Alibata Now:Attempted Revivals and Reforms

Norberto Romualdez attempted to change Tagbanuwa script in order to address the problem of not being able to represent the codas of syllables.³⁵ Bayani Mendoza de Leon, in an effort to revive the extinct ancient Tagalog script, synthesized graphs to represent letters found in the Roman alphabet and sounds found in Spanish and English.³⁶

All in all, however, it seems unrealistic to hope that the ancient scripts can be used for everyday purposes. The Roman alphabet actually better renders Philippine languages than the ancient script does, in terms of minimizing the amount of information lost when transcribing phonemes. In fact, the Roman alphabet is probably better at rendering the Philippine languages than it is at rendering English. The Philippine languuages generally do not use many more than twenty-six phonemes and therefore almost every phoneme has a corresponding grapheme in the Roman alphabet. In contrast, English utilizes many more phonemes than can be represented as graphemes, and hence, certain graphemes must be used to represent more than one phoneme, increasing ambiguity. In general, the Philippine scripts have been promoted by individuals whose goals are to inspire nationalist and/or ethnic pride.