When the Spaniards conquered the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571), they noticed several of its nations had a writing system of their own, called Baybáyin in Tagalog. It was a king of short-hand that did not make it possible to record closing consonants; thus i-lu in Baybáyin could represent í-log "river", i-lóng "nose" or it-lóg "egg", so much so that, while easy to write, it was difficult to read. Because of this shortcoming, it gave way to the Latin alphabet in the course of the 17th century. Nowadays Filipino graphic artists are reviving Baybáyin to express their philippineness.

Baybayin (incorrectly known as Alibata) is a pre-Filipino writing system from the islands called as the "Philippines". Baybayin comes from the word "baybay", which literally means "spell". Alibata was a term coined by Paul Versoza in the early 1900's. Written by Baybayin artist and translator, Christian Cabuay who runs Baybayin.com.

This book is a provisional essay, followed by a vocabulary and an index, on the Tagalogs' world view in the Sixteenth Century. It is mainly based on the entries of the earliest dictionaries of the Tagalog language. These were written by Spanish lexicographers about half-a-century after the conquest of the Philippines (Cebu 1565, Manila 1571). Additional data are drawn from Spanish chronicles. Many of the recorded beliefs and customs were already obsolete at the turn of the Seventeenth Century. Some are extremely surprising, starting from the primeval myth according to which the world had no solid land at its beginning, but only two fluids, water and air.

The few, and generally obsolete Tagalog words of Arabic and/or Persian origin that can be found in old and modern dictionaries are fragments from a period when they must have been more numerous, although their number cannot ever have been very large. Some illustrate how Manila was an outpost of the Bornean polity based in Brunei, itself a part of the Indo-Javanese system, while others point at direct contacts with traders who spoke some varieties of Arabic, but were probably Indians, Persians, Armenians from Persia or even Turks. Thus these terms entered Tagalog over a very long period that lasted until the 19th Century.

This is a study of the coinages propounded for the development of Tagalog / Pilipino / Filipino in the scientific fields and the humanities.

This book is the list of printed documents I have collected about the Philippines in general and the Tagalog language in particular. The entries are followed by an index of the themes involved.

Unlike other conventional histories, the unifying thread of A History of the Philippines is the struggle of the peoples themselves against various forms of oppression, from Spanish conquest and colonization to U.S. imperialism. Constantino provides a penetrating analysis of the productive relations and class structure in the Philippines, and how these have shaped―and been shaped by―the role of the Filipino people in the making of their own history. Additionally, he challenges the dominant views of Spanish and U.S. historians by exposing the myths and prejudices propagated in their work, and, in doing so, makes a major breakthrough toward intellectual decolonization. This book is an indispensible key to the history of conquest and resistance in the Philippine.