P Kelly
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 65450 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | P Kelly |
| NOMBRES | P |
| APELLIDO | Kelly |
| FIRMA | KELLY P |
| AFILIACIONES | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6467-2338 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 25 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 25 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
How Eskayan is used Today
The chapter introduces the linguistic ecology of the Philippines, and the place of Eskayan as it is spoken on the island of Bohol. Today, the dominant language of Bohol is Boholano-Visayan, but English and other languages are also used. Ritual languages and speech disguise games are known in various parts of the island. The Eskayan language, meanwhile, is spoken in just five small villages in the southeast. Eskayan is not used as a language of ev…
Conclusion
The controversies surrounding the origin of Eskayan language and script illustrate the complex politics of indigeneity in the Philippines. Even before the appearance of the Eskaya, the Tasaday Affair unfolded in Mindanao, generating a heated debate over indigenous authenticity. The history of the Eskayan language, meanwhile, demonstrates that “authentic” indigenous identities may themselves be creative constructions involving productive processes…
Words and their Origins
This chapter explores the origins of Eskayan vocabulary. Eskayan morphosyntax is strongly modeled on the grammar of Visayan, the principal language of Bohol. At the same time, its vocabulary bears only a minor Visayan influence, suggesting full-scale relexification. Spanish has had a more marked influence on Eskayan vocabulary in terms of phonotactics, root length, and a small number of direct borrowings. A small proportion of Eskayan lexemes are…
From Pinay to Mariano Datahan (And Back Again)
Mariano Datahan was the charismatic leader of the Eskaya community who lived on the island of Bohol in the Philippines, from circa 1875 to 1949. From various oral and written sources, it is possible to establish the broad circumstances of his life that led to his establishment of a radical utopian community. In childhood he served as an altar boy under the missionary linguist Fr. Felix Guillen, and he later participated in the Philippine–American…
Eskaya Literature and Traditional Historiography
Eskaya people have a large corpus of traditional literature, handwritten in both Eskayan and Visayan. The Eskaya also have traditions of oral historiography and prophecy. In these oral and written texts Eskaya people maintain that their ancestors arrived from Sumatra to colonize Bohol. Bohol’s first pope, Pinay, was instructed by the Holy Child to create the Eskayan language and script and base it on the human body. The Spanish came and burned th…
Language, Literacy, and Revolt in the Southern Philippines
This chapter summarizes the historical and sociological context of the Visayan archipelago of the southern Philippines with a view to understanding why the Eskayan language and its speakers went unnoticed in the archival record for so long. Pre-contact indigenous writing systems and literacy practices of the Philippines are introduced, as well as the language policies enacted by successive colonial governments in order to manage the “problem” of …
Eskayan Revealed
This chapter is a speculative reconstruction of the process by which the Eskayan language and script came into existence. Eskaya people today maintain that Eskayan was created by the ancestral “pope” Pinay and that it was later revealed to the prophet Mariano Datahan. The chapter argues that this event took place after the United States began introducing English into Bohol’s educational system in 1902, prompting a desire to return to Bohol’s “tru…
Simplification Is Not Dominant in the Evolution of Chinese Characters
Linguistic systems are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the claim that Chinese characters have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim by analyzing a dataset with more than half a million images of Chinese characters spanning more than 3,000 years of recorded history. We find no consistent evidence of simp…
The Last Language on Earth
The Eskayan language of Bohol in the southern Philippines has been an object of controversy ever since it came to light in the early 1980s. Written in an unusual script, Eskayan bears no obvious similarity to any known language of the Philippines, a fact that has prompted speculation that it was either displaced from afar, fossilized from the deep past, or invented as an elaborate hoax. This book investigates the history of Eskayan through a syst…
Knowledge and Attitudes of two Latino Groups about Alzheimer Disease
