In Amaya episode 103 (a Philippine fictional historical period drama), the main character (Amaya) teaches the pre-Filipino script. While there’s some room for improvement it’s good to see Baybayin in the mainstream.
Fans of the TV show raved about the episode but will they actually take the effort to learn Baybayin?
Kristian Kabuay 
I’ve been away from the Philippines since my teenhood and due to that long absence most of the Philippine history has long been gone in my memory. This babaybayin is very strange to me but it seems very interesting to learn, it is somewhat similar to arabic writing, is there any connection?
Nope, but it is incorrectly called alibata from the arabic “Alifbata”.
They both ultimately descended from Phoenician alphabet.
We need to keep Baybayin mainstreamed in the Philippines we need to to become more and more popular 🙂
I am so happy that Baybayin was partly tackled in Amaya….and now i am religiously trying to learn our prehispanic scripts….
The letters do have curly shapes that kind of remind people of the shapes of some Arabic letters, but any connection is in the really really distant past. Baybayin is definitely closely related to scripts from India and to some extent other southeast Asian scripts, and doesn’t show any relationship to Arabic. It never even borrowed letters or other signs from Arabic like some of the Indonesian scripts eventually did.
You’re right Chris (Miller), Arabic scripts are written from right to left and not left to right. Besides where are the arabic/hindu numerals? How about the Vijay kingdom? Its connection with the word Visaya or Visayan or more like a Vijayan, meaning people of Vijayan kingdom of India. Definitely Baybayin is closed to Indian scripts.
I mean Indonesian.
ya