adtbayuperdana
commented
6 years ago It is actually quite common for building and road signs to be done by a third party who doesn't understand the script at all. Factoring the widespread misunderstanding that qwerty keyboards are perfect transliteration scheme for Indonesian scripts, most of the these public samples is definitely wrong and should not be used as a base for transcribing. Cultural and educational figures know that these texts are wrong, local government are usually too busy with bureaucracy to fix it, and third party and (unfortunately) many regular people are either too apathetic to care or are simply not well-versed enough to know that it is wrong. In my opinion, we should be very careful in looking at the vernacular usage of Indonesian script, since the education system has not been quite successful in educating the people about the traditional scripts.
Standards are of course different from script to script. Javanese has broadly two standard: Mardi Kawi (MK) used for transcribing Kawi/Old Javanese language that are heavily influenced by Sanskrit, and Sriwedari (SW) which is based on a standardized and relatively recent or modern form of Javanese. Contemporary teachings (based on a standard issued by the regional governments of Java in 2002) seem to be largely based on SW conventions, but online community that are active in using Javanese prefers MK because they are able to transcribe older Javanese literature more accurately. Many contemporary vernacular usage however disregards both of these standards and simply view Javanese in the inaccurate lens of a latin alphabet transliteration, most people doesn't even understand the concept of Javanese as an abugida because they only see very simplistic letter tables that doesn't show the nuance of the script.
As far as I can tell, Balinese writing also has a standard that is closer to that of Javanese MK. Since Lontar documents are still being rewritten, and most lontar contain Old Javanese and Sanskrit terms, it makes sense for Balinese standards to gravitates towards a more conservative form of the spelling. Transcribing old documents seems to be more prevalent in Balinese compared to Javanese which often used to write short phrases or sentences, at least in the popular, non-academic realm.
Sundanese... is a bit weird in my opinion. Current Sundanese script is a an attempt by the Western Javanese government to revitalize ancient Sundanese (which nobody has used for centuries as Sundanese is written with a succession of scripts from ancient sundanese, to javanese, arabic and latin as time goes) and in a way to reclaim their "identity" or such. But, the committee did a really weird thing by arbitrarily simplifying many glyph shapes and introducing letters that nobody uses like Q, X, V, and Z; which indicates that "latin misunderstanding" is also present in Sundanese standard. As far as I know, there are no long text or book that are written with modern Sundanese (otherwise known as Aksara Sunda Baku, or Standardized Sundanese). It is the version that are taught at schools but I think Ilham Nurwansyah mentioned to me that the simplification is really unfortunate. For transcribing ancient sundanese document, it is possible to use existing code points (plus sundanese supplement) and just change all of the Sunda Baku glyph shapes into a more historically accurate Ancient Sundanese (Sunda Kuno).
In short, samples of "new" writing should be taken with a lot of salt since many of them are fueled by misconceptions of the nature of Indonesian writings. In my opinion, examples should be take from medias that are made at the time the script in question is used functionally and not just as a cultural token. For Javanese, colonial era publications might be appropriate. For Balinese, lontar manuscripts; and so on.
NorbertLindenberg
Ilhamkang
Indonesian scripts differ from the Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Myanmar scripts in that they’re not much used in daily life anymore. Since roughly the 1930es, the Indonesian languages are generally written in the Latin script. Several of the traditional scripts are still taught in school, occasionally used on building or street signs, and obviously used to transcribe old documents. I don’t know to what extent they’re used for new writing.
However, conventions in the use of the traditional scripts seem to be shifting somewhat. At least on building signs, it seems common to insert space between words, and to break lines only at word boundaries. I don’t know whether these changes also occur in long-form writing, and what standards or school textbooks say about them. Does anybody have more information? In particular, what is common usage when transcribing old documents?
If it turns out that there are divergent modern and traditional conventions, which ones should become the basis for the W3C requirements, taking into consideration the prevalence of new and old writing in the individual scripts?