 Welcome to this recording for the SOAS Language for Lockdown series. My name is Dr. Mualika Hijaz. I am the lecturer in Southeast Asian Studies at SOAS and my area of specialism is Malay manuscripts. So today I'm going to be talking about Jawey, what it is, why you might be interested in learning it and a little bit about its history and a brief introduction to the writing system itself. So obviously this Jawey is not a language, it's rather a script and it's a script that has been used for many hundreds of years for representing the Malay language. So I'm going to share some slides and go through them and hopefully this is all going to work. Okay, right, so these are some textbooks that I came across. So Jawey was used, it was taught in schools in the Malaysian National Curriculum up until the 1980s and as I'll go over the longer history of Jawey a little bit after this, you know, first is used from around the turn of the 14th century and then is indeed still in use but no longer on the national curriculum. So some of you may be familiar with the recent controversy about Jawey in Malaysia having to do with the proposed introduction of classes on learning indeed not reading or writing Jawey but calligraphy as far as I understand it and a lot of opposition to this because Jawey is now perceived as intrinsically Islamic and that studying Jawey is perceived by some as an attempt to Islamize by stealth or to as a form of da'wah to convert non-Muslims to Islam. So what I'm going to outline in the very brief history of Jawey that I'll go over is that this association between Islam and Jawey although of course it exists is not is not intrinsic right you can Jawey as a writing system you can write all kinds of things in it it was used by people who were Muslim and who were not Muslims as well and if we look back at the textbooks from the 80s it's quite interesting to see that the perception of Jawey was somewhat different and that the exclusive association to so Jawey being only an Islamic thing is something that post dates this that is really rather recent. So I think it's quite important to acknowledge to begin by acknowledging that so Jawey is one system of representing Malay among several others so obviously now the dominant method of representing Malay is Rumi Romanite script and before Jawey and in fact at the same time as Jawey other kinds of scripts were used most derived from index scripts so these are you know scripts that indeed are still in use in in parts of Southeast Asia, Jawey, Ren Chong, Yin Chong and the like. So in fact our oldest examples of writing from the region are inscriptions in index scripts as late as so these are just the inscriptions in forms of old Malay fourth century, fifth century and so on so we have a really long written tradition of course we don't have a lot of surviving material but it's very important to remember that just because the material doesn't survive it doesn't mean it didn't exist it did exist there was a writing tradition we just don't have it anymore. So this is a bit of an indication of the different Southeast Asian writing forms that ultimately all go back to Indic prototypes and this is a map from Kribbs digital Atlas of Indonesian history which shows you the locations and the times of some of these key inscriptions. It's also important to remember that something can be Islamic and not Jawey. So this is a tombstone from North Sumatra, Nunache, Minyatujo that dates to about 1380 and it's an Islamic tombstone but the inscription is in an Indic script. It's a very interesting example because it contains what is to all intents and purposes a Sha'a form in old Malay. So you know it can be Islamic without being Jawey. So the oldest Jawey inscription is this Batupasura in discovered in Trunganu. This is not it this is a massively inflated replica of it at a roundabout in Trunganu reflecting its importance of course and its perceived importance. So this is the oldest inscription in Jawey that's been found in Southeast Asia around 1300. So the oldest Malay manuscripts. The manuscript being defined as something written on perishable material, paper or dluwang or various kinds of paper or indeed vellum. So the oldest letters come from around 1510, 1520. The letters from Sultan Abu Hayyad of Trunate to the Portuguese and again these are the oldest letters that survived. They're not the oldest letters that were ever you know these are not the first Malay letters that were ever written. They survived because they're in the Portuguese National Archive which has been running since the 1520s at least. So this is an image of one of those letters from Trunate. The oldest text is a copy of the Akkad of Anasafi and it comes from around 1590 and so that's the oldest longer document, literally it's a religious document in this case. Recently a very interesting discovery by Wuli Kozak that the in fact the oldest surviving Malay manuscript is not an Islamic manuscript and is known as Jawi but rather is a text in a Sumatraan script and in fact still owned by a particular lineage in Highland Sumatra. So again you know I think it's important to think of the language rather than the script. You know the history of the language goes much further back and contains a lot more material than you know the normal Akkad. If we just look at Jawi then it's a much more restricted history. Okay at this point I should say a little bit about why you would want to