[A. G. Maisey]

I have now received a reply from my third informant. This person is a man in his sixties who is regarded world-wide as a premier authority on the keris, and he holds a high rank within the keraton Surakarta.I consider his knowledge in this matter of Javanese language to be beyond question. Here is his answer:-

-----tulisan jawa itu berbunyi sloko, artinya perak----

------that Javanese writing has the sound "sloko", its meaning is silver----

This little exercise demonstrates very well some of the difficulties with the Javanese language.

The honocoroko alphabet , like any alphabet, is used to represent in a written form certain sounds.
When the Dutch introduced the Roman alphabet to Jawa in the 19th century, the honocoroko alphabet was gradually Romanised,and the symbols were forced into the framework of the standard western alphabet.The sounds that were used with this alphabet were the sounds that the Dutch give to the letters of the alphabet.
In 1972, both the alphabet used to write Bahasa Indonesia, and Javanese were given the sound values of the English language, so in Javanese (and in Bahasa Indonesia) we have two possible spellings when a word is written in Roman script: the pre-1972 spelling, and the post-1972 spelling

In reading Javanese written in honocoroko it is apparently extraordinarily difficult to read just a single word, or even several unrelated words taken out of the context of a sentence. I have been told by several people that the way old Javanese script is read is that first you must gain a broad sense of what the passage of writing is about, then you read the words, and where several possibilities for interpretation exist, you use the interpretation that is the best fit with the sense of the passage.So, in the case of a single, isolated word, there is no point of reference, and more than one interpretation can exist.

Then there is another little peculiarity of Javanese, it is what I believe linguists refer to as a "non-standardised" language. In other words, there can be many sub-vocabularies within the broad range of the language, that may or may not be mutually intelligible to all speakers of the language, additionally, letters can be removed or added to a spelling, provided the spoken rendition of the word is correct.This characteristic of sub-vocabularies is distinct from the heirarchically structured usual three levels of formal Javanese.

On top of this we have a problem with the Javanese "o" (old spelling), "a" (new spelling).

One of the sounds represented by "a" in the new spelling was originally written as an "a" with a dot over it. The sound is unique, and really does not exist in English, it like a short "o" that is articulated at the back of the tongue. So when the new spelling was introduced this "a" was written with a dot over it. But typewriters do not have the ability to place this dot over the "a", so everybody just had to know when an "a" was pronounced as "a", and when it was pronounced as the old "o".

So, if we look at our word under discussion, I had three answers from three speakers of Javanese, all from Solo, and all able to read hanocoroko script.

One read it as a nonsense word with no meaning, and offered the explanation that it was a word that meant something to the original owner of the pendok but was meaningless to everybody else.

One offered the explanation that the word was "slaka", and interpreted this word as "ankle bracelet", which it may be in some sub-dialect, but in Javanese as usually spoken in Solo it is not, the word for an "ankle bracelet" is "binggel".

The reply from my most knowledgeable informant I have given above; he has written the word "sloko", rather than "slaka", but the pronunciation is the same, he has just used the old spelling.

I learnt this word not as "slaka", but as "salaka", the "a" has been added between the "s" and the "l", but in pronunciation both would sound the same to a western ear, and that pronunciation would be "sloko".

I have checked the word in three dictionaries, "salaka" is the seemingly authorised spelling, "slaka" is given as a variation.The meaning of both words is "silver".

I'm sorry Raden Usman, but "slaka" does not equal "saloka"; "saloka" is an entirely different word , and yes, it does mean a proverb, or a maxim, or a metaphor, but I doubt that it could be understood as a symbol, the usual word for "symbol", is "lambang", or in the case of a trademark, "cap". It is possible to render the honocoroko as "slaka", or as "sloko", the pronunciation of both these spellings is "sloko"; "sloko", and "slaka" can both be spelt with the addition of another vowel between the "s" and the "l", but we cannot render the honocoroko for "sloko" as "saloko", this word uses different honocoroko characters.

There is your answer Rick. Ferry's reading was correct, and the meaning of that reading is "silver".
I rather suspect that the combination of the symbol, plus "silver", may represent a trademark, a guarantee of quality.

But the interesting thing about this thread is this:- it has demonstrated the not inconsiderable difficulty there is in obtaining an accurate reading of the old honocoroko script.
My grandchildren recently moved back to Solo from Jakarta. The eldest one is 12 years old, and in the first year of highschool. In Jakarta honocoroko is not taught, and his Javanese language skills are very basic, however, in Solo Javanese and honocoroko are still taught in lower highschool. Because he has a very, very poor Javanese vocab, he has enormous difficulty in trying to read honocoroko.

Is it any wonder that Bahasa Indonesia is gradually replacing Javanese, and all the other original languages of the Indonesian Archipelago? A few years ago a professor at Sebelas Maret University in Solo went on record with his opinion that within a generation or two, Javanese will be a dead language.