Clustering Latinos under a single group in Alzheimer Disease (AD) research, neglects, among other things cultural and environmental differences. To address this, we examine knowledge and attitudes about AD among two Latino groups. We held 5 focus groups and 2 interviews all in Spanish with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans between 40 and 60 years old living in the Grand Rapids area in Michigan. Using content analysis of the discussions, we identified th…
The Predictable Evolution of Letter Shapes
A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus, the iconic ox's head 𓃾 of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician 𐤀 and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinea…
Australian message sticks
Message sticks are tools of graphic communication, once used across the Australian continent. While their styles vary, a typical message stick is a flattened or cylindrical length of wood with motifs engraved on all sides. Carried by special messengers over long distances, their motifs were intended to complement a verbally produced communication such as an invitation, a declaration of war, or news of a death. It was only in the late 1880s that m…
The art of not being legible
James C. Scott argued that the traditional non-literacy of highland minorities in mainland Southeast Asia may belong to a wider pattern of state evasion whereby lowland practices, including literacy, are strategically rejected. This position ignores the moral and material value attributed to literacy in upland folklore, as well as the many radical messianic movements that purported to bring writing back to the highlands. I review nine such cases …
L'art de ne pas être lisible
Discutant la proposition de l'anthropologue James Scott, qui affirme que l'absence de formes d'écritures vernaculaires parmi les minorités des hautes terres de l'Asie du Sud-Est continentale constituerait une des différentes manières de fuir l'État, l'auteur examine neuf écritures retrouvées, créées sur fond de violents conflits avec les basses terres. Reconnaissant l'écriture comme un instrument important du pouvoir étatique, les chefs de ces mi…
Excavating a Hidden Bell Story from the Philippines
Stories of hidden valuable artifacts are told in many parts of the Philippines. One such tale is of a church bell, concealed to prevent theft but now beyond reach (Motif V115.1.3, Sunken church bell cannot be raised). Typically, these stories are transmitted orally. However the small Eskaya community of southeast Bohol maintains a written version of a lost-bell tale included in a larger intergenerational archive of hand-copied literature. Since t…
Introducing the Eskaya Writing System
This paper introduces and documents the Eskaya () writing system of the Philippines, developed ca. 1920–1937, and attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its creation. Although the script is used for representing Visayan (Cebuano)—a widely used language of the southern Philippines—its privileged role is in the written reproduction of a constructed utopian language, referred to as Eskayan or Bisayan Declarado. Held to have been invented by th…
An Investigation into the Human Element of On-farm Animal Welfare Incidents in Ireland
A previous study on key farm performance indicators for animal welfare incidents in Ireland provided anecdotal evidence to suggest that farm animal welfare standards are often underpinned by social and human health-related factors among farmers. The present study took an exploratory approach to identify these factors and how they influence farm animal neglect. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with farmers. Identified factors included far…
Refuge 30.1 (General Issue) Print Copy
This is an accessible copy of issue 30.1. It was certified by a CPWA-certified accessibility professional as meeting or exceeding all accessibility conformance requirements with respect to: WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA PDF/UA (David Berman Communications 13 October, 2025)
Volume 10 (2014) | Issue 1
Volume 10, Issue 1 (2014), Journal:Journal of Human Security, Info:The Open Access Journal of Human Security brings together expertise from universities worldwide and facilitates communication and collaboration between researchers, practitioners and educators
The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets
The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets (2nd edition) George L. Campbell and Christopher Moseley London & New York: Routledge, 2012, 183 pp. Reviewed by Piers Kelly, The Australian National
Your word against mine
When news of an uncontacted ‘lost tribe’ began emanating from the island of B ohol in the southern P hilippines, visitors were fascinated by the group's unique language and complex writing system, used today by some five hundred people in limited domains. Though few persons have attempted to analyse the language—known today as Eskayan—exotic theories of its origins are widely circulated by outsiders. However, according to speakers, E skayan was c…
The Imagined Economies of Globalization
