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Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey
I have now received a reply from my third informant. This person is a man in his sixties who is regarded world-wide as a premier authority on the keris, and he holds a high rank within the keraton Surakarta.I consider his knowledge in this matter of Javanese language to be beyond question. Here is his answer:-
-----tulisan jawa itu berbunyi sloko, artinya perak----
------that Javanese writing has the sound "sloko", its meaning is silver----
This little exercise demonstrates very well some of the difficulties with the Javanese language.
The honocoroko alphabet , like any alphabet, is used to represent in a written form certain sounds.....
A few years ago a professor at Sebelas Maret University in Solo went on record with his opinion that within a generation or two, Javanese will be a dead language.
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Pak Alan,
Your respected source is correct, but the current spelling should be slaka rather than sloko. The letters are text-book and there can be no confusion in the reading.
The spelling should be hanacaraka rather than honocoroko. The O sound in Jawa script is written using the "taling-tarung".
As for basa Jawa dying, I don't think that is so. It is evolving rather than dying, bringing in Indonesian and English words and sheding and mixing the higher levels of krama madya and krama inggil.
The process now is that the low and intimate level of ngoko (note, I can't write ngaka for this word because it is an O sound) is becoming more dominant and mistakes in krama are much more acceptable, even in formal occasions.
If krama dies it will be fine, it is a relatively new language anyway and it goes against egalitarian values of the curent age.
Nuwun sewu,
Bram