The Kawi or or Old Javanese script is a
Brahmic script
The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...
found primarily in
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...
and used across much of
Maritime Southeast Asia
Maritime Southeast Asia comprises the countries of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and East Timor. Maritime Southeast Asia is sometimes also referred to as Island Southeast Asia, Insular Southeast Asia or Oceanic Sout ...
between the 8th century and the 16th century.
[Aditya Bayu Perdana and Ilham Nurwansah 2020]
Proposal to encode Kawi
/ref> The script is an abugida
An abugida (, from Ge'ez language, Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; ...
meaning that characters are read with an inherent vowel. Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s are used, either to suppress the vowel and represent a pure consonant, or to represent other vowels.[De Casparis, J. G. ''Indonesian Palaeography: A History of Writing in Indonesia from the beginnings to c. AD 1500'', Leiden/Koln, 1975, pp. 35-42 with footnotes][
]
History
The Kawi script is related to the Nagari or old-Devanagari script in India. Also called the Prae-Nagari in Dutch publications after the classic work of F.D.K. Bosch on early Indonesian scripts, the early-Nagari form of script was primarily used in the Kawi script form to write southeast Asian Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominalization, nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cul ...
and Old Javanese
Old Javanese or Kawi is the oldest attested phase of the Javanese language. It was spoken in the eastern part of what is now Central Java and the whole of East Java, Indonesia. As a literary language, Kawi was used across Java and on the islan ...
language in central and eastern Java.[ Kawi is the ancestor of traditional Indonesian scripts, such as Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese, as well as traditional Philippine scripts such as Luzon Kavi the ancient scripts of Laguna Copperplate Inscriptions 900 A.D. and The ]Baybayin
(, ''pre-kudlít'': , ''virama-krus-kudlít'': , ''virama-pamudpod'': ; also formerly commonly incorrectly known as alibata) is a Philippine script. The script is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Geographically, it ...
that has surviving records from the 16th century. The strongest evidence of Nagari influence is found in the Sanur stone inscription found in South Bali, which consists of texts in two scripts: one in Early Nagari and the other in Early Kawi script. Further, the Sanur inscription overlaps into two languages – Sanskrit and Old Balinese. Of these, the Old Balinese language portion of the text is expressed in both Early Nagari and Early Kawi script. This inscription is likely from 914 CE, and its features are similar to the earliest forms of Kawi script found in the central and eastern regions of the Bali's neighboring island of Java.
According to de Casparis, the early Nagari-inspired Kawi script thrived for over three centuries between the 7th- and 10th-century, and after 910 CE, the later Kawi script emerged incorporating regional innovations and South Indian influence (which in itself is influenced in part by Brahmi-Nandinagari). The four stages of Kawi script evolution are 910–950 CE (east Javanese Kawi I), 1019-1042 (east Javanese Kawi II), 1100–1220 (east Javanese Kawi III), 1050–1220 (square script of the Kediri period).
The earliest known texts in Kawi date from the Singhasari
Singhasari ( jv, ꦏꦫꦠꦺꦴꦤ꧀ꦱꦶꦔ꧀ꦲꦱꦫꦶ, translit=Karaton Singhasari or , id, Kerajaan Singasari) was a Javanese Hindu kingdom located in east Java between 1222 and 1292. The kingdom succeeded the Kingdom of Kediri a ...
kingdom in eastern Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...
. The more recent scripts were extant in the Majapahit
Majapahit ( jv, ꦩꦗꦥꦲꦶꦠ꧀; ), also known as Wilwatikta ( jv, ꦮꦶꦭ꧀ꦮꦠꦶꦏ꧀ꦠ; ), was a Javanese Hindu-Buddhist thalassocratic empire in Southeast Asia that was based on the island of Java (in modern-day Indonesi ...
kingdom, also in eastern Java, Bali
Bali () is a province of Indonesia and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller neighbouring islands, notably Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan, and Nu ...
, Borneo
Borneo (; id, Kalimantan) is the List of islands by area, third-largest island in the world and the largest in Asia. At the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia, in relation to major Indonesian islands, it is located north of Java Isl ...
and Sumatra. The Kawi script has attracted scholarly interest both in terms of the history of language and script diffusion, as well as the possible routes for the migration of Buddhism and Hinduism to southeast Asian region because many of the major scripts of southeast Asia show South Indian Pallava script influence.
The modern Javanese script, state George Campbell and Christopher Moseley, emerged in part through the modification of the Kawi script over the medieval era. This modification occurred in part via secondary forms called ''pasangan'' in Javanese, and also from changes in shape. It also shows influence of the northern and western Javanese script forms based on the Pallava Grantha script found in Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu (; , TN) is a state in southern India. It is the tenth largest Indian state by area and the sixth largest by population. Its capital and largest city is Chennai. Tamil Nadu is the home of the Tamil people, whose Tamil languag ...
as well as the Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...
and Roman script with changes in theo-political control of Java and nearby islands from the 14th- to 20th-century.