learn Jawi. Well obviously one of the reasons is as we've just looked at there's this really long history and many thousands of surviving documents manuscripts and the like particularly of course from the later period so 80 to 90 percent of the surviving Malayan manuscripts come from the 19th century which is sort of disappointing from a historical point of view but that's the way it is for various reasons and of course some of those texts although all the surviving examples in 19th century the texts themselves we can reasonably suppose to have been written in earlier centuries although of course there's a process of change that may or may not be obvious. Nevertheless there's a huge amount of material and this is the essential primary source material for understanding religious developments, political change, social change, everything really prior to print right and print is late in this region. It's also important to point out that there's lots of Jawi printing so the late 19th century saw a huge explosion in lithographic printing and so there are lots and lots of texts available from that period and into the early and mid 20th century, lots of Jawi newspapers, magazines, periodicals, again a really interesting and in my view completely underutilized source for social history and indeed lots of different gods of histories but the problem is all of this is in Jawi and so you've got to learn Jawi read it and get at it that way. Okay so I'm here's the alphabet I am not going to attempt to go through it because that's not going to be possible in in in this video but you clearly this is the Arabic alphabet with a few extra letters so these are the extra letters and clearly again they represent the sounds that are necessary for Malay and you know Austronesian languages but don't occur in fact in Arabic so conversely there are a lot of letters that you don't really need for Malay except in Arabic loanwords where typically a Malay speaker does not pronounce them you know correctly or as one would pronounce them in Arabic so it's a giveaway a dead giveaway for an Arabic loanword if it contains or a thought dot and so on but of course there are huge numbers of Arabic loanwords in Malay and names and so on okay so those are the Jawi only letters and the problem with Jawi or the problem with the Arabic alphabet for representing the Malay language has to do with the vowels in that the Arabic alphabet does not represent so-called short vowels so it's usually left you usually have to guess now this is quite reasonably straightforward in Arabic because it has a predictable morphology right there are patterns of vowels so if you're an Arabic speaker it's quite easy to guess what those would be now Malay does not follow that method so there's a great deal more ambiguity and you know we've got three vowels here alif wow and yeah they're representing as you can see a large number of sounds so alif could be ah or it could be uh so the little thing is the schwa so it's uh and not eh yeah or the javanese word for it is but but um which has schwa in it so that could so alif can be those two and then wow and yeah can be even more so it could be it could be oh it could be aw at the end of a word so pisau for instance or it could be used as a consonant what you know the beginning of the word or something yeah likewise yeah can be e can be eh can be i at the beginning of a word or it could be the consonant yeah so there's a lot of different options and that's when the that's with a vowel now most of the time you get no vowel um so it is true that of course you can you can represent the vowels with these um points or the tanda bacha and malay haraka um so the letter with a line on the top is ba one of beneath is b and the little kind of mini wow is bu and so cool in our silence is just ba so this is possible but the thing is that this is never done except for really beginning readers even then if we look at those textbooks they don't they don't do it um the only time it's certainly in the manuscripts that you might see these vowel points indicated is where the scribe thinks that the reader will have no idea what what the word is so particularly for european names and you know i'm always very grateful when i see this because uh otherwise the european names are absolutely the worst part of reading joey manuscripts so for instance there's um uh a rough so right with the uh fata rough the silencer on the first a rough and then lamb with it one underneath li and then the silence on the scene so sir rough list that's raffles um so that's helpful but you very very rarely get that so there that's the problem with joey so i'm going to give you a few examples um this is the example that was used in mb louis's um introduction to malay script which was a textbook uh from the 1950s um mb louis was the lecturer in malaya so as then um it's a really good book um particularly for for you know non-native speakers um anyway she has this example of um the potential ambiguities that kind of rise from from um the lack of vowels markings or lack of indication of what the vowel is when you go from we use an arabic script for the malay language so okay these are the letters lamb mim ba uh nga so obviously the formalized scripts go in the other way yeah um from this we can generate at least one two three five six seven eight um possibilities all of which are potentially correct um because this is sort of test your