Pegon script

Pegon script
Pegon (Javanese and Sundanese: , ; also known as ) is a modified Arabic script used to write the Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese languages, as an alternative to the Latin script or the Javanese script and the Old Sundanese script. It was used in a variety of applications, from religion, to diplomacy, to poetry. But today particularly, it is used for religious (Islamic) writing and poetry, particularly in writing commentaries of the Qur'an. Pegon includes letters that are not present in Modern Standard Arabic. Pegon has been studied far less than its Jawi counterpart which is used for Malay, Acehnese and Minangkabau.
In the past few decades, Indonesian language has grown in its prominence and role as the national language of Indonesia, being superimposed on all other local and regional languages. Thus, publishing institutions associated with religious schools have further developed new teaching material, in order to expand the use of Pegon script to Indonesian language as well. Indonesian language, being a variety of Malay, has also been written by the sister script of Pegon, Jawi.
Etymology
The word Pegon originated from the Javanese word , meaning "deviate", due to the practice of writing the Javanese language with Arabic script, which was considered unconventional by Javanese people.
History
One of the earliest dated examples of the usage of Pegon may be Masa'il al-ta'lim, a work on Islamic law written in Arabic with interlinear translation and marginal commentary in Javanese. The manuscript is dated 1623 and written on , a paper made from the bark of the mulberry tree.
Letters
Pegon uses the original letters of the Arabic script plus an additional seven letters to represent native Javanese sounds not present in Arabic: and . One additional letter is used in foreign loanwords: . These new letters are formed by the addition of dots to base letter forms. Pegon is not standardized and variation can be seen in how these additional letters are represented, most commonly in the position of the dots (above or below) and the number of dots (one or three).
In more recent teaching material, additional letters have been added in order to use the script for writing Indonesian language.
Representation of vowels
Diacritic marks are used in Pegon to represent vowel sounds or in some cases a lack thereof. Their prevalence in Pegon text varies from marking every letter, to being present only to differentiate particular vowel sounds. Full marking of letters is common in most formal texts, including religious texts and historic diplomatic manuscripts.
Arabic script is a (mostly) consonantal writing system, meaning that only consonants are written. Arabic has 3 vowels, each being short or long. There are 3 letters in Arabic ("ا", "و", and "ي") that also represent long vowels. but otherwise the short vowels are marked in diacritic in religious texts or texts meant for beginner learners, that are not marked at all in most everyday texts. But, the phonology of Javanese, Sundanese, and Madurese do not make such distinction. Instead there are 6 vowels. Thus, with the use of diacritics in conjuncton with the three aforementioned letters, Arabic script has become fully phonemic in its adoption for languages of Java Island.
Gundhul
A version of the script which uses no diacritics at all, similar to Jawi, is known as meaning 'bare/bald' in Javanese. Within sentences and context, to a fluent speaker, the base letters often indicate the correct word and the underlying vowel which renders the diacritics unnecessary.
This version is increasingly common in typed books (as opposed to handwritten texts, as was the norm) as to a fluent speaker, the base letters often indicate the correct word and the underlying vowel which renders the diacritics unnecessary, in this case only the e-pepêt (ۤ) is written. Other diacritics are only ever written when confusion arises, and are used to differentiate distinct vowel sounds.
List of vowel sounds
Vowels at the beginning of a word are indicated by the letter alif, by the appropriate diacritic on top of alif, as well as a follow-up letter "و" or "ي" if required. Traditionally, this follow-up letter will be written with a zero-vowel diacritic (sukun), to indicate its role as part of the first syllable of the word, and not the start of a new one.
Notes
In the prestige dialect of Surakarta, is pronounced [ɔ] in word-final open syllables, and in any open penultimate syllable before such an [ɔ]. This may be represented by . e.g. Surabaya Central Javanese: Suråbåyå Indonesian: Surabaya
Different from Maddah (letter آ), its shape is different, shorter in horizontal length. Historic texts have used both simultaneously and have differentiated between the two.
Below is a list of the diacritics that are used in indicating vowels:
Fathah (◌َ), also sometimes used on its own to represent , particularly in religious texts. It is added to the preceding letter to differentiate from , as is detailed below. It is used in a similar fashion to differentiate from .
Kasrah (◌ِ), also sometimes used on its own to represent , particularly in religious texts.
Dammah (◌ُ) also sometimes used on its own to represent , particularly in religious texts.
Pepet (ۤ◌) is used to represent (Note: different from Maddah, its shape is different, shorter in horizontal length.)
Sukun (◌ْ) used to indicate that the consonant it's marking, is part of the preceding sylable and not the beginning of a new one.
Sample words, fully vocalized as well as in Gundhul (unvocalized):
Samples presented in this article are from Javanese, Sundanese, and Indonesian.
Consonant clusters
Consonant clusters, as written with Latin script, are not written in Pegon. Instead, they are modified, either by Anaptyxis of an e-pepet (ê) ([ə]) on the first of the two consonants in the cluster, or by adding of a Prothesis [a] sound prior to the consonant cluster.
Anaptyxis of an e-pepet (ê) ([ə]) occurs through two types of clusters, clusters that consist of a nasal consonant followed by a liquid consonant, like [mr], [ml], or [ŋl], or clusters that consist of an obstruent consonant followed by a plosive consonant, like [tr], [sr], [kr], [gl], [pl], or [by].
