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Old 2nd July 2018, 12:00 AM   #13
A. G. Maisey
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"Pulungan" is a very interesting word.

It exists in Old Javanese where it is given a single meaning :- " a particular type of official". So before +/- 1600 the word "pulung" referred to an official of a particular type.

However, in Kawi, which was one of the inputs to Old Javanese, "pulung" is given four meanings:- "a roll", "rolled", "to gather", as well the Javanese meaning given in the next paragraph. But Kawi is a Javanese adaption of Sanscrit, and the word "pulung" does not seem to exist in Sanscrit, so "pulung", as it is understood in Jawa and other parts of Indonesia, appears to have originated in Kawi.

Modern Javanese (New Javanese) began to develop with the rise of the Second Kingdom of Mataram. (Zoetmulder seems to consider Kawi, Old Javanese and Middle Javanese together as "Old Javanese').

In Modern Javanese "pulung" acquired a number of applications, but the most generally used application seems to be the one associated with "wahyu" = " a sign from heaven in the form of a falling star indicating that the one on whom it falls is destined for high office", so here we have the continuation from Old Javanese into Modern Javanese of "pulung" being associated with officialdom. But in Modern Javanese there is also a whole swathe of other applications for the word "pulung", and its derivatives .

In Javanese the word "pulungan" seems not to get any sort of formal recognition, it may be informally used, but it appears not to be a word that can be used in formal Javanese speech. I am not proficient in Javanese, it is simply too difficult for me to learn, in fact, too difficult for most Javanese people to learn also. I know of a middle-class Javanese woman who married into an aristocratic family, and before her wedding she had to take lessons in Krama and Madya so that she was able to converse politely with all members of her new husband's family, before this she had only been able to speak Ngoko and Bahasa Indonesia. In any case, my opinion that "pulungan" does not exist in correct Javanese is based on personal information from a competent native speaker of Javanese and from several dictionaries.

"Pulungan" is not a Javanese word.
But it is an Indonesian word.

In Bahasa Indonesia (B.I.) the word "pulung" has a similar meaning to the Modern Javanese meaning linked to officialdom, except the B.I. understanding is that it is a flash of light that legitimises a ruler, before I consulted a dictionary, this was the only meaning I knew, however Echols & Shadilly give us other meanings as well:-
1)to have power bestowed by the flash of light,
2) to have the bad luck to be given an unwanted task (obviously a colloquial and cynical meaning).
In colloquial usage (Ngoko) the word "pulung" can also mean "good fortune", just as cynically or sarcastically it can also mean "bad luck".

But in B.I. "pulung" also means "pellet", and in B.I. the word "pulungan" does exist, it means something that has been rolled into pellets. The "an" is a B.I. suffix that creates a noun, for example:- "makan" = eat, "makanan" = "food".

Thus, it seems obvious to me that this "pulungan" word that has been stuck on these figural hilts is the product not of a speaker of Javanese, at least not speaker of Javanese who is above the level of Ngoko, but rather of a speaker of Bahasa Indonesia. Probably somebody from Jakarta.

Here is a hypothetical:- we need a word to put onto a keris hilt that identifies that keris hilt as a style used by people of rank, we know that "pulung" is a flash of light that legitimises a ruler, so we add "an" to the end of it to turn "pulung" into a noun:- "pulungan", a hilt for a ruler or at least somebody of rank.

The problem is though, that we are not really all that well educated, and we probably don't even have a dictionary in the house, let alone think of consulting a dictionary before inventing a new word that is really not all that fitting for the object we created it to describe (the pulungan hilt), so we do not know that the word "pulungan" already exists in B.I. and that it means something that has been rolled into pellets.

Words and the way they are used can tell us more than a little about the person using them.

Last edited by A. G. Maisey; 2nd July 2018 at 12:32 AM. Reason: maths
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