vocabulary but limbang swampy land um lombong surface cavity lumbing tapering to a point lumbang to be plausible lumbing of course spear lumbang swelling to a globe and so on so the the definition is taken from wilkinson's dictionary he doesn't even have lumbang which is perhaps the one modern speakers would come up with first meaning symbol emblem uh so you know obviously in most cases it ought to be fairly obvious which one of these you're going for from the context around it um but you know there there is always some room for ambiguity and um this is what makes reading joey a little bit challenging but also interesting okay here's an example uh that i um sometimes using my classes so khat nga khat nga so what could that be um yeah again uh native speakers probably going to come up with kangkong the vegetable um but you might also come up with um kangkong to stand with the legs apart keng keng to stand and then lift up one foot or um if as is often the case in the manuscripts this is not kha but gah so often in the manuscripts they do not include the dot on the kha you should just know whether it's kha or gah they're not going to tell you so if it's gah nga gah nga then it could be gongong to bark or a whole lot of other things um um i recently came across this order sometime during kangkong gate if anybody remembers that in Malaysia a scandal involving the former prime minister um somebody produced this meme which i thought was very useful for this so it could be a kong kong which is a slow loris it's entirely different from kangkong um so and when you are trying to read it you will have to figure out whether it is kong kong or kangkong um okay so that's the whistle stop tour of um a little bit about the history of jaoi a little bit about um why you might want to learn it and um some features of of the alphabet and the main problem um of reading jaoi which is um the vowels now actually i'm going to um say a couple more words about the other things that are a bit tricky about jaoi um so the vowels as i've mentioned um non-standard spelling so uh people who have learned jaoi in school or religious school or are always quite irritated that the manuscripts have um are not spelled correctly um and there's a huge amount of variation of spelling so you might have the same words spelled about three or four different ways on the same page um well this is quite normal not just for jaoi but for any other pre-print um script or representations of the language of course there's no there's no standardizations huge amount of regional variation there's no um de wan bahasa to tell you what is what um so you just have to accept um non-standard spelling also obviously there's no capitalization and there's no punctuation uh so words sentences just keep running um and there are certain words that indicate a stop uh which you would get used to but you know the the layout of the text is it doesn't have all these visual markers that we as readers of print um are accustomed to so that's something to get used to and then of course handwriting just getting used to um somebody else's handwriting even in you know the script that you're most familiar with say the roman script is is a considerable undertaking um so i'm going to end with uh just um mentioning some of the resources that are online if anybody um wants to uh do more jaoi which i hope you do um so i mentioned already wilkinson's dictionary this is a 1909 dictionary very useful for literary texts of the 19th century um and it's available in two different formats online one on c lang where you just put in the word in rome and it spits out the definition or you can look at the full text and page through it which the reason that that's on um archive.org and the reason that that's useful is that it has the jaoi in it so if you so sort of two different ways of looking things up depending on what you're starting from um so perhaps uh some of you may be aware of the malay concordance project which is a really amazing resource um where you can search for the occurrence of words in particular texts and then you can try to figure out you know so you think it might be kong kong but is that possible did people really use that word in you know these kinds of texts uh did they talk about slow laura samya so you can look it up there um i also highly recommend dr gallup's introduction to the jaoi source book which you can find on her academia dot edu page along with many of her really really amazing publications um and so this introduction really just gives a general overview um of of jaoi something similar to what i've tried to give here and the source book itself has um examples of jaoi script from different places in different times and so there's got an image and then some um transcription of it and it's it's kind of a good way to practice or at least familiarize yourself with the variety of hands um that are that we might come across um so there's also the jaoi transcription project which is something that i run uh and you can certainly have a look at that and have a go at transcribing uh literary text um i will talk about that more in in a forthcoming video and then just the bibliographic reference for uh the louis's handbook of malay script which again i highly recommend and sometimes you can buy um uh from second hand um so that's it from me for this time and i hope you enjoyed it and i will be making and i hope to see you again for the next video