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Old Javanese
Old Javanese or Kawi is an Austronesian language and the oldest attested phase of the Javanese language. It was natively spoken in the central and eastern part of Java Island, what is now Central Java, Yogyakarta and East Java Provinces, Indonesia. As a literary language, Kawi was used across Java and on the islands of Madura, Bali, and Lombok.
The oldest example written entirely in Ancient Javanese, called the Sukabumi inscription, is dated 25 March 804 AD. This inscription, located in the district of Kepung in the Kediri Regency of East Java, is a copy of the original, dated some 120 years earlier (only this copy has been preserved). Its contents concern the construction of a dam for an irrigation canal near the river Śrī Hariñjing (now shortened to Srinjing). This inscription is the last of its kind to be written using Pallava script; all consequent examples of Old Javanese are written using Kawi script.
Old Javanese was not static, and its usage covered approximately 800 years – from the Kalingga kingdom until the founding of the Majapahit empire in 1292. The Javanese language which was spoken and written in the Majapahit era already underwent some changes and is therefore already closer to the Modern Javanese language.
The most important shaping force on Old Javanese was its Austronesian heritage in vocabulary, sentence structure, and grammar that it shared with its sister languages in Southeast Asia.
The Indian linguistic influence in the Old Javanese language was almost exclusively Sanskrit influences (approximately 25%-40%). There is no evidence of Indian linguistic elements in Old Javanese other than Sanskrit. This is different from, for example, the influence of Indian linguistics in the (Old) Malay language.
Sanskrit has had a deep and lasting impact on the vocabulary of the Javanese language. The Old Javanese–English Dictionary, written by Professor P.J. Zoetmulder in 1982, contains approximately 25,500 entries, no fewer than 12,500 of which are borrowed from Sanskrit. This large number is not an indication of usage, but it is an indication that the Ancient Javanese knew and employed these Sanskrit words in their literary works. In any given Old Javanese literary work, approximately 25% of the vocabulary is derived from Sanskrit.
Sanskrit has also influenced both the phonology and the vocabulary of Old Javanese. Old Javanese also contains retroflex consonants, which might have been derived from Sanskrit. That is disputed by several linguists, who hold the view that it is also possible that the occurrence of these retroflex consonants was an independent development within the Austronesian language family.
A related question is the form in which Sanskrit words were loaned in Old Javanese. The borrowed Sanskrit words in Old Javanese are almost without exceptions nouns and adjectives in their undeclined form (Sanskrit lingga). Old Javanese texts contain many more characters with similar phonology values to represent distinct vowels and consonants in Sanskrit such as unadapted loanwords. Wherever these diacritics occur in Old Javanese texts, they are neglected in pronunciation: bhaṭāra is the same as baṭara (loss of vowel length and aspiration is also shared by Elu Prakrit, the ancestor of Sinhala). Nor do they influence the order of the words in the dictionary: the variants s, ṣ, and ś, for example, are all treated like s.
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Old Javanese
Old Javanese or Kawi is an Austronesian language and the oldest attested phase of the Javanese language. It was natively spoken in the central and eastern part of Java Island, what is now Central Java, Yogyakarta and East Java Provinces, Indonesia. As a literary language, Kawi was used across Java and on the islands of Madura, Bali, and Lombok.
The oldest example written entirely in Ancient Javanese, called the Sukabumi inscription, is dated 25 March 804 AD. This inscription, located in the district of Kepung in the Kediri Regency of East Java, is a copy of the original, dated some 120 years earlier (only this copy has been preserved). Its contents concern the construction of a dam for an irrigation canal near the river Śrī Hariñjing (now shortened to Srinjing). This inscription is the last of its kind to be written using Pallava script; all consequent examples of Old Javanese are written using Kawi script.
Old Javanese was not static, and its usage covered approximately 800 years – from the Kalingga kingdom until the founding of the Majapahit empire in 1292. The Javanese language which was spoken and written in the Majapahit era already underwent some changes and is therefore already closer to the Modern Javanese language.
The most important shaping force on Old Javanese was its Austronesian heritage in vocabulary, sentence structure, and grammar that it shared with its sister languages in Southeast Asia.
The Indian linguistic influence in the Old Javanese language was almost exclusively Sanskrit influences (approximately 25%-40%). There is no evidence of Indian linguistic elements in Old Javanese other than Sanskrit. This is different from, for example, the influence of Indian linguistics in the (Old) Malay language.
Sanskrit has had a deep and lasting impact on the vocabulary of the Javanese language. The Old Javanese–English Dictionary, written by Professor P.J. Zoetmulder in 1982, contains approximately 25,500 entries, no fewer than 12,500 of which are borrowed from Sanskrit. This large number is not an indication of usage, but it is an indication that the Ancient Javanese knew and employed these Sanskrit words in their literary works. In any given Old Javanese literary work, approximately 25% of the vocabulary is derived from Sanskrit.
Sanskrit has also influenced both the phonology and the vocabulary of Old Javanese. Old Javanese also contains retroflex consonants, which might have been derived from Sanskrit. That is disputed by several linguists, who hold the view that it is also possible that the occurrence of these retroflex consonants was an independent development within the Austronesian language family.
A related question is the form in which Sanskrit words were loaned in Old Javanese. The borrowed Sanskrit words in Old Javanese are almost without exceptions nouns and adjectives in their undeclined form (Sanskrit lingga). Old Javanese texts contain many more characters with similar phonology values to represent distinct vowels and consonants in Sanskrit such as unadapted loanwords. Wherever these diacritics occur in Old Javanese texts, they are neglected in pronunciation: bhaṭāra is the same as baṭara (loss of vowel length and aspiration is also shared by Elu Prakrit, the ancestor of Sinhala). Nor do they influence the order of the words in the dictionary: the variants s, ṣ, and ś, for example, are all treated like s.