Dr. Penelope V. Flores' Presentation of the places and areas connected to Dr. Jose Rizal, Madrid, Spain (1882-1887)

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You are all invited to  a presentation of my historical research into the places and buildings frequented by our national hero, Dr. José Rizal in Madrid, Spain.  It will be held on December 18, 2010, Saturday, 4:30 pm at the San Francisco Main Library,  corner Hyde and Grove Streets, Civic Center, downtown San Francisco.

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Noli me tángere translations

Harold Augenbraun, Noli translation. 2006.

Leon Ma. Guerrero Noli translation, 1961/1995

Ma. Soledad  Lacson-Locsin: Noli translation. 1996

Jose Rizal and Juan Luna at El Prado Museum, Madrid, 1884.

Jose Rizal and Juan Luna at the El Prado Museum, Madrid 1884

Thanks to King Carlos V and his son Felipe II, the Prado has the world’s top collection of Titians. Equally rich is its Rubens collection, and the Prado also has a rich collection of Italian paintings of the Romantic, Mannerists, and Baroque periods. King Felipe IV and Velásquez had a rewarding art history relationship (Alcolea, 1991: 227). Felipe commissioned Velásquez to travel all over Europe to buy paintings on his behalf. Twice Velásquez toured the continent for this purpose. Many of the choice works in the Prado are there because in riding back and forth between Italian cities, Velázquez came upon canvases, which he thought the king might like. It is safe to assume that Velázquez given a blank check by King Felipe to purchase his favorite paintings for the king, the Italian collection in the Prado were Velásquez’ personal choices.

The Spanish Masters

On many occasions, Rizal and Juan Luna, the Filipino painter, a student of Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, would have sauntered over to the Prado Museum to feast their eyes on contemporary art and to study the Spanish masters.
Only that year (1884) Juan Luna’s large oil painting Spoliarum won the prestigious Madrid National Exposition of Fine Arts award. This young Filipino compatriot proved himself as an “international artist.” Luna medaled gold! Luna’s entry showed the fresh corpse of gladiators being dragged across a dungeon floor of the Coliseum.

Spoliarium by Juan Luna

 His fame assured, Luna would be commissioned to paint the Battle of Lepanto specifically for the Spanish Cortes Senate Assembly hall.


















The Battle of Lepanto by Juan Luna can be seen at the Senate Hall, Madrid.

The Battle of Lepanto by Juan Luna

Another Filipino artist, Felix Resurrección Hidalgo garnered the silver medal for his Las Virgines Cristianas Espuestas al Populacho, dramatizing the humiliation of Christian women at a Roman slave market. To Rizal, who gave the toast at a celebratory party for the double victory, Luna’s fallen fighters and Hidalgo’s slave women were veiled allegories of the Filipino people’s suffering from Spanish political repression.

Cristianas Espuestas al Populacho by Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo

To their Filipino compatriots, the Luna-Hidalgo victory within the European salons of academic art clearly debunked the racist claim that Filipinos were a backward people. It was a heady piece of news.
“They proved to the world “indios” could, despite their supposed barbarian race, paint better than the Spaniards who colonized them (Ocampo, 1990: 63.)”
Both had beaten the Europeans at their own game in a major art competition by demonstrating their mastery at painting historical subjects in the grand mannerist style.



Empathetic Fallacy Conversation



What could it be like if we eaves-dropped on the Rizal and Luna conversation on the gallery floor of El Prado? We have no proof that this conversation occurred, but we have no reason to believe that the conversation could not have taken place either.

The two Filipinos stand before Velasquez’ Las Meninas (Maids of Honor, or The Family of Philip IV, 1656).

Las Meninas by Velasquez

Luna: This picture is complicated and not so easy to understand.

Rizal: I can read it pretty well. The center is the little princess. The other subjects recede into the background giving an interesting perspective.

Luna: You mean the Infanta Margarita Teresa.

Rizal: Yes, the maids are clustered about the Infanta, her tutors, page, and dwarf in attendance, and her huge dog is in the foreground. From the dog, we work our eyes up by stages to the distance. Velasquez paints himself into the picture. What an idiot!

Luna: Remember, Velázquez was always concerned about his status as a court painter. Therefore he must show himself to the king and queen in his creative art. See that mirror? That is the reflection of the king and queen. Can you see the two huge Rubens in the shadow?

Rizal: Yes, I can see it now, obliquely.

Luna: Here is the whole world of the inner court, presented in reverse order of importance. It portrays a single snapshot moment of each figure responding to the unannounced entrance of the king.

They view Goya’s King Charles IV and his Family (1800)

Charles IV and Family by Goy

Luna: Goya shows real beauty with cruel ugliness in this picture.

Rizal: Beauty in its ugliness? Is that a dramatic idiom?

Luna: Yes. Goya portrays the royal family as vain and pompous in the illusionist sense.

Rizal: Oh, you mean the dazzle of the silk and lace? But where is the illusion? I see an infinite delicacy with which the ribbons, jewels and sashes glitter.

Luna: That’s exactly my point. The painter patronizes their glamour. See how the royals are spread out like a frieze, heavy, dull and self-absorbed? He shows how remote they are from the people. If you can portray the glitter of life and imbue it with folly without shoving it in one’s face, that to me that is real beauty.

Heightened Consciousness

While my characterization of the scene between Luna and Rizal is in the fictionalized narrative style, yet here are two young Filipinos (Rizal in 1884 just celebrated his 23nd birthday), non-Spaniards experiencing art, discussing aesthetic issues and conversant with the western art world’s vocabulary of heightened consciousness in El Prado Museum. That in itself is a rarity.

Understanding art in an amazing process. The more one studies it, the more it forces one to look at embedded references and nuances. Gardner, in Art through the Ages (1980) explains this methodical pursuit of a system as "bringing order to visual experience.” Not anybody can get access into this kind of experience and use of language. Rizal most especially was among these selected few.

Noteworthy too is the fact that the expatriates in Madrid of the time were being acculturated into the European milieu, implying a level of facility and comfort level with Western thought without losing their own cultural identity. Art appreciation necessitates an intellectual process made more significant in Rizal’s case because it requires an access to education, and into the power of symbolic interactionism.

Looking at paintings is a gut reaction. Either you love it or you hate it. That Rizal, Luna and their compatriots understood the references, subtleties, and symbolism in a painting show they had penetrated into that higher closed circle of the transformative power elite.

The Many Translations of José Rizal's Noli me tángere

Last on my blog series on the title Noli me tángere

“Dicit ei Iesus noli me tangere nondum enim ascendi ad patrem meum.”
Jesus saith unto her, touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.”


Rizal took the title of his first novel from the Gospel of St. John, Chapter 20, line 17 (King James Version. London: Robert Barker, 1611). It was most likely that he was led to this particular quote because on one of his visits to the El Prado Museum in Madrid, he chanced upon the impressionable Correggio mannerist style painting named Noli me tángere, (see my blogs, August 26, 27, 28).

Leon Maria Guerrero writes in his translated volume of Noli me tángere: “The words are taken from John XX, 17, and are spoken by the risen Christ to Mary Magdalen, but the subject would seem to have no connection with the Rizal story,” (1961, xv). I tend to agree with Guerrero. As far as the story’s plot and characterization, it is not a description of the novel. However, as a metaphor and an allegory for a society’s social conditions, it makes sense. Rizal has a tendency to use metaphors and allegories in his writings.

The late monsignor Knox, in his translation of the Bible into modern English, renders Touch me not as Do not cling to me thus. He is right. Chapter 20 from my bible copy (The New American Bible. St. Joseph edition. 1970: 137-138) says: Do not cling to me. However, on the commentary below the page, it says. Don’t touch me is the literal translation. However, there is a profoundly spiritual aspect to this literal statement.

Let me explain. Mark, Chapter 28: 9 refers to the women who visited the empty tomb. When they see him risen from the dead they approached and were about to take hold and cling to his garments in order to anoint his feet and body, as was the Jewish custom in those days. Jesus addresses them saying: I have not yet ascended. In Mark, he doesn’t say, Don’t touch me. It’s implied. Like “Wait, I’m going first to my Father and when I come back imbued with His Spirit, then you can touch me with your traditional anointing rituals.”

For John and many of the New Testament evangelists, the ascension to heaven is understood in the purely theological terms. Resurrection means going forth to the Father to be glorified. The interaction with Mary Magdalene in the John scriptures dramatizes such an understanding. Rizal, who is so metaphysical in his letters and his description of his life in Madrid, understood what it meant to be imbued with the Spirit of reform before he can preach to his countrymen.

