Came across some Baybayin tattoo work from Ryan Anthony Saltiga. Below is what appears to be Pamilya translated to PA-MI-L-YA. Instead of using a + or x under the LA character (3rd one down), he uses a kudlit above and below it. Interesting method. He has some other work with this style that I couldn’t figure out the translation.
Kristian Kabuay 
X still marks the spot. The kudlits above and below is used for successive same-letter i.e. “Dodie” is written as one “Da” with kudlits above and below (do-di). Of course that would create confusion if you have someone name “Dido”, which is probably why it’s not used anymore as such.
This looks cool, but it got me confused… I totally read it as “po-mo-lo-ya” until you mentioned the interesting twist he made. Coolness or intelligibility… whatever rocks your boat, I guess.
That seems to be how the Doctrina Cristiana represents bare vowels; e.g. see the “alphabet” line of Baybayin.
That seems to be how the Doctrina Cristiana represents bare consonants; e.g. see the “alphabet” line of Baybayin.
Actually, the doubled kudlits in the Doctrina Christiana are most likely *not* to represent bare consonants. If they were, the Doctrina would have used them throughout the text. But they aren’t used at all except for the list of letters in the order the Filipinos recited them (before Spanish observers started writing them down in “a ba ca da…” alphabetical order following the Latin “a b c d…”). The Doctrina just follows the normal way all indigenous Filipinos wrote, and leaves syllable final consonants out. Filipinos continued to write this way and never adopted López’ cross kudlit.
The doubled kudlits in the Doctrina are just to show how the three vowels are expressed by writing nothing or adding each kudlit for the respective vowel. These letters with both kudlits on them were probably read as a sort of sequence for teaching and learning to read the different vowels on a single letter: the anthropologist Howard Conklin tells how a Tagbanuwa he was working with read out in a singsong voice “mangmaymi’ mangmaymu’ ” to show how the letters were read, and in south Sumatra they did the same thing, putting several vowel marks on a single letter to teach learners how to read the letters with different vowels.
There *was* one spelling abbreviation used by some people where they put more than one vowel kudlit on the same letter: this avoided having to write the same consonant letter more than once if two syllables began with the same sound. There are three separate signatures on record from Don Dionisio Kapulong (son of Lakandula), and in each of them he writes a single D with both an -u/-o and an -i kudlit (D-o/-i) to read Don Di (yo ni so). Agustin Tiwalag’s signature in the Santo Tomas archives has two -i kudlits on the same letter (T-i/-i) for the last syllable of his first name and the first of his last name: a gu ti/i wa la. And there are two examples of a double -u kudlit on T in a 1625 land deed: pa ka tu/u U = pagkatotoo and ni tu/u bi ga = nitong tubigan.