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More than diacritics: Writing, power, and the porosity of script and language in Java
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2022
Extract
The world, Fox shows in More than words, tends to be a lot more open-ended than we imagine, with more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of, not just in our philosophy but also our philology. As a student of Javanese literature, I had encountered glimpses of this open-endedness on the pages of manuscripts where we sometimes find little dots on top of Javanese letters. These dots often appear in the literature of Islamic Java written in the carakan alphabet. Known to us as diacritics, they are used for originally Arabic words to produce sounds for which there is no letter in Javanese. Not all originally Arabic words get dots in Javanese texts: while a significant percentage of the Javanese vocabulary is adopted from Arabic, many words have become naturalised to the extent that their origin has become invisible. Sometimes, however, one does find dotted letters, marking words as somehow different from the other Javanese words around them. With Fox's analysis in More than words, I want to ask: how do we understand these dots? And what should we do with them?
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- Short Essay
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- Copyright © The National University of Singapore, 2022
Footnotes
First and foremost, I would like to thank Thomas Hunter for organising the panel at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian Studies which initiated this discussion on Richard Fox's book in the first place. I am also grateful to all the participants of the panel for their contributions and thoughts. Finally, many thanks to Richard Fox, whose wonderful book provided the occasion for this debate.
References
1 See Fox, Richard, More than words: Transforming script, agency, and collective life in Bali (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), p. 178Google Scholar. The reference to philology is mine.
2 Ricci, Ronit, Islam translated: Literature, conversion, and the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Fox, More than words, p. 6.
4 Ibid., p. 48.
5 Ibid., pp. 171–2.
6 See for instance Q 16:103 in Haleem, M.A.S. Abdel, The Qur’an: Translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
7 Ricci, Ronit, ‘Reading a history of writing: Heritage, religion and script change in Java’, Itinerario 39, 3 (2015): 419–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 van Orman Quine, Willard, Word and object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960)Google Scholar.
9 Fox, More than words, pp. 181–2.