Hello Guwaya,
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There are ukiran in form of jagung or flowers which are called gana
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Just to add a bit of confusion for all of us: It is possible that gana only refers to flowers. As stated above, Groneman treats them together with corn cobs as a single hilt type though.
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Anyway, I think, just because Gronemans motherlanguage seemed to have been Dutch it makes no sense to study the dutch grammer for clearing the general question here. It will not be possible to come to a 100% verified conclusion and only an assumption based on the different languages could be made which possibly could have leed to a misunderstanding
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Yes, there definitely is some ambiguity in the cited text and we won't be able to resolve the intended meaning with certainty. By analyzing Groneman's publications for writing style, etc. as well as taking contemporary Dutch and German grammar into account, we may be able to define probabilities for the intended meaning but IMHO we won't be able to resolve the question for sure.
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It seems that the use of gana is only to read at Groneman (the others took it from Groneman) and that it is not confirmed by other researchers upon own researches. If this is the fact, the use of the term gana will always have to be used with a questionmark or with the hint to Groneman's reference.
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Yes, I agree: Unless we find an additional early field report, it seems best to just stop utilizing the word gana since it's meaning at the early 20th c. Yogya keraton is ambiguous and hasn't been independently verified, anyway.
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I am myself a Groneman fan but nobody is perfect and grammer mistakes are easily done - if they were done - who knows?! And who wants to decide this - after which criteria?
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There is something at odds here, grammatically. Just for fun, I'll check back with linguists to verify.
Regards,
Kai