wrote in Tagalog. (Rizal 1930)
48
(Rizal 1890) The only outstanding evidence we have, however, of Rizal’s efforts to convert his friends to the new
orthography are from a bit later, the year 1888; in July Rizal sent a postcard to Mariano Ponce from London, written
in Tagalog and in the new orthography. See (Rizal 1931)
49
“La nueva ortografía tagala que nosotros usamos está perfectamente de acorde con la antigua escritura según
averiguo por algunos libros que encuentro en el British Museum y con arreglo al origen sánscrito de muchas
palabras tagalas. Adóptela V.; Pedro Serrano ya publicó un billete con esta nueva ortografía y se publicará un
Diccionario.” (Rizal 1931)
50
(Rizal 1931)
51
“[E]n una novela que publiqué en Marzo de 1887 imprimí por primera vez las palabras y las citaciones en tagalog,
en esta nueva ortografía que, á instancias mías, ya usaban algunos amigos, esperando la adopte el público filipino
después de una razonable discusión acerca de su conveniencia y oportunidad. [In a novel that I published in March
of 1887, I printed for the first time words and citations in Tagalog, in this new orthography that, at my insistence,
some of my friends already were using, hoping that the Philippine public would adopt it after a reasonable
discussion of its usefulness and convenience.]” (Rizal 1890)
52
“con caracteres latinos que respondan mas á la ortografia de la palabra, segun los antiguos caracteres tagalos, que
las letras empleadas hoy segun la ortografia española. (Pardo de Tavera 1887)
53
(Serrano Laktaw 1889)
54
(Pardo de Tavera 1994)
55
“Precisamente el segundo apellido del autor, que se escribía de una manera defectuosa (Lactao) presentaba una
oportunidad que él no dejó escapar para aplicar los dos consonantes nuevamente introducidas.” (Pardo de Tavera
1994)
56
The author is given as “Pedro Serrano Laktaw” on the title page, but the signature of the author’s name that
appears on the dedication page reads “Pedro Serrano Lactao.” This book marks the moment when he changed from
one spelling to the other. It is possible that the “pamphlet” to which Rizal referred was this work or a part of it;
perhaps Serrano Laktaw had already written something else in this orthography which has since been lost.
57
“Creemos hacer, por lo que á nuestra humilde persona toca, un servicio á la filología, adoptando la ortografía
empleada por sabios orientalistas, tales como el Ab. Favre, don Manuel Troyano, Humboldt, Jacquet, Pardo de
Tavera, etc., y, últimamente, por el M. R. P. Toribio Minguella, de la Merced, agustino recoleto, sabio filólogo,
autor de varias obras en tagálog, y á quien debemos el curioso cuanto concienzudo trabajo de Los estudios
comparativos entre el tagálog y el Sanscrito. De esta manera, fácil es distinguir la raiz y los afijos componentes de
cada vocablo, se presenta la escritura menos complicada, y la palabra oral se representa con más exactitud, lo que no
sucede con la ortografia hasta ahora empleada.” (Serrano Laktaw 1889)
58
The dedication reads: “Al Excmo. Sr. D. Benigno Quiroga L. Ballesteros. La compaña que sostiene V. E. por la
prosperidad de Filipinas y el desarrollo de la instrucción es un título legítimo á la pública gratitud, con cuyo motivo
se permite dedicar á V. E. este primer fruto de su humilde trabajo. [To the Exalted Mr. Benigno Quiroga L.