Noli me tángere is not Spanish nor Italian, but Latin. At that time, Latin was the language of the enlightened. In fact the Italian dialect of Florence used by Dante and Boccaccio was considered “vulgar.”

On the several title forms
The Noli has been translated many times into many languages almost from the date of its publication. However, since I began my search on where the idea of the book’s title must first have originated, I end with how the book’s title was finally translated.

In the Filipino language translation by Bartolome del Valle, Benigno Zamora and Salud Enriques, (Philippine Book Co. 1993 edition), the title is not translated into Filipino. The original Noli title is retained.




Charles Derbyshire’s translation in 1912 was entitled The Social Cancer.

In Leon Maria Guerrero’s original translation, (1961) his title was The Lost Eden. In Guerrero’s later edition, 1995, the title is Noli Me Tangere: He writes: "I did not find it wise to translate the title, "(p xv.)

The translation by Maria Soledad Lacson-Locsin edited by Raul L Locsin (1996) used the facsimile of the original cover.

The translation of Harold Augenbraum (Penguin Classics, 2006) shows the Rizal original cover. It also had a subtitle Noli Me Tangere, and in parenthesis Touch Me Not was inserted below the first line title.

Of course here in my blog I use the Spanish style consistently for the title: only the first word is capitalized, and there is an accent on the ain the word tángere.

In closing, I would like to confess to a trivia observation that escaped me at that time. As a Rizaliana student in college very few of us, especially myself, never picked up this hidden and transparent fact. I must have been dozing during that lecture. In 1889, Rizal submitted a satirical article published in Barcelona as a pamphlet. He used a pseudonym: Dimasalang (Masalang, touch. Di is a contraction of the word hindî, the imperative of don’t).

In the end, Rizal himself had advanced the Tagalog translation of Touch me not. It was Dimasalang, also his symbolic Masonic name.



http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/28/The_Social_Cancer_1912_cover.jpg/300px-The_Social_Cancer_1912_cover.jpg

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Stay with me on my next blog: José Rizal and Juan Luna at the El Prado Museum, Madrid.

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In Search for a Book Title: Rizal’s and Correggio's Noli me Tángere. Part 2.

In Search for a Book Title:  Rizal’s and Correggio's Noli me Tángere.  Part 2.

                                                     Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio

                              Noli me Tángere,  1534.  Panel transferred to canvas, 130 by 103 cm. 

                                                            Prado Museum, Cat. No. 111

(To find Correggio at Prado Museum,  you must go to the ground floor and look for the 16th century Italian Renaissance painters.)

Correggio’s Noli me Tángere’s canvas is deeply poetic.  His risen Christ imbues a deep sad tone, painful irony, and wavering color tones, with a soft simmering beauty of the flesh.  Rizal must have been able to trace the effect of Correggio’s poetry:  the interplay between the ardent Mary Magdalene, all rich and spreading drapery and the austere Christ, who withdraws from her with infinite courtesy.  With outstretched arms, Christ almost dances in the freedom of resurrection while Mary is recumbent with the heaviness of earthly involvement.   A tree tells us that newness of life had only just begun and a great world stretches away toward the hills, remote, witnessing, and leaving Mary Magdalene to her own choices.  There is a touch of loneliness in the picture.  But fundamentally, the mood of the picture has an earthly vigor.

In his novel, Rizal was beginning to express Correggio’s romantic and mannerist style in his writing (mannerist: meaning greater depth in spiritual insight) in terms of dignity and realism.  Correggio shows superb skill in showing the truth about the situation with all the attendant weaknesses.  And yet he produced a picture that is supremely beautiful. 

Noli me Tángere…now Rizal must have been sufficiently challenged and motivated. His brain must have worked on overdrive.  He probably would have gone back again and again to the Correggio at the Prado.  Rizal must have talked to himself thus:

“The use of symbolism and nature is evident in the Correggio’s Noli me Tángere. The rich brocade cloth of the Magdalene dazzles and shimmers in the light, the red almost bleached out, like the plumage of a bird.  The other figure in the panel creates an undercurrent of violence and pain, with open outstretched hands, the image of Christ arises almost simultaneously, the look of expectancy, unafraid, unprotected”. 

At this moment in time, in Rizal’s mind, as in an epiphany, Correggio’s Noli me Tángere and his novel no longer were parallel forms. These had merged as one.

Is this Too Hard to Believe?

Up to this point, my research on searching for how Rizal got the idea for a book  title had all been conjectures.  I knew that a Titian and a Correggio painting with the title Noli me Tángere existed.  Titian’s Noli is kept at the National Gallery in London, while the Correggio one remains on permanent exhibit at the Prado.

My own curiosity aroused, I had to see the Correggio painting for myself.  I packed a Carry-On and booked a flight to Madrid. At the Philippine Embassy in Madrid, Jaime Marco gave me a tour of the places where Rizal lived.  Jaime wrote a monograph “Rizal’s Madrid. ”  At the Prado I asked permission to take a photo of Noli me Tángere painting. 

Incredible as it may seem, many of us Filipinos who had read the novel were never cognizant of, nor had even been made aware of this painting that left an imprint on Rizal’s creative genius. Of the many historians, writers, authors, and scholars writing about Rizal, none had made this connection, and if they did, this fact was never brought explicitly to our attention.  In discussing my conjecture with an imminent Philippine historian and author, she confessed that she had been to the Prado many times, but was never aware of this Correggio painting.

It is fitting that Filipinos should plan to have this painting included in their repertoire of Rizaliana teaching materials.  In addition it ought to be an important itinerary in Rizal’s Madrid: Walking and Cultural Tour, promoted by the Philippine embassy in Madrid.

The Smoking Gun

My conjectures at this point were inconclusive.  I needed a confirmation, a citation, to assure me that my proposition about the Rizal-Correggio connection has some merit.

Then out of the stack of texts, correspondences, documents, and writings, I came upon an Austrian book in German written by Harry Sichrovsky, the foreign editor of Austria’s Radio and TV service specializing on China, Korea, and South Asia. The book is entitled Der Revolutionär von Leitmeritz: Ferdinand Blumentritt und der Philippinische Freiheitskampf (1983).

Buried amidst the voluminous Rizal-Blumentritt correspondence, I found the “smoking gun.”  In one seemingly unprepossessing sentence, at the bottom of a long expository paragraph explaining Rizal’s Noli me Tángere in the context of the word spoken by Christ to Mary Magdalene, Professor Sichrovsky wrote as if in afterthought:

“Rizal had seen in the Prado Museum in Madrid the famous painting of Correggio, which depicts the scene.”   English translation, 1987, p 38. (Highlight and Underscoring mine.)

There it was staring right in my face—inconspicuous, nothing less, nothing more—no extraneous explanations, no sleuthing suspense, and no genuine illumination to any reader either.  It was an overlooked artifact, except where my persistent questioning mind was concerned.

                                             

Philippine scholars had never connected the dots because it was an unlikely source. They were looking at rationalizations in written sources when looking at an art museum  where our hero frequented would have given them a  really important and significant clue.

The Final Answer

Rizal himself answers the final question.  For those who seek original sources, there is a letter dated March 5, 1887 at the Ayer Collection of Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois.  Written in French, Rizal explains why he chose to name his novel Noli me Tángere. It is a rationalization.  Rizal was in Berlin at that time and studying with a French teacher, Madame Lucie Cerdolle.  Marcel Colin, a French Rizal scholar translated this letter for me.  He wrote on the margin “Rizal’s French wasn’t perfect, but he could manage very well in our language.” (Correspondence, 5-23.87).

Rizal held the mirror to the Filipino people of their own situation. There was an incredible phobic feeling for the title “Do not touch me”.  No one would speak of the human vanity, vice and hypocrisy during the colonial period as Rizal did.  He was the voice of the people.

Guadalupe Fores-Guanzon (1973) explained this kind of feeling in her introduction to the English translation of the La Solidaridad.

There was an upsurge of nationalist feeling among the Filipinos, many of whom awoke to the realization that Spain’s colonial administration in the Philippines could no longer be suffered in silence, for in many respects, it was arbitrary, unjust, graft-ridden, and largely dominated by the friars (p vii).

According to Leonard Casper (1966), a literary critic, Rizal’s burden was to startle into imagery the Philippine presence beyond all question of human worth (p 18).

As Yabes (1963) pointed out, Rizal was always the realist, who in the Noli kept truth and its consequences ever present in his mind.

