Hello! Please introduce yourself.
I’m Kristian Kabuay, an artist and educator of
prePhilippine scripts. of the economic conditions. I and others are proof that
there is economic benefit to cultural practices.
How did you get started with Baybayin? What
was your biggest challenge when you were only
beginning to write with it?
I first saw it on one of the Katipunan flags. I thought
the “Ka” was a capital “I” representing “Independence”
but when I found out it was our own writing system,
I was hooked.
The biggest challenge was writing the strokes since
it’s quite different from the Roman alphabet. Can anybody learn Baybayin? If one were to
suddenly take up Baybayin, what's the most
important thing that they should remember? And
how can one start?
Yes they can. The most important thing is to learn
the Kudlit (vowel marks), Virama (vowel cancels), and
writing as pronounced. They can start by checking
out my website baybayin.com and in the future
baybayinschool.com.
In your many platforms, you've touched on
common misconceptions people have about
Baybayin. (It is a writing system - not a language,
and that Alibata is a misnomer.) What other
misapprehensions are there that the community
could benefit to correct?
Not specifically to writing systems, but [others tend
to think] cultural and artistic practice is impractical.
When people say impractical, they really mean that it
won’t make any money and one cannot live off it. Most
of these thoughts come from the Philippines because Do you envision a time when Baybayin would be
widely used? How far or close are we from that
reality? And what can the average Filipino do to
help us get closer to that?
Maybe...We’re still far from it because of the social,
cultural, and economic conditions. The best thing the
average Filipino can do is to be economically stable.
Sure, you can do something cultural and economic
in parallel but in the Philippine context, economic
independence is the main factor. Once they have that,
they can have the privilege to explore the culture more.
Kristian Kabuay is a San Francisco-
based Filipino artist who has made it
his mission to revive and promulgate
the nearly extinct prePhilippine
script Baybayin via a contemporary
interpretation in art and mixed-media.
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