Sample words, fully vocalized as well as in Gundhul (unvocalized)::
Prothesis of an [a] sound prior to the consonant cluster occurs in clusters that consist of a nasal consonant followed by a plosive consonant, like [nj], [ŋg], [mb], or [nd]
Sample words, fully vocalized as well as in Gundhul (unvocalized)::
Vowel Sequences
Vowel sequences follow certain general conventions. Variations besides these are also commonly seen in various books and manuscripts.
Reduplication
In Pegon script, Reduplication is done in a manner simillar to Jawi script, that is with the use of the numeral "٢" right after the base word.
While suffixed, the numeral "٢" comes in between the base word and the suffix, effectively being in the middle of the word.
while prefixed reduplication of base word is represented with the hypen.
Javanese Sample words, fully vocalized as well as in Gundhul (unvocalized)::
Madurese Pèghu
Madurese language has a phonology that is more complicated than its neighbouring languages on the island of Java. It includes /a/ (shown with "a" in Latin) and /ɤ/ (shown with "â" in Latin). It also has a wider range of glottal pauses.
Thus, the Arabic script adopted to Madurese, natively known as Pèghu, is quite different, and still exclusively written vocalized using diacritics.
Madurese also has more consonants than its neighboring languages due to it having voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated (traditionally often transcribed as voiced aspirated), and voiced unaspirated. But these are not reflected in Pèghu Script.
List of vowel sounds
Vowels at the beginning of a word are indicated by the letter alif (ا) or ain (ع), by the appropriate diacritic on top of the letter, as well as a follow-up letter "و", "ي", or "ء" if required. Traditionally, this follow-up letter will be written with a zero-vowel diacritic (sukun), to indicate its role as part of the first syllable of the word, and not the start of a new one.
Consonants
Below table are the additional consonants that are used in Madurese Pèghu. As seen here, for the phonemes /g/ and /dh/, the preference of Madurese writers has been to place one dot underneath the letter.
With the exception of "dh", all other aspirated consonants in Madurese Pèghu are missing a letter, and are generally simply represented by the same letter as their unaspirated counterpart.
Comparison of Pegon and Jawi
The main difference between Jawi and Pegon is that the latter is almost always written with vowel diacritics. Javanese written without any vowel diacritics, similar to Jawi is called , meaning 'bare/bald' in Javanese. The orthographic rules of Jawi and Pegon differ, with Jawi spelling being much more standardised than Pegon. Pegon tends to write all vowel sounds of native words explicitly, either with full letters or diacritics, whereas Jawi orthography sometimes omits alif in certain positions where an would be pronounced, similarly other vowel sounds may not be written explicitly.
For those additional letters representing sounds not present in Arabic, some letters have the same appearance in both Jawi and Pegon, while others differ. Pegon also features two additional letters for sounds native to Javanese which are not present in Malay. Also the form of kaf used differs between the two varieties with Pegon using the Arabic form, while Jawi uses the Persian form.
Transliteration
The United States Library of Congress published a romanization standard of Jawi and Pegon in 2012.
Text samples
The below Islamic quote, in several languages, written in their respective Latin scripts, as well as in Pegon script.
His Majesty the Prophet Muhammad is the messenger of God to all creatures, whatever is told by His Majesty the Prophet Muhammad is the real truth. Therefore all creatures have to corroborate and follow His Majesty the Prophet Muhammad.
Note that in the above examples, there are 5 Arabic Loanwords, which must be written as they would in Arabic. Namely:
The word Nabi in Latin Script shall be written as نبي in Pegon. It would be incorrect to write نابي.
The word Muhammad in Latin Script shall be written as محمد in Pegon. It would be incorrect to write موهمماد.
The word Allah in Latin Script shall be written as الله in Pegon. It would be incorrect to write أللاه.
The word Makhluk in Latin Script shall be written as مخلوق in Pegon. It would be incorrect to write ماخلوك.
The word Wajib in Latin Script shall be written as واجب in Pegon. It would be incorrect to write واجيب.
See also
Jawi alphabet
Abjad Pegon (in Indonesian)
Abjad Jawi (in Indonesian)
Footnotes
References
On Pegon Script for Javanese language: Jamalin, F., & Rahman, A. A. (2021). Arabic-Java Writing System: How Javanese Language Adopts Arabic Script. Izdihar : Journal of Arabic Language Teaching, Linguistics, and Literature, 4(1), 43–58. https://doi.org/10.22219/jiz.v4i1.11337 (PDF) (Archive)
On Pegon Script for Sundanese language: Apriyanto, Agung, Ruhaliah Nunuy Nurjanah, and Ruhaliah. (2021) "Structure of the Sundanese Language in the Pegon Script". Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (ICOLLITE 2021). https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211119.006. PDF (Archive)
Religious book featuring Arabic, with word-by-word Madurese language translation: Syeikh Khalil bin Abdul Latif al-Bankalani al-Maduri (Bangkalan, Madura). (1988) "Al-Matn al-Shareef". https://archive.org/details/SyaikhonaKholil/mode/2up
Gallop, A. T. (2015). A Jawi sourcebook for the study of Malay palaeography and orthography. Indonesia and the Malay World, 43(125), 13–171.
Jacquerye, Denis Moyogo. (2019). Proposal to encode Javanese and Sundanese Arabic characters. Unicode.
Arabic alphabets
Indonesian scripts
Javanese language
Sundanese language