Journal Article The Imagined Economies of Globalization Get access Philip Kelly Philip Kelly York University, Toronto, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Economic Geography, Volume 5, Issue 2, April 2005, Pages 254–257, https://doi.org/10.1093/jnlecg/lbh048 Published: 01 April 2005
Body image and sociology
Health-related quality of life of HIV-infected women
The word made flesh
In 1980, news of an uncontacted 'Eskaya tribe' began emanating from the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. Early visitors were fascinated by the group's unique language and complex writing system, which are still used today by some 500 people for song, prayer, teaching and the reproduction of a large corpus of traditional literature. Though few have attempted to analyse the Eskayan language, exotic theories of its origins are widely cir…
Australian message sticks
Message sticks are tools of graphic communication, once used across the Australian continent. While their styles vary, a typical message stick is a flattened or cylindrical length of wood with motifs engraved on all sides. Carried by special messengers over long distances, their motifs were intended to complement a verbally produced communication such as an invitation, a declaration of war, or news of a death. It was only in the late 1880s that m…
The Predictable Evolution of Letter Shapes
A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus, the iconic ox's head 𓃾 of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician 𐤀 and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinea…
Introducing the Eskaya Writing System
This paper introduces and documents the Eskaya () writing system of the Philippines, developed ca. 1920–1937, and attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its creation. Although the script is used for representing Visayan (Cebuano)—a widely used language of the southern Philippines—its privileged role is in the written reproduction of a constructed utopian language, referred to as Eskayan or Bisayan Declarado. Held to have been invented by th…
The word made flesh
In 1980, news of an uncontacted 'Eskaya tribe' began emanating from the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. Early visitors were fascinated by the group's unique language and complex writing system, which are still used today by some 500 people for song, prayer, teaching and the reproduction of a large corpus of traditional literature. Though few have attempted to analyse the Eskayan language, exotic theories of its origins are widely cir…
Your word against mine
When news of an uncontacted ‘lost tribe’ began emanating from the island of B ohol in the southern P hilippines, visitors were fascinated by the group's unique language and complex writing system, used today by some five hundred people in limited domains. Though few persons have attempted to analyse the language—known today as Eskayan—exotic theories of its origins are widely circulated by outsiders. However, according to speakers, E skayan was c…
The Last Language on Earth
The Eskayan language of Bohol in the southern Philippines has been an object of controversy ever since it came to light in the early 1980s. Written in an unusual script, Eskayan bears no obvious similarity to any known language of the Philippines, a fact that has prompted speculation that it was either displaced from afar, fossilized from the deep past, or invented as an elaborate hoax. This book investigates the history of Eskayan through a syst…
Knowledge and Attitudes of two Latino Groups about Alzheimer Disease
Clustering Latinos under a single group in Alzheimer Disease (AD) research, neglects, among other things cultural and environmental differences. To address this, we examine knowledge and attitudes about AD among two Latino groups. We held 5 focus groups and 2 interviews all in Spanish with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans between 40 and 60 years old living in the Grand Rapids area in Michigan. Using content analysis of the discussions, we identified th…
The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets
The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets (2nd edition) George L. Campbell and Christopher Moseley London & New York: Routledge, 2012, 183 pp. Reviewed by Piers Kelly, The Australian National
Health-related quality of life of HIV-infected women
Body image and sociology
The Imagined Economies of Globalization
Journal Article The Imagined Economies of Globalization Get access Philip Kelly Philip Kelly York University, Toronto, Canada Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Economic Geography, Volume 5, Issue 2, April 2005, Pages 254–257, https://doi.org/10.1093/jnlecg/lbh048 Published: 01 April 2005
Your word against mine
