History
According to speakers, the Eskaya language and script were creations of Pinay, the ancestor of the Eskaya people, who was inspired by human anatomy.Piers KellyClassification
Eskayan is a "sophisticated encryption" of theWriting system
The Eskayan script has both alphabetic and syllabic components. A basic 'alphabet' of 46 characters accounts for most of the common sounds and syllables used in Eskayan while a broader subset totalling over 1000 is used to represent the remaining syllables. The unusual diversity of consonant and vowel clusters accounts for this relatively large number of composite characters, which even includes superfluous symbols. The symbols are said to be based on parts of the human anatomy, though many are clearly based on the cursive Roman alphabet.Romanised orthography
A romanised form of Eskayan is used in the cultural schools for the purpose of exposition. Although not strictly standardised, this orthography has elements in common with the Spanish system once used for transliterating Cebuano. E.g., the letters and are interchangeable symbols representing the sound ; the 'll' combination is pronounced and the letter will be pronounced when it precedes a front vowel, as in Spanish. A notable innovation in Eskayan romanised orthography is the letter combination 'chd' which represents the sound .Phonology and phonotactics
Eskayan shares all the same phonemes as Boholano-Visayan (the particular variety of Cebuano spoken on Bohol) and even includes the distinctive Boholano voiced palatal affricate that appears in Visayan words such as ('good'). With the exception of this phoneme, Eskayan shares the same basic phonology as Cebuano-Visayan, Tagalog and many other Philippine languages. The phonotactics of Eskayan, on the other hand, are quite different from those of Boholano-Visayan and Philippine languages generally. This can be seen in Eskayan words such as ('eel'), ('face'), ('knee') and ('flower') that contain consonant sequences like , , , and which do not feature in Philippine languages. Furthermore, a significant number of Eskayan words have phonemic sequences that are common in Spanish or in Spanish loans into Boholano-Visayan but appear rarely, if ever, in non-borrowed words.Case system
Eskayan conforms to the same syntactic and morphological structure as Cebuano. Accordingly, Eskayan nouns are uninflected but may be marked for case with one of several preceding case markers. The table below shows the basic case system of Eskayan, with Cebuano equivalents in brackets. and parallel Spanish 'with' and 'that', approximate Spanish glosses for Cebuano and . Eskayan and Cebuano texts, which are always written face-to-face in the bilingual Eskayan books, generally have a one-to-one correspondence. For example:Pronouns
Eskayan personal pronouns are also marked by case. In the table below, the Cebuano equivalents are indicated in brackets. (These pronouns are drawn from a limited corpus; omissions are indicated by [] and uncertainties with an asterisk.)Lexicon
Cebuano influences
Despite its structural equivalence to Eskayan, Cebuano has had a very limited lexical influence on the language. In a comparison of core Swadesh vocabulary, there are eight identifiable cognates. Eskayan words have a one-to-one correspondence with Cebuano, so that when two words are homophones in Cebuano, they are homophones in Eskayan as well. However, the verbal morphology is quite different: Cebuano has twenty-four verbal affixes which indicate grammatical aspect and other feature, whereas Eskayan has just five (''muy-'', ''dil-'', ''pur-'', ''yu-'', ''yi-''), each of which can substitute for any of the Cebuano affixes. This often makes Eskayan grammar ambiguous, and dependent on the parallel Cebuano text. In addition, some Eskayan verbs are equivalent to specific inflections of Cebuano verbs despite not having any morphology. For example, Eskayan 'was taken on', which is basic root, translates Cebuano , where ''gi-'' indicates that the action is completed and performed on theSpanish influences
Although the Eskayan lexicon bears a marked Spanish influence,See op. cit. Martinez ''Gahum ug Gubat'' (132) and Kelly ''The Classification of the Eskayan Language of Bohol'' (12) the loan-patterns are hard to map. Some Spanish words appear to have been directly borrowed into Eskayan with virtually no semantic or phonetic alterations. E.g., the Eskayan word , meaning 'husband', is evidently borrowed from the Spanish , also meaning 'husband'. Others retain only a few of the semantic properties of the original. E.g., the word means 'sun' in Eskayan but 'star' in Spanish. In some interesting cases Eskayan lexical items appear to be borrowed but are assigned new meanings entirely. E.g., the Eskayan ('sky') does not coincide semantically with the Spanish ('memory'). One of the most intriguing examples of such an 'interrupted loan' is that of the Eskayan ('two') seemingly derived from the Spanish ('three'). Here the semantic property of 'number' was retained but the actual quantity it represented was reassigned.Text
Theories and controversies
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Eskaya community attracted the interest of local mystics who promoted the notion that their language was of exotic origin.. Produced for the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, Bohol, Philippines. 2006 Today, the few linguists who have examined Eskayan generally concur that it is structurally Cebuano but lexically innovative, suggesting that Eskayan is an auxiliary language or a highly sophisticated form of disguised speech encoded from Cebuano.References
Further reading
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{{Constructed languages Constructed languages Mixed languages Languages of Bohol Verb–subject–object languages Constructed scripts Constructed languages introduced in the 20th century Spanish language in the Philippines Philippine English