Jaga, possibly you might not remember, but years & years ago there was an ad on TV for Castrol oil --- mid-1980's, GTX?.
Well, the ganja has a similar problem:-
ganjas ain't ganjas, they's gonjos
in Javanese there is a vowel sound that is sort of between an "A" & an "O", you pronounce it far back in the throat and quite short.
if written correctly this "a" in ganja should have an overring accompanying it, and on old typewriter keyboards and print, that's the way it could be written, but now our keyboards do not have the facility that permits the "A" with overring, so the decision was taken by those who take such decisions to represent the "A" with overring as just "A".
These decision makers figured that the people who knew how to pronounce these words that included the "A" with overring would go on pronouncing them correctly, and those who did not know how to pronounce those words didn't matter anyway.
One thing this did was to permit immediate recognition of an outsider.
A lot of Javanese words use this hidden little vowel.
Surakarta = Surokarto
Kartasura = Kartosuro
Jogjakarta = Jogjokarto = Ngayogyokarto
Lima = Limo
Basa = Boso
Warangka = Rangka = Rongko/Wrongko
In some ways Javanese is a bit like English, you need to know the language as spoken before you can read it correctly, Bahasa Indonesia is quite different, once you know how to pronounce a written word, those vowels are nearly always the same, as with Italian. A child who does not understand what he is reading can read something aloud and adults will understand him -- provided he remembers to roll his r's like a Scotsman, & that the k is often a glottal stop.
We can come up with lots of ideas for the ganja, currently I like the idea that it acts as a cushion for the hand, as well as a guard. Symbolically I'm pretty keen on a water relationship --- Dewi Gangga : Ganges.
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