Filipino Orthography - Notes On Filipino Orthography

Notes On Filipino Orthography

• C, F, J, Ñ, Q, V, X, and Z are used mostly for loanwords or regional words.
• The vowels are A, E, I, O, and U.
• Usual diacritic marks are acute ( ´ ), grave ( ` ), circumflex ( ˆ ), which are optional, and only used with the vowels. The latter two may only appear at the end of a word ending in a vowel. Diacritics have no impact on the primary alphabetical order. Possible combinations include: á, à, â, é, è, ê, í, ì, î, ó, ò, ô, ú, ù, û. A historically used diacritic in many Philippine languages was g̃, a letter which was notably used to shorten the words nang ("of/of the") and man͠gá (a word which signifies plurality) into ng̃ and mg̃á respectively. Today, these two words are usually just simply written as ng and mga, with no g̃ diacritic.
• Ñ is considered as a separate letter, instead of a letter-diacritical mark combination.
• The alphabet also uses the Ng digraph, even originally with a large tilde that spanned both n and g (as in n͠g) when a vowel follows the digraph. (This tilde indicates that the "n͠g" and the vowel should be pronounced as one syllable, such as "n͠ga" in the three-syllable word "pan͠galan" ("name") – syllabicated as, not . The use of the tilde over the two letters is now rare. Due to technical constraints, machine-printed variants of "n͠ga" emerged, which included "ñga", "ng̃a", and even "gña" (as in the case of Sagñay, Camarines Sur).
• The Ng digraph letter is similar to, but not the same as, the prepositional word ng ("of"/"of the"), originally spelled ng̃ (with a tilde over the g only). The words ng and ng̃ are shortened forms of the word nang.