Древнеяванский язык: история и особенности

Oldest attested phase of the Javanese 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 islands of Madura, Bali, and Lombok. It had a sizable vocabulary of Sanskrit loanwords but had not yet developed the formal krama language register, to be used with one's social superiors that is characteristic of modern Javanese.

While evidence of writing in Java dates to the Sanskrit Tarumanegara inscription of 450 AD, the oldest example written entirely in Javanese, called the Sukabumi inscription, is dated 25 March 804 AD. This inscription, located in the district of Pare 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 500 years – from the Sukabumi (Kediri, East Java) inscription 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 influence. 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.

Medieval poems written in Old Javanese using the Kawi script continued to be circulated within the courts of Kartasura, Surakarta, and Yogyakarta. The poems were called layang kawi (Kawi books) or kakawin and were held in high regard. Starting in the 18th century, literature inspired by Old Javanese was written using the modern Javanese language and verse.

There are twenty consonants in Old Javanese which are written as b, c, d, ḍ, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, ñ, ŋ, p, r, s, t, ṭ, w, and y in Latin transliteration. The consonant ñ sometimes is written as the digraph ny and IPA ɲ, while the consonant ŋ sometimes is written as the digraph ng. from which is taken the National motto of Indonesia: "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika". Although often glibly translated as "Unity in Diversity", it is more correctly rendered as "[although] scattered, remaining [as] one"— referring to the scattered islands of the archipelago nation, not as an expression of multicultural solidarity as may be perceived in modern times. A more modern work is the poem "Susila Budhi Dharma", by Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, the founder of Subud. In this work, he provides a framework for understanding the experience of the latihan kejiwaan.

The first scholar to address Kawi in a serious academic manner was Wilhelm von Humboldt, who considered it the father of all Malay Polynesian languages. Furthermore, he deprecated misconceptions about Kawi being wholly influenced by Sanskrit, finding that Kawi did not use verb inflexion, thus differing from Sanskrit's highly developed inflectional system. Kawi might have come from a very ancient settlement in the pacific side of Asia. In Kawi language, the meaning of a sentence must be grasped through word order and context. Humboldt further noted that Kawi utilizes tense distinctions, with past, present, and future, and differentiated moods via the imperative and subjunctive. Numerous scholars have studied the language, including the Dutch expatriate Indonesian Prof. Dr. Petrus Josephus Zoetmulder S. J., who contributed an enormous quantity of original texts and serious scholarly study to the language, and his pupil and associate, Father Dr. Ignatius Kuntara Wiryamartana. Other eminent Indonesian scholars of the language include Poedjawijatna, Sumarti Suprayitna, Poerbatjaraka and Tardjan Hadiwidjaja.