WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT ANCIENT SCRIPTS IN THE PHILIPPINES?

The Ancient scripts in the Philippines, or pre-colonial scripts, aside from Baybayin, are the following,

Buhid
Hanunuo
Kulitan
Tagbanwa

Buhid is an abugida that is still being used by the Mangyans in the island of Mindoro. It closely resembles Baybayin, though the characters are sharp, and meant to be written on hard substances like bamboo.

Like Baybayin, it has consonants that end with an A vowel sound. To change the vowel sound into an E or I, a small marker is placed above the character, while an O or U vowel sound requires the small marker to be placed at the bottom of the character.

Unlike Baybayin, it has its own character for Ra (Baybayin commonly uses the Da character for Ra, and in some occasions, La)

In total, Buhid has 3 vowels namely A, I, and U. I can also stand for E, while U can also substitute for O.


As for the consonants, there are 15 which are the following: Ba, Da, Ga, Ha, La, Ka, Ma, Na, NGa, Pa, Ra, Sa, Ta, Wa, Ya.


Hanunuo, like Buhid is also an abugida being used by Mangyans in the island of Mindoro. It also has the same set of characters which are

A, I, U, Ba, Da, Ga, Ha, Ka, La, Ma, Na, NGa, Pa, Ra, Sa, Ta, Wa, Ya.

Like Baybayin and Buhid, small markers are placed on top of the character to change the sound from A to I, while placing the small marker below the character makes the vowel sound change from A to O. As with the previous two, syllables with no vowel sounds are not written.

However, in the 1950s, Antoon Postma, a Dutch anthropologist,  went to the Philippines and studied about the Mangyan tribe and introduced the use of Pamudpod.

The Pamudpod is curved line placed at the lower right portion of the character to cancel out the vowel sound, similar to the purpose of placing a small cross in Baybayin, introduced by Fr. Francisco Lopez.


Kulitan is a script used in the province of Pampangga that has the following characters,

A, E, I, O, U, Ba, Da, Ga, Ka, La, Ma, Na, NGa, Pa, Sa, Ta.

While it was used during the revolution against Spain, and later with the Americans, it was in the 1990s when Modern Kulitan was introduced to reinvigorate the use of this script. The modern Kulitan features a different writing orientation from the rest of the Philippine scripts, as the characters are written from top to bottom, and from each column written from left to right.

The Tagbanwa script is used by the Tagbanua people located in Palawan. It diverged from Baybayin as some characters took a different form, and has the following set of characters:

A, I, U, Ba, Da, Ga, Ka, La, Ma, Na, NGa, Pa, Sa, Ta, Wa, Ya.

Outside of these five scripts, one might have also encountered the following:

Badlit
Basahan
Kurdita or Kuritan
Jawi
Kirim

Badlit is said to be the script used in Visayas.
Basahan is a script being used apparently in Bicol.
Kuritan, or Kurdita to some, is used to define the script used in Ilocos.

Badlit basically means a "mark" or a glyph in Visayan language, which is the same case with "Kuritan", or "to mark" in Ilocano language. On the other hand, Basahan means"read".

However, these are not really separate Philippine scripts. The source where these scripts were taken from is actually a chart showing different samples of Baybayin taken from different places. The script has differences either because of differences in penmanship or due to distortions in how the scripts were printed out.

Names of places were included on the chart to identify where the specimen was obtained, but some people such as Pedro Paterno thought that the different places stood there to indicate that these are different scripts per region.

According to Christopher Ray Miller, a linguist and resource person at the Mangyan Heritage Center,

"It’s also important to realise that the kinds of lettershapes you see in most examples of Baybayin are actually based almost entirely on the printing typeface used in the 1620 Ilocano catechism as well as an earlier grammar and a dictionary. These shapes in turn are reinterpretations of the shapes in the 1593 Doctrina Christiana, which preserves some of the ways letters were written in the late 1500s; in ordinary handwriting, we only see these systematically in the signatures in two 1591 documents from Taal held in the Archivo General de Índias in Seville. Many of these lettershapes are very similar to the ones that survived and were preserved in Palawan. Otherwise, typical 17th-century handwriting changed in significant ways from these archaic shapes, and the different Mindoro varieties actually descend from the later shapes common around the mid-1600s."

The above statement was made on a question-and-answer website.

Moreover, Miller also answered a question posted on a social networking site, which further explains how Bicol Basahan came about, explaining how it was not a separate script.

"The chart of letters that some interpret as a separate "Bicol Basahan" script is actually from an example of writing written down by a Spanish noble, labelled as "Carácteres antiguos con los que escribían estos naturales del Tagalog y Camarines" (Ancient characters with which these natives of Tagalog and Camarines used to write). The original is held in the Naval Museum in Madrid.
The actual shapes of the letters given are distorted versions of the "López" shapes from the 1621 Ilocano catechism and two earlier grammars, after about three generations of recopyings by different authors; in each recopying, the body of most of the letters was for some reason rotated further and further clockwise (along with other added distortions), resulting in the nearly 120º rotation in the letters in this 19th century copy.

Malcolm Mintz included this as an illustration in his Bikol dictionary mainly because "Camarines" was mentioned, but there is no first-hand evidence of any distinct script used in the region and, as I said above, this doesn't count because it is a third- or fourth-generation copy of earlier copies, with distortion piled on top of distortion."

As for Jawi and Kirim, these are not native scripts and are only used in some parts of the Philippines due to trading and sharing of cultures.

To read more about this topic, and other Baybayin related information, it is highly recommended to check out these sites:
http://paulmorrow.ca/bayeng1.htm
https://www.quora.com/Is-Baybayin-really-a-writing-system-in-the-entire-pre-hispanic-Philippines-Whats-the-basis-for-making-it-a-national-writing-system-if-pre-hispanic-kingdoms-weren-t-homogenous