Rizal and Correggio's Noli me Tángere: Penélope's Conjecture

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Emilio Aguinaldo

Dr. José Rizal’s and Correggio’s NOLI me TANGERE

By

Penélope V. Flores

Exactly 112 years ago, on June 12^th 1898, the Philippine revolutionary establishment raised the Philippine flag and declared the government of the Philippines a democratically formed constitutional republic independent from Spanish domination with Emilio Aguinaldo as the elected president.  What is noteworthy is that a hundred and twelve years ago, there was no other South East Asian country that was democratically formed with a nationally elected representative body and a ratified written constitution like that proclaimed in Malolos, Bulacan on January 23, 1899.  That it was a short-lived republic is immaterial.  The Philippines  (and Cuba) would be “up for sale” for $20,000,000 by Spain to a new master—the United States of America at the Treaty of Paris before the end of the century.

Much of that nationalistic fervor came from the responsible and intellectual activity of José Rizal through his novel Noli me tángere.

The purpose of this article is to examine the source of the novel’s title.  It is not my objective to make rhetorical statements about the meaning of Noli me tángere. There are countless historians, scholars and researchers who have dissected the meaning of the title, and why this novel was written.  Additionally, there is a rich body of illuminative literary criticism and historical commentary in the literature pondering the Noli me tángere.  Neither will I go into the story pilot and the literary characterization of the protagonists and antagonists in the novel.  What I’m looking for is the “how” and “where” the idea for the book title came about.

Applying the concept in today’s modern marketing and advertising parlance, any title of a book spells its success or dooms its failure in terms of product outcomes. Publishing houses and their agents scour their collective brains looking for a particular book title that would click with the reader and the public. 

 How did Rizal find that title for his novel that clicked with the public? 

Rizal in 1886

It was 1886 in Europe.  Rizal at that time was writing a novel that would open the eyes of readers about the plight of the Filipino people by the hand of the Spanish colonizers.  This historical novel had characters that seemed autobiographical.  Every episode in the novel came from actual experiences by people Rizal knew.  Rizal began writing in Madrid where he finished half of the manuscript.   He continued writing about a fourth of the material in Paris, France, and the last portion in Leipzig, Germany. The fimal chapters were ready for publication on February of 1887.

Rizal was determined to make the novel accessible to Philippine and Spanish readers.  It was important to have it published.  But there were logistical and structural problems. First, in order for the novel to be read by the progressive elements of the Spanish Cortes, the text had to be written in the Castilian language.  Second, this window of opportunity for his reformist message to reach a sympathetic audience is extremely short.  When the opportunity presents itself it must be grasped immediately.  At that particular time, there were more moderate members of the Spanish parliament than the previous years.  Third, the novel, which was critical of the friars, could not be printed in Madrid, since the contents would immediately be censored.  No Spanish printer would take the risk of publishing it.  Therefore, it had to be printed outside Spain.  Not any country could be selected. It had to be a nearby accessible country. Fourth, printing a book in a foreign language outside Spain was very expensive.  Rizal lacked the necessary funds to finance the project.  Paciano, Rizal’s brother was then having economic difficulties at that particular time (the world price of sugar went down) and Rizal had not received his allowance.

Enter Maximo Viola, a wealthy Filipino compatriot, a close friend, and a student at the Universidad de Barcelona.  He would help publish Rizal’s novel.   Both were completing their medical degrees at that time (Rizal at the Universidad Central de Madrid).  That May 1887, with their courses completed and the novel deposited at the printers, they traveled together (see Viola’s My Travels with Dr. José Rizal, 1913) to Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Konstanz, Basel and Geneva.  At Leitmeritz, Austria (now Litomérice, Czech Republic) José Rizal finally met face-to-face with Ferdinand Blumentritt, the Filipinologist with whom he had a long and lasting correspondence.

A Personal Connection with José Rizal

Maximo had several sisters, Juliana being one of them.  She is my connection to Rizal.  Juliana is my father’s mother (my grandmother, Viola side). Maximo offered José Rizal the money to publish the Noli me tángere.  Rizal resisted, but upon Viola’s insistence Rizal recapitulated, accepting three hundred pesetas to cover the printing cost, with the understanding that the amount would be repaid when Rizal’s money arrived from Calamba.  The book project had begun.

Viola searched for the most affordable printer to publish two thousand copies of the book.  He scouted the printing presses and finally was able to persuade a trade school in Berlin, the Setzerinnungsschule des Letter-Vereins, Berliner Buchdruckkerei Actien-Gesellschaft  (Guild school of typesetters, Berlin Book Printing Press Co.) to undertake the project.  It was Viola who carried Rizal’s original handwritten manuscript to the printers.  Señor Vicente Blasco Ibañez, a Spanish writer of note volunteered his services as proofreader and consultant. In March 1887, the first copies rolled hot off the press.  In Madrid, the copies sold for five pesetas.

At the end of the book project, in recognition for Viola’s work, Rizal gave the galley proofs, not to his own family, but to Viola with a personal dedication.  It is a Viola family joke that this original galley proof, hidden in their Kamalig (granary) at San Miguel de Mayumo, Bulacan looked like “pinag-balutan ng pan de sal,” because it was not a bound book.  In the consequential disarray during the Spanish revolution it was lost.

The Title’s Plausible Explanation

Since my interest is in the probable sources of Rizal’s choice of a book title, I had to come up with some plausible conjectures.  I present three perspectives: 1) the Bible perspective, 2) the Medical (Social Cancer) perspective, and 3) the El Prado perspective.

Of the three above, items 1 and 2 had been examined studiously and prodigiously.  Number 3 is an idea that came to me as I traced Rizal’s personal individuality and his humanity (in the manner of Ambeth Ocampo's approach), as opposed to studying him as a national hero).  It had never been studied nor published before.

1. The Bible scenario concerns Chapter 20, verse 17 of the Gospel according to John in the New Testament.  Rizal picks up the title from the words of Jesus to Mary Magdalene.  There are many titles where one can get a book title.  Why was this chapter singled out?  And why this particular quote?  Did he look at a bible index and look for possible biblical expressions that describe the theme of his novel? (I'll address this again in my next blog).

2. The medical scenario promised to reveal the social ills of the Philippine society.  Rizal had a strong inclination to use this title to serve as a clinical excision to cure the malignant cancer infecting the society. Could this title describe the whole point of his novel? Could this be the title he needed?  Was it an appealing title for a book dealing with several sensitive issues?  Guerrero’s Rizal biography quotes him saying:

“I shall endeavor to show your condition, faithfully and ruthlessly. I shall lift a corner of the veil, which shrouds the disease, sacrificing to the right everything even self-love -- for as your son, your defects and weaknesses are also mine.” 

Filipinas’ Cancerous Society would have made an accurate title and Rizal would have found it very appropriate.  But he must have been convinced it sounds too archaic and academic.  Lacking punch it would read like a sociological treatise, not a novel characterized by sarcasm, irony, and symbolism.  If his purpose was to piqué his readers’ interest, Rizal knew for sure that such a dry and trite title would shy away readers rather than attract them. 

In Guerrero’s introduction to the English translation of Noli me Tángere, he suggested that Untouchable was contemplated as a title.  However, although appropriate for the novel and theme, that title was thought to be misleading.  It was surmised that the Hindu scheduled caste of the Untouchables might cloud the issue of Rizal’s social reform platform.

3. The El Prado Perspective.

In this scenario, Rizal frequents the national museum of El Prado.  In 1872, many religious works of the Madrid and Toledo schools were added to the Prado Museum. Thanks to Carlos V and his son Felipe II, the Prado has the world’s top collection of the Italian paintings of the 15^th century romantic mannerists and baroque periods. 

In Rizal’s time, many art lovers visited the Prado.  It is hard to believe that Rizal, the consummate lover of art, the student who enrolled at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (he studied landscape) would not have been enamored of the Prado’s collection.

Let’s follow Rizal one fateful day in 1886.  He had very little cash and for weeks now had been subsisting on bread and water.  Studying hard, he is also writing the novel in between his studies and submitting articles for La Solidaridad, a fortnightly anti-friar propagandist newsletter edited by Marcelo H. del Pilar. 

Rizal had been wracking his brains for an appropriate title for his novel.  The manuscript is nearly finished.  He is tired and decides to relax his mind and stop thinking about it.  He goes to the Prado (a walking distance from his apartment).  Absent mindedly, he paces the ground floor and in one place he glances up.  In front of him, in a panel 130 by 104 centimeters, is a most dazzling portrait of infinitesimal expression.  Correggio’s exquisite rendition is as fine a work as any of the late Renaissance Italian school ever produced.

