Jawi Spelling

By Zainal-Abidin bin Ahmad.

It has been said with much truth that the Arabic characters are less suited to represent Malay sounds than are the Roman. But it has also been said with hardly a grain of truth that there is no system governing the Jawi spelling of Malay words. The spelling of Malay words written in Malayo-Arabic characters is full of irregularities — and these unfortunately among the most common and every day words. But this does not prove that the same is the case with all the remaining Malay words, or that Jawi spelling is devoid of system. When Malay words are classified there are evident certain general principles governing the Jawi spelling just as there are principles governing the spelling of other languages not possessing a perfect alphabet.

Jawi spelling as it stands to-day is built upon the principle of the bails or harakat system, which is a peculiar property of the Arabic language, and on the principle of the huruj saksi which is a common property of most alphabetic languages. This mixture of divergent principles is partly responsible for the irregularities of Jawi spelling: the problem is where to apply the one and where the other in accordance with popular practice and established usage. But there are other and more important causes too which have given rise to difficulties.

Firstly, the letters of the Jawi or Malayo-Arabic alphabet were originally all consonants. As used in Arabic, there is not a single letter which represents a vowel-sound. Alij, ya and wau, now regarded by Malays as vowel-letters {huruj saksi) ^ never were and never are vowels in Arabic. Their nature happening to be cognate with the three vowel-sounds in Arabic (i.e. alij with jathah^ ya with kasrahy and wau with dammah), they cannot but serve to lengthen these vowel-sounds when one of them follows its cognate. The vowel-sounds in Arabic are all represented by baris or diacritical strokes. Thus pada, padi, padu, for instance, are respectively

written according to Arabic system Pd, Pd, Pd or ji jJS

(=in modern Jawi spelling ji or ) But as a rule, in

Arabic writing even these strokes are used only for unusual or ambiguous words, or when the writing is meant for “ parrot readers. Otherwise when context and grammar show the correct baris, they are not employed.

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Zainal-Abidin bin Ahmad.

Secondly, the vowel-sounds of the Malay language are not the same in number and kind as those of Arabic. Arabic has only three distinct vowel-sounds, namely, fathah (=a), kasrah (=/ or e) and dantmah (=w or o), which are rendered in Malay as baris di-atas, bans di-bnwah and baris dUhadapan. Ma^ay has at least six vowelsounds. So, the Arabic system of representing vowels is insufficient to reproduce and distinguish Mala}' sounds.

These two facts led to a third which explains how the baris and huruf saksi systems have ultimately come to get mixed up.

When the Arabic alphabet was introduced for the writing of the Malay language, the system of Arabic orthography might have been applied in ioio, at least as an experiment. But the 14th century Trengganu inscription makes a lavish use of hurui saksi, especially alif. The subsequent standardized spelling of the 16 — 17 centuries used them very sparingly, which proves that the scribes of that time had the baris system in their minds all the time; and some old manuscripts which have come down to us are fully vocalised with baiis. But though they knew the baris system, they found it quite inadequate. To meet the difficulty they did not introduce new baris in addition to the three in use: that would have increased the comnlication and tediousness of writing, when their desire was, if possible, to leave out the baris and write Malay simply without them, as Arabic is generally written. But entire omission of the baris was impracticable. The Malay language having a grammar totally different from Arabic and vowel-sounds much more elaborate, the wholesale omission of baris would have made the spelling hardly intelligible. Hence these foster-scribes of the Malay language were driven to the only alternative, namely, that of supplying the deficiency of vowels by using letters to represent them.

In the Arabic alphabet, as has been seen above, there are no letters which represent vowel-sounds. So a second difficulty arose.

Despite this, f ^ \ were adopted to supply the need, seeing

that the nature of these letters corresponds with the three main divisions of vowel-sounds in the Malay language. This practice has

survived and Malays continue to call and look up on ^ ^ 1 as solely huruf saksi.

Unhappily for Jawi spelling, early writers did not invent new letters to supply the vacant place of ^ ^ 1 as consonants: • ^ \

have to serve both as consonants and as vowels. Nor did they devise any method to meet the shortage of vowel letters. They overlooked the fact that Malay has really more vowel-sounds than three. Hence

Journal Malayan Branch [Vol. VI, pt. II.