OCCASIONAL NOTES. 157 



Anybody is at liberty to look for them wherever and when- 

 ever he likes, 



F. KEHDING. 



THE ALPHABETS OF THE PHILIPPINE GROUP. 



Pardo de Tavera's Essay on the Alphabets of the Philip- 

 pines* was thus reviewed in March, 1885, by Professor Muller 

 of Vienna : — 



" Those of the inhabitants of the Philippines who belong to 

 the Malay race possess, as is well known, their own particu- 

 lar alphabet, but it has become more and more obsolete, and 

 has been superseded by the Roman character brought into 

 the country by the Spanish missionaries together with the 

 Christian religion. This alphabet which preserves its princi- 

 pal characteristics among the different tribes — the Tagalas, 

 the Ylocos, the Visayas, and the Pampangas — is connected 

 with the alphabet of cognate races in Celebes (Bugis, Makas- 

 sar), and Sumatra (Battak, Redjang, Lampong), while both 

 its external form (the shaping of the characters) and its 

 internal design (the conception of the proportion of consonant 

 to vowel) seem to point to India as its place of origin. But 

 whether the alphabet of the Malay races has been derived 

 from the Indian in a straight line, or whether it has been de- 

 duced from it by the intervention of another alphabet and what 

 Indian alphabet (that is, the alphabet of what province and 

 of what era) has been the foundation of the Malay ones — 

 these are questions answered differently by different philologists, 

 and have therefore at present to be treated as open ones/'' 



" It would take us too far afield to go into these topics, but 

 we venture to direct the attention of those readers who take 

 a pleasure in following out this paleographically and ethno- 

 graphically interesting problem, to certain pamphlets in 



* Contribution para el estudio de los antiguos alfabetos Jilipinos, 

 (1884). 