“Stunning!” Rizal, exclaims. “ It is intensely physical and yet steadily aware of light and its spiritual significance.  There is an inner solidity in the Christ figure.  Correggio keeps the Mary Magdalene figure reasonably human, thus making the picture still more lovable.  There is this wonderful dream-like dawn, leaving an overwhelming impression of actuality.  Really this canvas has the best technical mannerist wizardry of all.”

Jesus is pictured with outstretched arms, a swath of bold blue shroud draped around his torso.  Rizal’s eye follows a pyramid from the top of the hill to the foreground outlined with a gardener’s hoe in the right corner. (According to the scriptures, Mary Magdalene first mistakenly thought the figure of Jesus before him was a gardener.)

Rizal's vision traces a diagonal line beginning down at the arms of the Magdalene up to the powerful open arms of the risen Christ.  “A most powerful and striking composition,” he observed.  He admires the canvas from a distance, and then he moves slowly toward the picture to read the title.  It was: Noli me tángere.

Rizal must have come to this realization: “The symbolism of this expression is rich with nuances and vigorously stated, very much like the expression in my novel.”

Knowing how methodical Rizal was in his systematic research, he must have consulted the Prado’s library.  He would have found that Titian influenced Correggio.  And amazingly, Titian also painted a Noli me Tángere. In addition, Titian explained that his painting’s biblical passage title came from John.

The possible triangulation of Noli me Tángere as a book title is complete.  Titian influenced Correggio.  Correggio stimulated Rizal.

            
                                Antonio Allegri called Correggio, Noli me Tángere, 1534
                                El Prado Museum, Madrid, Catalogue No.111
                                Entered the Prado 1839


Only in John’s Gospel
Then to Rizal’s complete amazement, he discovers something extraordinarily cunning and importantly ominous about this particular text.  The phrase “touch me not” is found nowhere else except in the Gospel according to John. Matthew, Luke and Mark do not carry this specific phraseology.  Now, Rizal understood perfectly well why Titian, (followed by Correggio) looking for a Renaissance subject chose this particular passage to portray.  It was a unique theme to show off an artist’s power of imagery and interpretation.

With this discovery and imbued by the hidden message, Rizal must have reread the biblical passage within that honest purposeful context and with a fresh meaning.  He has the conceptual map of his almost finished manuscript dancing before his eyes.  He must have internalized the cognitive meaning of the gospel according to John and became fully convinced this was the message he wanted to convey for the title of the novel.

Rizal could visualize the Correggio canvas expressing the undercurrent violence and pain.  He could relate to the same emotion and expression emanating from his novel.  He was writing about a sensitive topic which no one dared touch.  The subject is a taboo topic.  Yet there it was –Touch me not—full of hidden yet transparent symbolism.

Finally, his search was over.  He had found a title:  Noli me tángere.

Read part 2 on my bext blog on Noli me Tángere: Looking for a Book Title

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b0/Jose_rizal_01.jpg/75px-Jose_rizal_01.jpg

More on Penelope's visit to Litomérice, Czech Republic, July 2010

I found this article written by Alan Levy. He describes the Rizal monument in Litomerice better than I did.

"Three busts in one block."


"What Litomerice celebrates in a ceremony every June is not the late Jose Rizal's early martryrdom -- which incited a full-scale rebellion against Spanish rule -- but four of the best days of his life. Three busts of him stand within a square-block's radius of the town's spiffed-up, arcaded central square. (See box.)"

"Born in the Philippine town of Calamba (since 1974, officially "twinned" with Litomerice as "sister towns"), Rizal had been in Europe since May 1882, studying medicine and philosophy in Madrid and ophthalmology in Paris and Heidelberg. (He was a licensed eye doctor.) In Germany, he had finished writing and just published -- in Spanish -- his first novel, Noli Me Tangere (Don't Touch Me). Now he and Maximo Viola -- a Filipino physician who'd funded publication of Rizal's novel -- embarked on a farewell trip across central Europe together before Rizal would sail east from Marseilles that summer."

"Blumentritt, a Prague-born and -educated German-speaker not quite eight years Rizal's senior, had settled in Leitmeritz upon graduation from Charles University, where he'd studied Spanish colonialism, to take up an appointment to teach history and geography in the town's Technical Secondary School (of which he later became director). He married a local girl, Rosa Muller, and they had two sons and a daughter to whom they gave a Spanish name, Dolores; at home, she was called Loleng, the Tagalog, or Philippine language, version."


"Math in Tagalog
Rizal, who'd been campaigning to introduce Philippine studies into European universities, had heard that Blumentritt was learning Tagalog. While still in Heidelberg, Rizal sent Blumentritt an arithmetic book written in Tagalog and Spanish by a Filipino scholar. Blumentritt responded enthusiastically, and thus began what Rizal's biographer, Austin Coates, has called "the most remarkable -- and the most voluminous -- correspondence in Philippine letters, which went on almost uninterruptedly until terminated by death."

"In an 1886 exchange of letters, Rizal rebuked the staunchly Catholic Blumentritt for his research reliance on Spanish authors and monks. (The latter are the villains of Noli Me Tangere.)"

"Blumentritt sent Rizal some etchings of his family. Rizal, who also was an artist, sent back a self-portrait. Blumentritt wrote to Rizal: "I look forward with even greater impatience than before to the moment when I should come to know you personally."

"RIZAL IN LITOMERICE
The town's stunning main square, now called Mirove namesti (Peace Square) is dominated by a tower shaped like a chalice. The Gothic building beneath it houses Mayor Jiri Landa's office, in the vestibule of which stands a bust of Rizal. In the tourist office on the ground floor, you can obtain an excellent 60-page paperback in English, Jose Rizal, Ferdinand Blumentritt and the Philippines in the New Age (1998) by Jindrich Tomas, the town archivist. At Mirove nam. 12, another bust is built into the facade of the elegant Hotel Salva Guarda, which was the mayor's office at the time of Rizal's visit. From a park behind the Salva Guarda, a third bust of Rizal looks out across the town to its majestic St. Stephen's Cathedral."

"Across Mirove namesti from the Salva Guarda is the Hotel Rak, where Rizal and Viola stayed. A short walk past the Rak along Novobranska brings you to Na Valech 2, where Blumentritt died in 1913. Across busy Na Valech is the school where Blumentritt spent his career."

"The Blumentritt home Rizal visited in 1887 was at Lange Gasse (now Dlouha) 29. That building was destroyed May 9, 1945 -- a day after World War II ended in Europe -- by Soviet bombers clearing a route for the belated entry into Prague of Red Army tanks."


"GETTING THERE
A bus leaves Prague's Florenc terminal at 9 a.m. daily and takes 65 minutes. There is a fast return bus at 6:35 p.m. from Litomerice that takes one hour to Prague's Nadrazi Holesovice. Fare each way: 56 Kc ($1.40)"

"That occasion came May 13, 1887, when Rizal and Viola stepped off a train in Leitmeritz. The whole Blumentritt family was there to welcome them and escort them to their billets at the Hotel Rak on the main square. "


"Beer and a butterfly
It wasn't a historic weekend -- or even a newsworthy one: just one friend sharing his life with another. After a visit to the Blumentritt home, they strolled the slopes of the hilly town, inhaling the scent of its May flowers and blossoming fruit trees, while conversing mostly in German. They visited the bishop's residence, where Rizal particularly admired a Czech Bible from the 15th century, and the mayor's office, where Rizal and Viola signed the city chronicle's guest book. They drank in a town pub, where Viola pronounced its beer the best in Bohemia, and ate Austro-Czech food, for Rizal had mentioned in a letter that he didn't like north German cuisine. Blumentritt also took his guests to a meeting of the Tourists' Club. Their farewell dinner was in an inn beneath tall trees that Rizal admired on the Shooter's Isle (now Strelecky ostrov) in the Elbe."

"As the train to Prague pulled out on May 16, Blumentritt stood silent, his eyes blurred with tears, while his daughter Dolores ran along the platform "like a butterfly," Rizal recalled. On May 19 from Brno, Rizal wrote a prescient thank-you to Blumentritt:

"Shall this magnificent farewell to Europe be perhaps the omen of a terrible reception in the Philippines?" But, Rizal concluded, he would always remember that "you are not alone, Rizal. There is a little corner of Bohemia [where] there are good, noble souls and friends who appreciate you. Think of them."

