Notes on Filipino orthography

What's frustrating is that it used to be rendered as ng̃ to denote a special letter but this was dropped sometime in the first half of the 20th century. It's frustrating to me because ñ is an important part of Spanish culture and it's even part of the logo of Institutio Cervantes, but Philippine orthography casually dropped ng̃ which is sad.

The letter thorn (Þþ) used to be in the English alphabet and it sometimes written like an inverted y, hence old timey signs saying stuff like "Ye Old Inn," which ought be pronounced "the" and not "ye." But this letter was dropped during the print revolution since English typesetters would import letters made from Germany which didn't have thorn keys. So that explains why that letter was dropped in England.

But in the Philippines, typesetters regularly had access to g̃ keys. For example, look at this scan of a book from 1913.

I have another theory, perhaps the fault is with American typewriters which don't have g̃. But if that's the case, why wasn't ñ dropped in favor of ny? After all, all words with ñ can be plausibly spelled with ny, for example, "niño" could be "ninyo" whose meaning is still clear without an ñ. Perhaps it could be even Spanish typewriters didn't have g̃, so it was dropped because people stopped making keys for it.

The jury is still out on it. In any case, Philippine orthography is so much poorer without g̃ in my opinion.

The alpabeto with 28 letters is the first and primary symbol of the national and nationalist mission of KWF. That's why in the 2013 Ortograpiyang Pambansa, first explained was the function of the additional letters to ease the entry of the native languages into the enrichment of “Filipino.” Here manifests the extreme importance of the letters F, ), V, and Z because these are letters that represent sounds occuring in many native languages and are not to be found in Tagalog or even in Sebwano, Ilonggo, or Ilokano. Meanwhile, like C, Q, Ñ, and X, the four can aalso be used in "modernization" or borrowing technical and scientific terms from international languages. Just using the first four, such words as “alifuffug” (whirlwind) in Itawes, “falendag” (a kind of flute) of the Teduray, “jambangan” (a plant) from the Tausug, “masjid” (place of worship) in Méranaw, “vakul” (a headdress) in Ivatan, and “zigattu” (east) of the Ibanag can easily enter the “Filipino” vocabulary.

Well on the top of my head, "barangay" is a problematic word because ng and g are combined together. It was once spelled "baranggay" which denotes both ng and g. Had ng̃ still been a letter, I think these contractions would probably not happen as it's clearer as to what the two letters denote.

There are other contractions too, like mang̃a becoming mg̃a and now mga. Has mg̃a been retained, it would be clearer that the "g̃a" does not denote a "ga" but "nga" sound.

Also sometimes "n" and "g" are next to each other but do not denote a "ng̃a" sound but rather belong to different syllables, a "an"+"ga" for example. Our current orthography can't differentiate between the two right now.

There are likely a lot of other examples, but those are the ones on the top of my head.