When news of an uncontacted ‘lost tribe’ began emanating from the island of B ohol in the southern P hilippines, visitors were fascinated by the group's unique language and complex writing system, used today by some five hundred people in limited domains. Though few persons have attempted to analyse the language—known today as Eskayan—exotic theories of its origins are widely circulated by outsiders. However, according to speakers, E skayan was c…
Volume 10 (2014) | Issue 1
Volume 10, Issue 1 (2014), Journal:Journal of Human Security, Info:The Open Access Journal of Human Security brings together expertise from universities worldwide and facilitates communication and collaboration between researchers, practitioners and educators
The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets
The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets (2nd edition) George L. Campbell and Christopher Moseley London & New York: Routledge, 2012, 183 pp. Reviewed by Piers Kelly, The Australian National
Refuge 30.1 (General Issue) Print Copy
This is an accessible copy of issue 30.1. It was certified by a CPWA-certified accessibility professional as meeting or exceeding all accessibility conformance requirements with respect to: WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA PDF/UA (David Berman Communications 13 October, 2025)
An Investigation into the Human Element of On-farm Animal Welfare Incidents in Ireland
A previous study on key farm performance indicators for animal welfare incidents in Ireland provided anecdotal evidence to suggest that farm animal welfare standards are often underpinned by social and human health-related factors among farmers. The present study took an exploratory approach to identify these factors and how they influence farm animal neglect. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with farmers. Identified factors included far…
Excavating a Hidden Bell Story from the Philippines
Stories of hidden valuable artifacts are told in many parts of the Philippines. One such tale is of a church bell, concealed to prevent theft but now beyond reach (Motif V115.1.3, Sunken church bell cannot be raised). Typically, these stories are transmitted orally. However the small Eskaya community of southeast Bohol maintains a written version of a lost-bell tale included in a larger intergenerational archive of hand-copied literature. Since t…
Introducing the Eskaya Writing System
This paper introduces and documents the Eskaya () writing system of the Philippines, developed ca. 1920–1937, and attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its creation. Although the script is used for representing Visayan (Cebuano)—a widely used language of the southern Philippines—its privileged role is in the written reproduction of a constructed utopian language, referred to as Eskayan or Bisayan Declarado. Held to have been invented by th…
The art of not being legible
James C. Scott argued that the traditional non-literacy of highland minorities in mainland Southeast Asia may belong to a wider pattern of state evasion whereby lowland practices, including literacy, are strategically rejected. This position ignores the moral and material value attributed to literacy in upland folklore, as well as the many radical messianic movements that purported to bring writing back to the highlands. I review nine such cases …
L'art de ne pas être lisible
Discutant la proposition de l'anthropologue James Scott, qui affirme que l'absence de formes d'écritures vernaculaires parmi les minorités des hautes terres de l'Asie du Sud-Est continentale constituerait une des différentes manières de fuir l'État, l'auteur examine neuf écritures retrouvées, créées sur fond de violents conflits avec les basses terres. Reconnaissant l'écriture comme un instrument important du pouvoir étatique, les chefs de ces mi…
Australian message sticks
Message sticks are tools of graphic communication, once used across the Australian continent. While their styles vary, a typical message stick is a flattened or cylindrical length of wood with motifs engraved on all sides. Carried by special messengers over long distances, their motifs were intended to complement a verbally produced communication such as an invitation, a declaration of war, or news of a death. It was only in the late 1880s that m…
Knowledge and Attitudes of two Latino Groups about Alzheimer Disease
Clustering Latinos under a single group in Alzheimer Disease (AD) research, neglects, among other things cultural and environmental differences. To address this, we examine knowledge and attitudes about AD among two Latino groups. We held 5 focus groups and 2 interviews all in Spanish with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans between 40 and 60 years old living in the Grand Rapids area in Michigan. Using content analysis of the discussions, we identified th…
The Predictable Evolution of Letter Shapes
A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus, the iconic ox's head 𓃾 of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician 𐤀 and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinea…
How Eskayan is used Today