"And he told Blumentritt: "I am in my heart a Leitmeritzan just as you consider yourself a Filipino in sentiment."

"When Rizal reached Manila in August 1887, his novel had preceded him and he was indeed notorious. After he published a fiery sequel, El filibusterismo (The Subversive, 1891), he was arrested as a revolutionary agitator and banished to Dapitan on Mindanao island. In November 1896, he was put on trial and condemned to death for instigating an insurrection and founding revolutionary societies."

"On Dec. 29, 1896, from his cell in Fort Santiago, Rizal penned his last letter to Blumentritt: "My dear brother: When you receive this letter, I am already dead. Tomorrow at 7 o'clock I shall be shot. I am, however, innocent of the crime of rebellion. Farewell, my best, my dearest friend, and never think ill of me."

16th Century Visuals of the Philippine Archipelago

Old Time Mapmakers Coming Across As Novices:
16th Century Visuals of the Philippine Archipelago


Penelope V. Flores and Manuel G. Flores
San Francisco State University and
Educational Multimedia Resources
pflores@sfsu.edu



Abstract

Sorting out the 16th and 17th century chaos of visual maps of the Philippines has been like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle where there is no picture board as a guide. In our research study, old time cartographers come across as novices. The conceptual framework used in this study is based on the world-system’s origins of the knowledge of Southeast Asian portolans (pilot books) and maps through the geographic thought of sixteenth to eighteenth century chroniclers, explorers, and cartographers. We analyze the pre-Pedro Murillo 1734 Philippine visual map. There is a general confusion of the life and subsequent deaths of phantom peninsulas and dragon-tail-like promontories that metamorphose into America. To this navigation of Philippine seas, we get entangled with Terra Orientales and ensnared by that infamous shifting linea—Treaty of Tordesilla’s demarcation line. The discrepancies and the various published rendering of Pigafetta’s text and account of Maximillian are full of ambiguities. We find the Zooloo string of islands called Samal scattered all over the Marianas. We document several transliterations and corrupted various ways of copyists. Knowledge of how medieval Europe depicted the Philippines is crucial to our understanding of Philippine culture and history.


1. Introduction

No understanding of the Philippines within Southeast Asia could be complete without reference to cartography—particularly at the time when a veritable revolution took place in map designs and projection during the sixteenth century.

Maps of Southeast Asia and the Philippines in the early 16th century was a mad confusion of peninsulas that was like dragon tails, and islands that dotted the Insulis or inland seas. First there was an archaic geography of Southeast Asia perpetrated by Ptolemy showing the Golden Chersonesus which corresponds to modern Malaysia. Medieval maps show the mythical Southeast Asia where the Indian Ocean was a closed ocean with no outlet and was a place of the gold and silver islands called Chryse and Argyre. According to the bible, Paradise was located in the East. Even now, Sri Lanka is believed to be the fabled garden of Eden.

It is in this setting that we locate the Philippine archipelago using Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and English mapmakers. Each generation of maps incurred serious location errors mirrored by other mapmakers. Even with the voyage of discovery, many chroniclers were often mistaken. Copyists conflated some islands and corrupted name places. The effect was a complicated jumble of interpretations.

But are we not anachronistically viewing maps from contemporary eyes? In the 16th century, these maps were the ultimate in new world information.

2. Southeast Asia in the 16th century

2.1. Mythological Southeast Asia
Medieval thought commonly envisioned the area of the Philippines and Southeast Asia as “three Indias”, India Gangem, India Extra Gangem, and India Orientalis. This probably arose from the Biblical account of the three eastern kings who visited the infant Jesus. This notion of three Indias took literal form on world maps in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Renaissance mapmakers felt they had made better sense out of “three Indias.” Soon the belief that Asia possessed three peninsular sub continents took on a life of its own, culminating with the belief that America was the easternmost “India”. Hence, Columbus sailing westward believed that he had reached the southeastern outskirts of Asia represented as Indus Externalis and so named the indigenous people of his new discovery “Indians.” A most symbolically rendered map of Asia as the mythical horse Pegasus is presented by a theologian Heinrich Bunting as a rich allegorical figure. The horse’s two hind legs form the supposedly double peninsulas based on Asia and America as mapped by Giacomo Gastaldi in 1546. The Pacific is roughly interpreted as the same size of the Atlantic Ocean.












Fig 1. 1581 H. Bünting Pegasus map of Asia


The Chinese, Arabs and later the Portuguese knew about Southeast Asia, but very few maps existed. In addition the Portuguese were so secretive about their new discoveries in the Spice Islands that under penalty of death no mapmakers dared subvert the order. So, in the 16th century a devise was made to represent Southeast Asia: the hand map.

2.1 Barros’s Hand Map

The Portuguese João de Barros in 1522 offered a hand map of Southeast Asia. It was to form the human hand into a map. He instructed his readers to point their left hand toward their body, palm down, index finger straightened and separated from the thumb, with the remaining three fingers also separated from the index finger, these three are curled so that they extend out only to the knuckle. The thumb represented India.The index finger is the Malay peninsula, and the flesh between them Myanmar. The space represents the Indian Ocean. The three curled fingers are Cambodia and Vietnam with their natural shape approximating the land’s true southwest-northeast contour. The space between the index finger and the third finger bent at the knuckles represent the Gulf of Siam. The natural indentation of the hand visually represented Chao Phraya river; that between the third finger and the fourth fingers is the Mekong River. The contour of the hand goes up the wrist and shows the curve of Indochina. Chiang Mai is represented in the wrist. This Barros hand map is more accurate than any other maps of the period. (Suarez, 1999: 123.) And then we have the numerous islands of the Inland sea.



3. The Philippine’s 7,488 islands.

It is interesting to note that in a map below Java Minor there is an inscription which refers to an archipelago of precisely 7,448 islands. Marco Polo got this number from the testimony of seamen that sailed the China seas that “according to the testimony of experienced pilots and seamen that sail upon the China sea, they are well acquainted with the truth that it contained 7,448 islands, most of them inhabited.”










Fig.2. Ruysch’s 7,448 8 Islands Archipelagus 7448 Insularus, by Sebastian Münster,1540 in Suarez: 128.


This figure is approximately an allusion to the 7,100 islands of the Philippines. It could have been low tide when Marco Polo’s pilots chanced upon these islands. Several mapmakers make the same claim: Father Odoric, in reference to islands of the eastern seas estimated it as “at least 5000” While Mandeville repeats the same, speaking of “Inde and the isles beyond the Inde, where be more than 5,000 isles” (Suarez, 1999: 107).

Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1540) called a treatyse of the Newe India, (Lach, 1965: 209) gave the literate public of Europe its first clear cartographic glimpse of the “marvelous fruitful island of Puloan, (Palawan, Philippines) located due north of Porne (Borneo).” Poloan in Münster’s (1540) map is oriented east west horizontally.
















Fig. 3. Münster

The Caroline Islands is found off Samar’s Guirayan point. And this is the reason why in many old time maps, the Caroline island group is called New Philippines. The Philippine island of Samal is dutifully reported in Guam. The Jesuits’s letters contributed to this confusion.












Fig.4. Nueva Filipinas:The Caroline Islands









The Italian mapmaker Giacomo Gastaldi’s 1548 reconstruction of the Philippines is frustrating. Luzon does not appear. It is on Gastaldi’s map of 1550 that the word “Giapam”(Japan) appears in place of Marco Polo’s “Zipangu” for the first time.












The German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller was the one who prepared a new set of world maps of an edition of Ptolemy”s Geographica. In Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the New World, he indicated the new continent between Europe and India as “America” after the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who retraced Columbus voyages and realized that there was a vast continent between India and Europe. In Waldseemüller’s 1510 map of the Malay Peninsula, we find the Zooloo string of islands scattered all over (now) Singapore and Indonesian seas.







.








We document several transliterations and corrupted various ways of copyists.








Diogo Ribeiro, a Portuguese in the employ of Spain was the chief instrument maker in Seville. He was the master map charter of all known seas: the Eastern hemisphere and the Pacific region (Lach, 1965 : 221.) His Padron Real had for the first time the Philippines’ longitudinal axis correctly oriented after the Magellan voyage.











Oronce Fine’s (1531),






The Venetian humanist and civil servant Giovanni Batista Ramusio’s 1554 three-volume Della Navigationi et Viaggi first appeared in 1550, to aid in correcting Ptolemy’s maps of Asia and Africa based on voyages and crews who sailed around the world. (Lach, 1965: 207). His 1550 volume included Pigafetta’s Primo Viaggio intorno al Mondo published in 1524 and was translated to French and then to Italian which according to William Scott (1994: 283) “has given rise to the modern Philippine controversy over a supposed Magellan visit to Butuan.”