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41
Ballesteros. The company that you keep for the prosperity of the Philippines and the development of education is a
legitimate entitlement to public gratitude, with which motive permit me to dedicate to you this first fruit of my
humble work.]” (Serrano Laktaw 1889)
59
“contribuir á la difusión del castellano en este archipiélago, que siendo un pedazo de España, debiera ser español
en su idioma, como español en su gobierno, español en su religión, en sus sentimientos, en sus hábitos y en sus
aspiraciones.” (del Pilar y Gatmaytan 1889)
60
(Hindî Alemán (pseudonym) 1889)
61
(Tecson y Santiago 1889)
62
“Cuando frecuentaban Vds. la escuela del pueblo para aprender las primeras letras, ó cuando las tenían que
enseñar á otros más pequeños, les habrá, sin duda, llamado la atención, como á mí, la gran dificultad que
encontraban los niños al llegar á las sílabas, ca, ce, ci, co, ga, ge, gua, gue, gui, etc., etcétera, por no comprender la
razón de estas irregularidades y el por qué de los cambios de valor en los sonidos de algunas consonantes. Los
azotes llovían, los castigos menudeaban. . . . Y consideraba ya que aquellas sílabas, que tantas lágrimas costaban á
los muchachos, no les iban á servir para nada, puesto que en nuestra lengua y en la antigua ortografía, no tenemos ni
ce, ni ci, ni ge, ni gi, etc., sílabas propias de castellano, que sólo un tres por mil de los muchachos iban á aprender en
Manila á fuerza de oirlo y ponerse de memoria volúmenes sobre volúmenes. Y por más que en mi interior me
preguntaba para qué estudiaban aquello, si al fin y al postre no iban á hablar más que el tagalo . . . , callábame
porque tenía el presentimiento de que en aquellos países pretender reformar una cosa, es embarcarse para una mala
navegación.” (Rizal 1890)
63
From the subtitle of the article: “Carta á mis paisanos.” (Rizal 1890)
64
“hacer su estudio fácil y asequible, aun para los extranjeros.” (Rizal 1890)
65
“una ortografía más perfecta de lo que me imaginé.” (Rizal 1890)
66
“Me alegré porque ví que no era el único en la idea, que ésta había surgido casi simultáneamente en nuestra
imaginación. . . y porque la autoridad del Dr. Pardo de Tavera robustecía de una manera notable mis aspiraciones.
La prueba grande de que ambas tentativas surgieron independiente y casi simultáneamente en nuestros ánimos, sin
que mediasen entre nosotros ni consultas ni explicaciones, es el uso del wa usado por el Dr. Pardo de Tavera, que no
se me había ocurrido en mi obra, uso que adopté inmediatamente que lo ví, pues comprendí su perfecta utilidad.”
(Rizal 1890)
67
“¿á qué atormentar á los niños á que las aprendan cuando no han de hablar más que el tagalog, porque el
castellano les está totalmente vedado? Si más tarde tienen ocasión de aprender este último idioma, ya estudiarán
estas combinaciones, como hacemos todos cuando principiamos el estudio del francés, inglés, alemán, holandés, etc.
Nadie en España aprende desde niño el silabario francés, ni inglés; ¿para qué, pues, han de matarse los niños de los
pueblos en aprender el silabario de un idioma que jamás han de hablar? Lo único que pueden sacar de bueno es
cobrar odio á los estudios, viendo lo difíciles é inútiles que son.” (Rizal 1890)
68
“Es pues, sobrado pueril. . . rechazar su uso diciendo que es de origen alemán y tomándolo por motivo para hacer
alardes de patriotismo, como si el patriotismo consistiera en las letras. «¡Somos españoles ante todo! » dicen sus
adversarios, y con esto creen haber hecho un acto heroico; «¡somos españoles ante todo! y rechazamos la K de
origen alemán! » De seguro que nueve por diez de estos patriotas de abecedario de mi país, usan sombreros
genuinamente alemanes y quizás botas genuinamente alemanas también! Qué? ¿donde está el patriotismo?
¿Aumenta la exportación de Alemania, usando nosotros la K, más que cuando importamos y usamos artículos
alemanas? ¿Porqué no usar chambergo, salakot ó sombrero de buntal, si son tan proteccionistas? ¿Nos ha de
empobrecer la K? ¿Es la C producto del país? Así es muy fácil ser patriota.” (Rizal 1890)
69
“los que no adoptaron desde un principio sin antes una madura reflexión . . .” (Rizal 1890)
70
“la libré esfera de los hechos científicos,” (Rizal 1890)
71
“No dudamos, pues, de que al fin llegue á generalizarse . . .estamos seguros de que, convencidos de sus ventajas,
la han de considerar como la escritura nacional, razonada y fácil de nuestro armonioso idioma.” (Rizal 1890)
72
This ability pertains equally well to appropriating words from English. My favorite example is siniroks, meaning
“was photocopied,” from the root siroks: Xerox. The root may not be English, properly speaking, but it illustrates
the point nonetheless.
73
Thanks to Maria Teresa Savella for this information as well as the insight that it represents a modern-day version
of the orthographic debates about which I have written.
mct 1/23/05
42
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