Introduction

[A. G. Maisey]

Good to have you on board Gajah.

I don't have much to add to what David has already said.

Terminology alters from place to place and from time to time, and assessment of blade age with any degree of possible accuracy will take you a very long time to come to terms with.

For postings to this discussion group English is quite OK, but Bahasa Indonesia at a level sufficient for comfortable communication is perhaps the world's easiest language to learn, as you are resident there I'm certain that you already have more than sufficient Indonesian for comfortable communication.

The Javanese language is something quite different. After going on for 50 years of contact with Indonesia, and using a mixture of English-Indonesian-Javanese every day in domestic communication, I am still a very long way from being proficient in Javanese, in fact I have come to the conclusion that you need to be born Javanese in either a rural setting, or an aristocratic setting to be a good speaker of Javanese.

As for Old Javanese, it does help if you can gain some understanding of it, but I rather doubt that you will be able to find anybody who can help you with this, it becomes a self-driven effort involving Romanised Old Javanese text and dictionaries and lots of patience.

To go a step further you might consider learning the old alphabet:- aksara jawa, hanacaraka, however, as with the spoken language there are problems with this, because Javanese is a non-standardised language and in speech, Romanised text and aksara jawa there is a good deal of variation in the way words are presented.