The Dutchman, Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s maps are contained in his Itinerario which gives the best descriptions derived from Portuguese maps. What caught our attention is one of his digressions about the “relationships between the Portuguese in Goa and their native wives, the Christian Luso-Indians (mestiços) [Luzon natives who of course were Christianized by the Spanish, underscore ours] indulging in a few snide comments on miscegenation (Lach, 1965: 482).


Gerard Mercatur’s 1569 maps of early Philippines was very limited.



The Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Spanish maps from the Spanish voyages of 1525 to 1700 are enlarged in full detail and in color, much like the vellum specimen of the originals.




A woodcut from Pigafetta’s Primo Viaggio shows Mattau (Mactan) island off Zyubu presented as more than a third the size of present Cebu.











Fig. xx Cebu and Mactan, Pigafetta 1525, Primo Viaggio Intorno al Globo Terraqueo, Milan 1800. P125.


I note several errors. Tandaya is the name of the chief of Samar. The map names the island Samar as Tendaya.

We find the island of Camiguing in the northern coast of Mindanao where they were told are the towns of Butuan, Surigao, Calagan, and Caraga were located. Masagua, Sarangani, Mactan, Cabu were mistranslated words and are subsequently mutilated in many maps of the archipelago.


5. Conclusion

Knowledge of how medieval Europe depicted the Philippines is crucial to our understanding of Philippine culture and history. Many Filipino scholars at present have done scant studies of the several islands depicted in modern maps. There has been little analysis of the mistranslations, misnaming, misspelled, misidentified and mislocated islands. Early errors perpetuated are persistently used today. This is a travestry of the highest nature. Somehow, things must change.

From the Ancient Baybayin Script to the Romanized Alphabet

Abstract

People commit historic struggles to construct lessons about their changing society. This was how the indigenous Filipinos’ relationships with the foreign colonizers enriched and hampered their local, educational, and cultural experience. When the Spanish conquistadors came to settle in the Philippines in the mid-sixteenth century they were surprised to find a literate population—the people already knew how to read and write. This paper traces the social changes in baybayin literacy from the initial contact with Spanish missionaries in the Philippines to the introduction of the Romanized alphabet. Differences between modes of literacy and points of learning in another language are generally subject to social evaluation and social stigma. The integration of Philippine socio-cultural, socio-linguistic, and gender equity is the conceptual framework used in this paper.





1. Introduction

When the Spanish conquistadors came to settle in the Philippines in the mid-sixteenth century they were surprised to find a literate population—the people already knew how to read and write. Miguel de Legazpi in 1567 indicated, “They have their letters and characters like those of the Malays, from whom they learned them; they write on bamboo bark and palm leaves with a pointed tool.” (Merino, 175: 292).The Malays referred to meant the Muslim merchants from Borneo and Luzon. The Jesuit, Father Chirino, who was in the Philippines from 1590 to 1604, noted that Manila by 1600 was almost 100 percent literate. He observed, “The people were so accustomed to writing and reading that there is hardly a man, much less a woman, who does not read and write in letters proper to the island of Manila” (Chirino, 1602). Another Spanish observer, the historian Antonio de Morga wrote that almost all the natives, both men and women write in this language. He commented: “There are very few who do not write it excellently and correctly.” (Morga,1609).


2. Origin of the Baybayin Script

Contemporary research is not united in the origin of this pre-hispanic syllabary. Alzina, in 1668, said the Visayans had learned it from the Tagalogs, who in turn had learned it from the Borneans (Scott, 1984: 55, Bernad, 1972: 150). Professor Juan Francisco of Indo-Philippine studies (Francisco, 1994) believes that it is derived from an extant form of Sanskrit. The Buginese, Makassarese and Mandar alphabets of Celebes (Sulawesi) to the south of Philippines are considered the origins since they share a particular characteristic with the Philippine script—the inability to express a final consonant (Scott, 1984: 61). To anthropologist F. Landa Jocano it is enough that a system of writing among the ancient Filipinos existed and was universal in many parts of the archipelago. He comments, “They had a system of writing and had achieved almost a hundred per cent literacy rate,” (Jocano,1975: 235). Corpuz however, disputes that writing was universal in prehispanic Philippines (pp. 20-36).


2.1. Surviving Artifacts of the Ancient Script

There are three surviving artifacts exhibited in the Philippine National Museum bearing this ancient script. The first is a 15th century earthenware jar excavated in Calatagan, Batangas. The native script was inscribed around the shoulder rim. The rounded earthenware is slightly flattened at the bottom with a splayed wide rim, suggesting it was used as a container jar, not a cooking clay pot as some scholars say. The writing is in an ancient extant language and has not yet been fully deciphered. It is 12 centimeters high and 20.2 centimeters wide. The Batangas earthenware shape is very similar to a regular banga still in use in many traditional kitchens.

The second artifact is a silver bar with inscriptions found among the 1970 excavation pits in Butuan. This script did not resemble any of the syllabaries chronicled by the Spanish during the contact period. This silver strip is dated from the 12th to the 15th century and looters had gained access first rendering the archeological context of its site lost to scholars. An Indonesian paleographer, Boechari, recognized it as of Javanese origin—suggesting an early Hindu-Buddhist influence in Mindanao (Casals, 1991). The strip measures 17.8 centimeters long and 1.3 centimeters wide. On one side are 22 symbols etched by a metal point.

The third artifact of this ancient script is found in a copper plate. In 1990 an antique dealer obtained through pot hunters in Laguna Bay a thin copper plate measuring 20 by 30 centimeters wherein an old Malay script closely related to old Tagalog script is inscribed, and therefore Tagalog speakers can readily understand. The text is a certification of debts paid in substantial amounts of gold (Salcedo, 1998). There may be other artifacts, but these may have been written in perishable materials such as leaves, bark of trees, and bamboo nodes.

2.2. A Comparative Perspective: 1603 to 1645 in Europe and England

The archives of the University of Santo Tomas preserve more than a hundred specimens of Filipino signatures between 1603 to 1645 as well as two complete documents showing a variety of styles ranging from elegant cursive to awkward scrawls (Scott, 1984: 53).To put this in comparative perspective, from 1570 to 1590 in rural France, 3 to 10 percent among the men and none of the women knew their ABCs. Spain and Portugal at the dawn of the seventeenth century did not fare any better. Of Englishmen born in 1600, only 33–40 per cent were literate as measured by their ability to sign their names (Lockridge, 1981). David Cressy (1981) reports that in Norfolk and Suffolk, 95 per cent of the females sampled between 1580 and 1640 could not sign their names ( Mitch, 1982).

3. The Phonetic Baybayin: Baybayin’s Vowels

Chirino called this phonetic syllabary Las letras de Manila as shown in Figure 1. It was the native baybayin of three vowels and fourteen consonants.















Fig.


Fig. 1. Las Letras de Manila, Chirino.

3.1. Vowels

There are three vowels: A, U or O, I or E, which actually represent five sounds. According to Jose Rizal, there are orthographical rules for when E is pronounced I , and U to O and vice versa (Rizal,1890: 251-263). To him the Spaniards all got it wrong when they said that the Tagalogs used these vowels indifferently. A sociolinguistic explanation is that it is a regional variation. This is not only found among Filipinos. All languages in the world share this regional variation. In the US, for example, in some Southern dialects, pin is pronounced pen and ten for tin.

Nevertheless, Fox (1954) argues that these Philippine three-syllable interchangeable vowels “conform to a common phonemic pattern of Philippine contemporary language.” This pronunciation is the bane of all teachers of English in regional schools at present. The pervasiveness of the ancient pronunciation for supposedly interchanging vowel sounds is found not only among present-day students but among the educated and government officials as well. A recent newspaper in Manila commented on some Filipinos’ inability to pronounce vowels and certain consonants correctly. Journalist Leandro V. Coronel (1999: 7) of the Philippine Inquirer noted that cabinet members could not pronounce vowels and consonants properly. He writes:

“Isn’t it a shame that even Filipinos in high places can’t properly pronounce letters like “f,” “v,” and “ph”? Politicians cannot be consistent with their “fs” and “v’s” as when many pronounce “VFA” as “BFA.” We even mispronounce words we use regularly. Take the name of our country. Many Filipinos pronounce it “pilipins,” without the “f” pronunciation of “ph.” Of course, we also interchange “e” with “i,” and “o” and “u.”