The chapter introduces the linguistic ecology of the Philippines, and the place of Eskayan as it is spoken on the island of Bohol. Today, the dominant language of Bohol is Boholano-Visayan, but English and other languages are also used. Ritual languages and speech disguise games are known in various parts of the island. The Eskayan language, meanwhile, is spoken in just five small villages in the southeast. Eskayan is not used as a language of ev…
Conclusion
The controversies surrounding the origin of Eskayan language and script illustrate the complex politics of indigeneity in the Philippines. Even before the appearance of the Eskaya, the Tasaday Affair unfolded in Mindanao, generating a heated debate over indigenous authenticity. The history of the Eskayan language, meanwhile, demonstrates that “authentic” indigenous identities may themselves be creative constructions involving productive processes…
Words and their Origins
This chapter explores the origins of Eskayan vocabulary. Eskayan morphosyntax is strongly modeled on the grammar of Visayan, the principal language of Bohol. At the same time, its vocabulary bears only a minor Visayan influence, suggesting full-scale relexification. Spanish has had a more marked influence on Eskayan vocabulary in terms of phonotactics, root length, and a small number of direct borrowings. A small proportion of Eskayan lexemes are…
From Pinay to Mariano Datahan (And Back Again)
Mariano Datahan was the charismatic leader of the Eskaya community who lived on the island of Bohol in the Philippines, from circa 1875 to 1949. From various oral and written sources, it is possible to establish the broad circumstances of his life that led to his establishment of a radical utopian community. In childhood he served as an altar boy under the missionary linguist Fr. Felix Guillen, and he later participated in the Philippine–American…
Eskaya Literature and Traditional Historiography
Eskaya people have a large corpus of traditional literature, handwritten in both Eskayan and Visayan. The Eskaya also have traditions of oral historiography and prophecy. In these oral and written texts Eskaya people maintain that their ancestors arrived from Sumatra to colonize Bohol. Bohol’s first pope, Pinay, was instructed by the Holy Child to create the Eskayan language and script and base it on the human body. The Spanish came and burned th…
Language, Literacy, and Revolt in the Southern Philippines
This chapter summarizes the historical and sociological context of the Visayan archipelago of the southern Philippines with a view to understanding why the Eskayan language and its speakers went unnoticed in the archival record for so long. Pre-contact indigenous writing systems and literacy practices of the Philippines are introduced, as well as the language policies enacted by successive colonial governments in order to manage the “problem” of …
Eskayan Revealed
This chapter is a speculative reconstruction of the process by which the Eskayan language and script came into existence. Eskaya people today maintain that Eskayan was created by the ancestral “pope” Pinay and that it was later revealed to the prophet Mariano Datahan. The chapter argues that this event took place after the United States began introducing English into Bohol’s educational system in 1902, prompting a desire to return to Bohol’s “tru…
Simplification Is Not Dominant in the Evolution of Chinese Characters
Linguistic systems are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the claim that Chinese characters have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim by analyzing a dataset with more than half a million images of Chinese characters spanning more than 3,000 years of recorded history. We find no consistent evidence of simp…
The Last Language on Earth
The Eskayan language of Bohol in the southern Philippines has been an object of controversy ever since it came to light in the early 1980s. Written in an unusual script, Eskayan bears no obvious similarity to any known language of the Philippines, a fact that has prompted speculation that it was either displaced from afar, fossilized from the deep past, or invented as an elaborate hoax. This book investigates the history of Eskayan through a syst…
The word made flesh
In 1980, news of an uncontacted 'Eskaya tribe' began emanating from the island of Bohol in the southern Philippines. Early visitors were fascinated by the group's unique language and complex writing system, which are still used today by some 500 people for song, prayer, teaching and the reproduction of a large corpus of traditional literature. Though few have attempted to analyse the Eskayan language, exotic theories of its origins are widely cir…
History (18 obras) · Sociology (16 obras) · Linguistics (13 obras) · Philippine History and Culture (12 obras) · Art (10 obras) · History (10 obras) · Political science (10 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras) · Anthropology (7 obras) · Computer Science (7 obras)