Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Javanese Alphabet (Ha Na Ca Ra Ka)

  • Javanese is a syllabic alphabet - each letter has an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels can be indicated using a variety of diacritics which appear above, below, in front of or after the main letter, which also known as tjarakan or carakan.
  • Each consonant has two forms: the aksara form is used at the beginning of a syllable, while the pasangan form, which usually appears below the aksara form, is used for the second consonant of a consonant cluster and mutes the vowel of the aksara.
  • Here are the display the Javanese alphabet on both carakan and pasangan:
Carakan:
Pasangan

How to write it?
Carakan in Javanese alphabet is functioned as the basic letters which are in the form of syllable in its pronunciations. There are 20 letter-syllables in Javanese alphabet as displayed above, in which all are consonant with /a/ sound as the default sound follows in each letter-syllable. Meanwhile, if you want to get only letter with no /a/ sound, pasangan is used, to make it clearer, take a look these below examples:

Bakso
  1. This word consists of letter syllables ‘ba’, ‘so’ and consonant letter ‘k’. In writing that word in Javanese, for the first step to make it easier, just read that word as bakasa, in this form, all the components are in the form of letter-syllables (carakan), so all you need to do is just see the carakan table.
  2. After you got the letter needed to form that word, the next step is try to notice in what part is a letter not letter-syllable. In that word you see that ‘k’ stands alone, which means that ‘k’ is in the form of letter/ consonant letter. To get this consonant, just write the ‘ba’ and ‘ka’ and to stop ‘ka’ and change it into ‘k’, put pasangan ‘sa’ after ‘ka’. In this state, your writing is pronounced as baksa, and then finally put some punctuation or sandhangan to get the sound /o/, in this case is taling tarung before and after pasangan ‘sa’, for further discussion on sandhangan will be discussed in the next section. 
  3. The writing of that word in Javanese will be:








So that, to get consonant in Javanese, (1) just write the consonant (or letter that is stopped) by using carakan letter-syllable and then (2) put the pasangan of the letter which follows it. 

Sandhangan (punctuation



2 comments:

  1. Does Javanese Aksara could be use to master the language itself from someone who isn't a native ?
    By the way for Extensive Reading Project, I've put in my link at dionniko.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. the hardest thing that I hate the most when I got elementary and secondary schools...although I know its important to know and its seems regret cz I always left the class when Javanese subject heheheheheheh..

    ReplyDelete

If you have other contemporary issues, questions, suggestions, criticisms, disagreements, or even rejections, please leave comment politely...