During my Baybayin signing event at the GMA booth, I caught up with Amaya 🙂
Some thoughts:
- I did about 50 name “translations”
- Out of the 50, about 20 knew about the script
- The 20 were ages 15-30
- Out of 20, 5 knew it as alibata
This guy was shocked that what I wrote was his family name
One of the performers, Josie
Kristian Kabuay 
I wonder where the 20 and 5 learned about it?
When I asked, they said from friends and the internet. Other answers was
when I went to high school in the Philippines.
Rizal’s barong
By GEMMA CRUZ ARANETA
June 30, 2011, 4:47am
MANILA, Philippines — Since Jose Rizal  had that studio picture taken
in Madrid with Marcelo del Pilar standing beside him and Mariano Ponce
seated in front of them, all his monuments, paintings, or busts
invariably show him in various versions of that overcoat.
We can surmise that whenever Rizal came home to Calamba or when
he was in  Dapitan working on that water system or planting coconuts, he
wore lighter  clothes, a comfortable camisa china perhaps with striped
cotton  trousers and a salakot, like in those 19th century prints.
So far, there is only one monument  which shows him  wearing a
barong tagalog and carrying a salakot and that is located at the Central
Luzon State University in Nueva Ecija. Apparently, it was designed in
the 1950’s by a group of students who  probably  surmounted  stiff
opposition to that seemingly irreverent idea.
They have just been proven right, Rizal did wear a barong.
Last week, I attended the inauguration of  the “International
Sesquicentennial Conference: Rizal in the 21th Century” sponsored by the
University of the Philippines and organized by Philippine Studies
Tri-College during which Jose Rizal was honored with a procession fit
for a hometown patron saint.
The keynote speaker was Mr. Lucien Spittael, a Belgian gentleman,
 white-haired with a thin moustache and married to a Filipina. The
Spittaels followed Rizal’s  footsteps all over Europe, not as mere
tourists, but as ardent researchers who left no stone unturned.
The couple  made incredible discoveries in Germany – 22 objects
which Rizal sent to a Dr. Bastian, a friend of Ferdinand Blumentritt,
who was collecting objects from the Philippines for his private
ethnographic museum. Mercifully, Â these survived two world wars, or we
would never have known about that barong tagalog.
I would like to believe that Rizal owned it although it was not
 indicated it in the inventory, unlike the salakot with silver trimmings
which, he said in German, that he owned.
Curiously, there was also a slim gold pen embellished with what
looked like a vine-and-leaf design. Baffled, Mr. Spittael said it was
made by a certain Nakpil. I did not have a chance to tell him that maybe
Ariston Bautista gave the pen to his good friend Jose Rizal while in
Paris.
Bautista was married to Petrona Nakpil (sister of  musician
 Julio, later  Bonifacio’s aide-de-camp) whose family had a jewelry
business, Orfebreria Nakpil. What a small world! (gemma601@yahoo.com)
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nice.. I hope that the baybayin school will be soon open.. I am already excited to learn about baybayin..