The phonetic component in the missionary grammars of the Philippines (17th-18th centuries)

In this paper, we will address the phonetic-orthographic aspects in the missionary-colonial grammars of the Philippines. Based on a corpus of 16 grammars created by missionaries-linguists during the 17th and 18th centuries, we describe the treatment of the phonetic component of the Philippine languages that they subject to grammatical analysis. Also, we demonstrate its importance in the broad grammatical process that began in Europe with the vernacular languages and continued in the Hispanic tradition with Amerindian and Philippine languages. We establish the links between these three traditions, examine the methods used by the missionaries in analysing this level of language, and emphasise the most important aspects of this grammatization process. As we will observe, some concepts arise from the analysis of the phonetic particularities of the Philippine languages under study, others come from the Amerindian tradition, and many of them, albeit with significant adaptations, are inherited from the vernacular European and Graeco-Latin tradition.