Javanese Alphabet - History

History

See also: Kawi script

Javanese and Balinese are modern variants of the old Kawi script, a Brahmic script introduced to Java along with Hinduism and Buddhism. Kawi is first attested in a legal document from 804 CE. It was widely used in literature and translations from Sanskrit from the tenth century; by the seventeenth, the script is identified as carakan. A Latin orthography based on Dutch was introduced in 1926, revised in 1972–1973, and has largely supplanted the carakan.

Currently, there are only a few newspapers and magazines being printed in the Javanese script, such as "Jaka Lodhang". However it is still taught in most elementary school and some junior high school as of compulsory subject in Javanese language areas.

Read more about this topic:  Javanese Alphabet

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.
    Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)

    If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
    Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)

    The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)