Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The Javanese script

According to Ethnologue, there are 84,300,000 people in Indonesia who speak Javanese. The Wikipedia article on the Javanese script shows the positions of the characters of the script.


There are minimally 91 characters that need to be expressed in a font. It takes one person with the appropriate skills to create a font for Javanese. What they look like can be found here.

There is a request for a Javanese Wikisource but it would really make sense when the sources are expressed in the way the source are written. Is there nobody among the 84,300,000 Javanese who can create a font? Is there someone else who can help?
Thanks,
      GerardM

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your statistic is misleading, among those millions of Javanese who went to school, most uses Latin script, while the Javanese script remains as object of the past, even though some cities (such as Solo) tries to display it in public more frequently (http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkas:Ratan_Gajah_Mada.jpg)

The point is, there's far fewer people who have the skill set needed (Javanese language, Javanese script, design, and so forth).

GerardM said...

The context of the wish for support for the Javanese script goes together with Wikisource. A source text should be expressed in its original format and it may be transliterated as well in the Latin script.

So I am fully behind the need for support for this script and the statistics relate to the large group of people who are denied to see their cultural heritage on the Internet.
Thanks,
GerardM