When the Spaniards first came to Pampanga in 1571 they found every Kapampangan man, woman and child able to read and write in their own orthography called kulitan, just as they found Tagalogs using baybayin. "There is scarcely anybody who cannot read and write in letters proper to the island of Manila,” wrote Jesuit historian Pedro Chirino later in 1604. Our ancestors were already quite literate and civilized, but the Spaniards wanted to impose the Spanish language on them, so they made them unlearn what they already knew—thus making our already very literate ancestors illiterate once again!
Fortunately, some of our ancestors persisted in using kulitan and some Spanish friars recorded and studied kulitan, like Fray Alvaro de Benavente who showed and explained how to convert kulitan into the Roman alphabet in his book Arte de Lengua Pampanga written in 1699, translated by Fr. Edilberto Santos and published by the HAU Center for Kapampangan Studies.
Compared to the Roman alphabet’s 26 letters, kulitan has only 14 characters (11 consonants and 3 vowels), but, Benavente said, “this should not be looked at as a defect, but rather as a creative contribution… because, without adding anything to them, one can write and read them perfectly well.”
Fray Diego Bergaño, in his 1732 Kapampangan dictionary (updated 1860) defined culit as “the fine points in Pampango handwriting.” The verb magculit means “to learn how to read its characters,” and the noun pagculitan means “a little book of exercises in Pampango spelling.”
The consonants in kulitan are pronounced with the default (automatic) vowel sound /a/ such as /ba/, /ka/, /da/.
(To be continued)