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Old 7th June 2007, 10:46 PM   #48
A. G. Maisey
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Join Date: May 2006
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No, not really outlawed.

I think it was 1972 when Dutch spellings were replaced by English spellings, but there are a lot of problems with Javanese spellings.Using a modern keyboard, for instance the dotted "A" which has a sound like "O" but further back in the mouth, not at the front of the mouth. The word "ganja" is correctly spelt as "ganja",but with dots over the "A"'s---but you cannot put those dots there with a keyboard, so they become understood.

And it is pronounced like "gonjo", which means that probably most people spell it this way.

Doesn't stop with little things either---major towns and cities can be seen to be spelt in the old way, or the new way.

Its probably best not to get too tied up with spellings in Javanese, it is really a spoken language, and the speakers of it will often change spellings as well as pronunciations to suit themselves. The main thing is that the message be understood.
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