3.2. The Obvious Question

On this unusual pronunciation predisposition, a reasonable person should be asking two obvious questions. Isn’t it anachronistic that the Spanish conquistador Ruy Lopez de Villalobos in 1542 named the archipelago “Las Islas Felipinas” in honor of Felipe who later became king of Spain (Schurz, 1985), ignorant that the natives cannot pronounce “F” since they do not have it in their native syllabary? Besides, the natives also tend to interchange their E’s to I’s .

Isn’t it doubly ironic that the Americans in 1898 anglicized the country’s name to “The Philippines” without much thought, thus reproducing this inexcusable mistake? Had the colonial governments exercised some sociolinguistic sense, Maynila, the sea port in Luzon bay, meaning the place where local indigo dye (nilad) is traded, or Lusong the native name for the main island, or for that matter, Mindanao, the place where floodwaters flow, would have been the most logical and natural choices which would have posed no vowel and consonant interference.

Twice, in its colonial history, Filipinos (Felipeños, if we want to adhere strictly to having been named after Felipe) had been humiliated in the sociolinguistic arena and made to appear stupid; a people considered so severely speech-deficient that they couldn’t even pronounce their own country’s name correctly.

3.3. Baybayin’s Consonants

There are fourteen consonants in the Baybayin: They are

ka, ga, nga, ta, da, na, pa, ba, ma, ya, la, wa, sa , ha ( Rizal, 1890)


written as

K , G, NG, T, D, N, P, B, M, Y, L, W, S, H .

Each of the consonants changes in the vowel ending pronunciation according to the placement of a mark or korlet (kudlit) above or below the character. A dot above Ba made it either be or bi; a dot below made it either bo or bu.

3.5. Baybayin’s Writing Functions

The writing materials used were sections of bamboo and the letters were carved with a knife or sharp-pointed instrument. According to historian Bernad, (1972: 150) writing was more for sending messages than for recording transactions

However, the geographical orientation of the extent of usage by the Tagalogs, Ilocanos, Pangasinans, Pampangos, Visayans (Samar-Leyte, Negros), and in the islands of Mindoro and Palawan, all coastal or near coastal areas suggest writing was not only for sending messages but most certainly for inter trade transactions among themselves and with foreign traders (Jocano, 1975: 198-199).

3.6. The Codification and Standardization Process




















Fig. 2. Standardization of the native script

Father Méntrida commented in his 1637 Arte de la Lengua bisaya-hiliguayna that different forms of individual scripts were currently in use. In 1663, Esguerra’s Arte de la Lengua bisaya gave alternate letterforms for the vowel e-i symbol by studying signatures in Spanish and Tagalog document.(Jocano, 1975: 48-49, Scott, 1994: 95). The Spanish priest-scholars began to standardize the variant baybayin script that proliferated among the vernacular groups (Scott, 1994: 60).

The seventeenth century variations standardized by López from several documents can be seen in Figure 2. It became easier to read the inscriptions. The vowel killer applied to the end of words ending in consonants improved reading rapidly because any reader can depend on orthography alone, unlike the old method where the orthography plus the contextual knowledge about what and when the inscription was written, were needed to give meaning to the text. In addition, a literate society found the transference to a new system of alphabet easy and most enlightening

There were some positive consequences of the romanization of the ancient syllabary. Through the codification of the vernaculars, the languages were preserved and accounts of the first contact with Spain survived. The negative consequences showed that instead of being able to transfer their literature and writings in the new form, their learning were proscribed to Christian doctrines and their writings of traditional topics were censured as succumbing to the work of the devil.

3.7. Current Users of the Script: Mindoro Bamboo Literacy

This ancient syllabary did not completely die out. Modern day Hanunoo Mangyans of Mindoro and Tagbanuas of Palawan have retained their traditional script writing. Nevertheless, there is no great literature coming out of these groups who write in the native syllabary. They remain marginal and peripheral to mainstream Filipino society. According to anthropologist Antoon Postma, this script is written from bottom to top so that when the bamboo reeds are laid down, it reads left to right (Postma, 1988: 224-225). The Mangyans write their ambahan poetry in this script.


4. The Doctrina Christiana

Within a relatively short period of time after the initial encounter, the Christian doctrine was diffused throughout the archipelago. The friars’ study of languages provided an interpretation of the Filipino way of life. In addition, it provided new mechanism for controlling the people (Phelan,1955 154-159). First came the new schema of the Latin alphabet. Concurrent with it came the Spanish religion; the native culture was the main casualty. The Augustianians, Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Recollects struggled valiantly to understand, speak and write the native language. However, the most vexing problems the Spanish met in the Philippines were the extent of linguistic diversity within the archipelago (Carroll, 1968: 62).

The first step in ending this “confusion of tongues” was to formulate a grammatology or a comparison of alphabets, words, and syntax. The Franciscans in 1580 seriously engaged in the systematic study of the native Tagalog vernacular and compiled a Tagalog dictionary For evangelization purposes, Juan de Placensia in 1593 printed the Doctrina Christiana, an instruction manual of prayers and catechism in Spanish and Philippine script with Tagalog wood blocks (Lach, 1977: 500). It provided an interlinear translation, Spanish on one side, Tagalog baybayin script on the other.

















Fig. 4. Doctrina Christiana

As an unintended sociolinguistic consequence, this dictionary and the printed catechism in Spanish and Tagalog effectively established Tagalog (spoken only by a small minority of eleven and not more than fifteen per cent of the total population) as the power language in the island vis-à-vis the other languages.

The Doctrina was a proselytizing success and enjoyed several printings. It was distributed to several parishes. However, the natives were still reading the old baybayin script while studying the new alphabet. In 1663, Father Colin, the Jesuit missionary admitted that although “there is scarcely a man, and still less a woman who does not know and practice this old writing method,” he complained the people “cling fondly to their own method of writing and reading” and was rueful that indeed “even those who are already Christian in matters of devotion” are guilty of this practice. (Blair and Robertson, 1903: 37-97).







5. The Transliteration Effect

5.1. Reordering of Baybayin Sequence

As the Spanish in the Philippines became adept at the language, their European prejudices and Spanish cultural framework shaped their work according to the principles of Latin and Iberian orthography, grammar, and culture. This effort effectively subverted the ancient script to conform to the linguistic scholars of the age. One example is the rearrangement of the sequence of the Philippine syllabary from the original ordering beginning with K, G, Ng, Ta—this order or sequence of letters is derived from the study of Dr. Pardo de Tavera (1890) entitled “Contribution to the Study of the Old Filipino Alphabet”— to the Latin alphabetical order of A B C D hence the Abakada..

In a personal correspondence with baybayin expert Dr. Jean Paul Potet he called our attention to the Rizal’s ordering of the baybayin. It was not the original sequence but a Sanskrit syllabary order. He said: “////////////////////////” (email correspondence,July 2,2001.)

5.2. .Substitution of consonants to Spanish Alphabet

The Spanish alphabet had no W or NG so Father Chirino omitted these letters from his transliterated Philippine alphabet, thus timawa (freeman) became timagua. Even today, a place spelled Wawa in Pampanga in the new orthography is Hispanized and spelled Guagua, in the same manner that the Central American country called Watemala by natives has a Hispanized spelling of Guatemala. “R” was introduced.


6. Socio-cultural Effects of the Roman Alphabet Change

The Roman alphabet was introduced and by it the entire social structure of Philippine society was affected. Reading and writing the Romanized alphabet was easily learned. The transfer of knowledge came next.


In order to teach this transliteral alphabet, schools had to be established—of course church sponsored. Before admission, one has to be a Catholic. To be a Catholic, one has to be baptized. This sacrament effectively obliterated the Filipino indigenous names.

6.1. Onomastic or Naming Patterns

In baptism, a child has to be given a name. Before the arrival of the Spanish, indigenous Filipino girls’ names were sunshine (Luningning), stars (Bituin), virtues (Mayumi), and other special characteristics. Boys were named for heroic deeds (Bayani), birds (Kalaw) valor, (Magtanggol), among others.

In the changed social structure, the parish priests had a formula for naming Filipino children. A calendar or almanac of feast days was consulted (Joaquin, 1979). If a boy was born on March 19, a perusal of the calendar of saints says it is the feast day of San José. Ergo, the boy is automatically named José. If it is a girl, her name becomes Josefa.. A girl born on December 8 is named Maria Concepcion, or Maria Inmaculada, the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. It is supposed to be simple and straightforward. An almanac had to be written; its use must be taught in church sermons in the pulpit. It was a required household reference book.

