Re: Filipino 1537 calendar, resembles VMS diagrams

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > For what it's worth -- you have 17 character syllabaries with 3
    > vowel markers... And a language family known for word
    > doublets... But what about character doublets?
    > 
    > I might also 'give' the symbol for 'va' and possibly 'da' as
    > matches to VMS - maybe 'ha' is on its side?
    
I assumed that the aboriginal languages of the Philippines were all
polysyllabic, thus I didn't pay much attention to them. On second
thoughts... given their location, the Philippines probably harbored
minorities speaking languages from other groups, possibly monosyllabic
ones too. Another thing to investigate...

Due to the Pope's partition of the world (treaty of Tordesillas, a few
yers after Columbus), the Philippines became the main hub for Spanish
presence in East Asia, just as Goa, Malacca and Macau were for the
Portuguese. The commercial partition was mirrored by a missionary one:
the Jesuits made Macao their East Asian "headquarters", while the
Dominicans settled in Manila. (Relations between the two orders were
not exactly a paragon of Christian love, much to the dismay of their
would-be converts.) The Philippines were visited at least once a year
by a Spanish galleon that sailed around South America and then up
along the coast up to California or thereabouts. Francis Drake sacked
and sank some of these ships in ~1580, and Drake's "copycat corsair"
Thomas Cavendish did the same in 1587. (To thicken the plot, in the
manner which cornstarch does to soup, Thomas Cavendish visited John
Dee at Mortlake in 1590. At the time, Dee had already returned from
Prague, but kept in touch with his Bohemian friends, and Kelley was
still at Rudolf's court.)

    > Lastly, the calendar is taken from a 1572 manuscript,
    > not 1537 or am I looking at the wrong calendar?

You are right, I must have been looking at the wrong page when I typed
that date. 

Anyway, both dates may be wrong. The Povedano manuscript is claimed to
be a fraud, perpetrated by a certain José E. Marco who sold the it to
the Philippine Library and Museum in 1913 (!). His accounts on how he
got the manuscript sound rather familiar, in style if not in
substance...

http://www.mts.net/~pmorrow/calendar.htm
http://www.inq7.net/opi/2001/nov/16/opi_arocampo-1.htm

All the best,

--stolfi