Examples
A well-known document written in Kawi is the Laguna Copperplate Inscription
The Laguna copperplate inscription ( tl, Inskripsyon sa binatbat na tanso ng Laguna, literal translation: ''Inscription on flattened copper of Laguna'') is an official acquittance inscribed onto a copper plate in the Shaka year 822 (Gregorian ...
, found in 1989 in Laguna de Bay
Laguna de Bay (Spanish for "Lagoon/Lake of Bay"; tl, Lawa ng Bay, ), also known as Laguna Lake, is the largest lake in the Philippines. It is located southeast of Metro Manila, between the provinces of Laguna to the south and Rizal to the no ...
near Manila, Philippines
Manila ( , ; fil, Maynila, ), officially the City of Manila ( fil, Lungsod ng Maynila, ), is the capital city, capital of the Philippines, and its second-most populous city. It is Cities of the Philippines#Independent cities, highly urbanize ...
. It has inscribed on it a date of Saka era
The Shaka era ( IAST: Śaka, Śāka) is a historical Hindu calendar era (year numbering), the epoch (its year zero) of which corresponds to Julian year 78.
The era has been widely used in different regions of India as well as in SE Asia.
Hi ...
822, corresponding to May 10, 900 AD,[Laguna Copperplate Inscription – Article in English](_blank)
and is written in Old Malay
Malay was first used in the first millennia known as Old Malay, a part of the Austronesian language family. Over a period of two millennia, Malay has undergone various stages of development that derived from different layers of foreign influen ...
containing numerous loanwords from Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominalization, nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cul ...
and a few non-Malay vocabulary elements whose origin is ambiguous between Old Javanese
Old Javanese or Kawi is the oldest attested phase of the Javanese language. It was spoken in the eastern part of what is now Central Java and the whole of East Java, Indonesia. As a literary language, Kawi was used across Java and on the islan ...
and Old Tagalog.[Postma, Antoon. (1992).]
Unicode
The Kawi script was added to the Unicode Standard 15.0 in September 2022 based on a proposal by Aditya Bayu Perdana and Ilham Nurwansah.[Unicode Technical Committee 2021]
Approved Minutes of UTC Meeting 166
/ref> An earlier preliminary proposal was submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee by Anshuman Pandey in 2012.
The Unicode block for the Kawi script is U+11F00–U+11F5F and contains 86 characters:
Child systems
Consonants
Gallery
The above is a comparison of the development of Devanagari
Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the a ...
characters in Kawi, Old Mon of the kingdom of Ava, and Thai script
The Thai script ( th, อักษรไทย, ) is the abugida used to write Thai, Southern Thai and many other languages spoken in Thailand. The Thai alphabet itself (as used to write Thai) has 44 consonant symbols ( th, พยัญชน ...
.
See also
*Baybayin
(, ''pre-kudlít'': , ''virama-krus-kudlít'': , ''virama-pamudpod'': ; also formerly commonly incorrectly known as alibata) is a Philippine script. The script is an abugida belonging to the family of the Brahmic scripts. Geographically, it ...
*Buhid script
Surat Buhid is an Abugida used to write the Buhid language. As a Brahmic script indigenous to the Philippines, it closely related to Baybayin and Hanunó'o. It is still used today by the Mangyans, found mainly on island of Mindoro, to write t ...
*Filipino orthography
Filipino orthography ( fil, Ortograpiyang Filipino) specifies the correct use of the writing system of the Filipino language, the national and co- official language of the Philippines.
In 2013, the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino released the ''Or ...
*Hanunó'o script
Hanunoo (), also rendered Hanunó'o, is one of the scripts indigenous to the Philippines and is used by the Mangyan peoples of southern Mindoro to write the Hanunó'o language.
It is an abugida descended from the Brahmic scripts, closely ...
*Kawi language
Old Javanese or Kawi is the oldest attested phase of the Javanese language. It was spoken in the eastern part of what is now Central Java and the whole of East Java, Indonesia. As a literary language, Kawi was used across Java and on the islan ...
*Tagbanwa script
Tagbanwa is one of the scripts indigenous to the Philippines, used by the Tagbanwa and the Palawan people as their ethnic writing system.
The Tagbanwa languages (Aborlan, Calamian and Central), which are Austronesian languages with about 25,000 ...
* Vaṭṭeḻuttu script
Notes
References
*Omniglot
''Kawi alphabet''
Retrieved 16 May 2019
*Tiongson, Jaime F., (2008)
Laguna copperplate inscription: a new interpretation using early Tagalog dictionaries
Bayang Pinagpala. Retrieved January 14, 2012.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kawi Script
8th-century introductions
Obsolete writing systems
Brahmic scripts