With this Christianization effort, they who held their practice of naming their children according to their own family tradition were divested of this patronymic right (Flores, 1997). Suddenly a new generation of Filipinos was carrying Hispanic given names. Unlike other countries where grandchildren naturally receive their grandparent’s names and there is a mechanism to trace one’s ancestry back in time, in the case of the Filipinos, this onomastic pattern was aborted. Thus an intergenerational line could never be traced.

6.2. New Literacy had a social function.

The old script became completely obsolete with very few exceptions. Most importantly this change effectively rendered the literate Filipinos illiterate. Ironically, this inadequacy was used by the colonizers to argue that the Filipinos were not yet civilized.

What else did the early Filipinos own that was taken away? A denigration effect was especially directed towards the women.

6.3. Gender Inequality Effects

Before the Spaniards came, Filipino women enjoyed the same privileges, rights, and opportunity as men (Manansan, 1998: 194). Daughters grew up active as sons in work, training, and trade. They had economic power. Inheritance was divided equally among male and female children. Kinship ties were (still are) traced bilaterally from the woman’s and man’s line. Divorce was initiated not by husbands alone but by wives as well. Women retained their maiden names in marriage (Tapales, 1992). The Filipina also enjoyed political and educational power. The woman’s personal signature by and of itself is a lawful symbol of the authentication of any document because of their proven reliability in fulfilling contracts (de la Costa, 1965: 9). Women’s signatures were required to make any transactions valid. When the Spaniards set up their settlements in Luzon, they were shocked by the freedom manifested by the Filipina. Most of all they were shocked at the high position of the local babaylan women.


7. The Babaylan or Native Priesthood Class

Essentially, the local priesthood was a priestess-hood: the babaylan, the traditional repository of cultural and esoteric knowledge. Linguistically, the term babaylan (the priestess class), baybayin (native script), babae (woman, variant: Babaye), and Binibini (woman leader) are interrelated in etymology and in orthography (Flores, 2001). McCoy (1982) writes that the most common term for spirit medium in insular South East Asia is derived from the classical Malay word belian-belian, or waylan in Java, Bali, Borneo and Halmahera; bailan or baylan among the interior population of Mindanao; and baylan or babaylan in he Visayan and Central Philippines.



7.1.An Etymology of Baybayin

In current usage the word baybayin means “to spell, to write a word in order.” A second meaning is “beach” or coastline (English, 1986). Does it mean this native script was used in trade routes normally the seacoasts or beach? Or was the Filipino woman perhaps the real “speller” suggesting that she was the principal “user” of the old traditional script? Were they the recognized culture bearers of society? Were they the more literate group?

7.1.1 “Literate” versus “Illiterate”

According to Michael Clancy (1981) in medieval England, the clergy (the clericus) was associated with literacy in Latin, (literatus). In a sense this differentiated the clergy as a select group in the service of God. This distinction is a social construction of the Middle Ages. Europe had created an elite of priests who monopolized writing. The opposite of clericus is laicus, or the ordinary people, the (laicus) or laymen. In time, the proposition that was advanced became crystallized as an axiom where clericus is the antithesis of laicus, and literatus is the opposite of illiteratus. It is no accident that the Spanish chroniclers who reported the literacy of the indigenous Filipino women were members of the clerici.

As a product of their medieval time, the Spanish in the Philippines, during the contact, tended to question the literacy of the laity. As a case in point, repeatedly, the Spanish chroniclers kept adding the incredulous parenthetical phrase, “there is scarcely a man, and still less a woman who did not write, “both men and women write in this language. ” Corpuz (1989: 20-36) cites Morga saying “virtually all people, the women more than men, not only knew how to write but also loved doing so.” Alcina writes about the difficulty of reading which is more guessing than pronouncing: “It is easy to learn, and most women read with dexterity and without stumbling.” (Scott: 96). We underscored the reference to women here.

In many traditional ancient cultures, the first to possess the art of writing was the priestly caste. As we have seen, in prehispanic Philippines, this priestly office was primarily a woman’s domain, which leads us to believe that women, more than men could have done much of the baybayin writing. Could certain groups have been the members of an indigenous Secretariat, the medieval English counterpart of the scrivener class perhaps, who recorded the laws and orders promulgated by the council of community elders?

7.2. Women Kept in Place

When the Spanish Inquisition’s office in Manila persecuted the babaylans, branded them as witches, burned them at the stakes, threw the babaylan’s writings into the fire, the ancient script was efficiently removed. These burned documents were not only religious and ritualistic incantations but also contained metaphorical statements for arranging marriages, ritual ceremonies, dowry contracts (given to the bride’s parents), eulogy dirges, genealogical records, onomastic naming practices, birth records, wills, blessings, recipes for healing herbs, organic cosmetics and the like (Flores, 2000). All these documents were lost, and with it was the accompanying loss of a peoples’ cultural capital.

The idea of the Filipina did not fit into the Hispanic concept of how woman should be and behave in society. The friars most especially set out to remold her according to the image of the perfect woman of Iberian society, imposing the European restrictive norms of behavior of the times. Through the colonial experience, the Filipino woman was domesticated (taught only domestic skills).


8. Honorific Titles Based on Achievement

The loss of a native script also precipitated a change in the structure of Filipino’s way of acknowledging individual achievement. Socially the early Filipinos were quite deferential to people of attainment. Filipinos do not call people by their given names alone. There is always a polite title attached when referring to somebody by name. For example, when Magellan came in 1521, his Chronicler Pigafetta identified the leaders he met as Siawi, Simiut, Sibuaia, Sisacai. Contrary to what contemporary Balarila textbooks say that SI in front of names is an indefinite pronoun, the Si in front of the names is an honorific title, show of respect, much like the Shri in India (Scott,1994).

8. 1. Traditional Achievement and Performance Oriented Filipino Titles

This was a new paradigm to the Europeans who were differential only to people of superordinate rank and saw events through European lenses and capable of interpreting different cultures in misleading and sometimes pejorative ways. For example, it is not expected that conquistadors would call their subordinate subjects by their titles and traditional respectful addresses. This must look incongruous and inappropriate. The honorifics such as Gat (leader), Lakan (chief), Sri (respected) Dayang (lady of high integrity), Binibini (well bred lady) (Scott, 1994: 196) were translated to Don and Doña which in the first place carried connotations of having been hispanicized, implying subjugation. Furthermore, these Spanish titles were also seen as race-based (Spanish or mestizos) and wealth-driven.

The title Dayang was cast away, obliterated, and assigned to the dust-heap of colonial history. Only the Muslim royalty carry this title today. Binibini was stripped of its rank and exists only as the equivalent of the Spanish Señorita or the modern Miss. Si became a grammar casualty; now used as an indefinite personal pronoun. The original Filipino titles of respect for leadership and greatness were sometimes hereditary but more often than not, were acquired, not ascribed titles (Lynch, 1963:.163-191). Even today, Filipinos insist on addressing a person of attainment Attorney Flores, or Engineer Cruz; vestiges of achievement and performance titles.


8.2. Residues of archaic and suppressed Tagalog modes of honorific titles

Occasionally Filipino extant titles resurface in contemporary Filipino surnames like Gatmaitan, Gatdula, Gatchalian, Gatpuno, Gatbonton, Magat, Lakandula, Lacanlale, and Lakambini.

Lakambini, was reserved for women leaders. However, the Spanish were highly skeptical of the idea of a woman chief no matter how meritorious, valorous or nobly born. After all, their own Queen Juana, who was a legitimate ruler, was officially called, Juana, la loca. Thus they reduced Philippine women titles to a generic form. To add insult to injury, beauty contest promoters of today have bowdlerized it as the title for beauty queen winners of Miss Philippines competitions from prestigious national pageants down to lowly barrio fiestas.


9. Conclusion

Philippine society a few decades after the initial contact with the Spanish brought social changes and social mobility. From a community characterized as simplistic where mobility is permeable and egalitarian to some extent, it turned into a highly stratified one with unequal access and social and educational opportunity. In the course of three centuries of Spanish colonial rule, out of a society overlaid with Catholicism, Hispanic culture, and western thought, there emerged according to James Fallows (1989) a “damaged” society continually robbed of its ingenuity, initiative, self-esteem, and most importantly its literacy. In this paper, we suggest that among other things, the core of this social malaise may be traced far back to the replacement of the era when nearly the total population was literate in the ancient baybayin system.