Philippine ancient writing and the adoption of the Latin alphabet to represent the languages of the archipelago in the arts and orthographies of the Spanish colonial missionary tradition

Abstract

The first aim of this paper to expose the treatment of the scriptural methods used to represent the languages of the Philippines before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers done by the missionary linguists in their gramatization process of these languages. After a detailed study on how scriptural Filipino tradition is treated by a large number of grammatical missionary studies, we focus on the aspects that led them to the adoption of the Latin alphabet, how it is used by the missionaries to represent Filipino languages and what were strategies that should be used to circumvent the problems that the use of this alphabet presented in its application to these linguistic realities.