A Note on Orthography and Transliteration

In: Storied Island
Open Access

The sources cited and discussed in this book span several places, periods, and languages. Orthographic variation was very much the norm for much of the period covered, and variation also occurred when the same words were spelled across scripts.

Questions pertaining to the relationships between languages and the cultural capital and historical echoes they carry are pertinent to the work of many of the authors in this volume, e.g., where and on what basis, in the context of Javanese literature, do we draw a “dividing line” between languages and their repository of words? Where does Arabic “end” and Javanese “begin”? Is standardization desirable or is it an imposition as, for example, when Arabic diacritics or long vowels are added to Indonesian words to “correct” them? These are not merely technical matters, yet in the end, editorial decisions about spelling and transliteration must be made and for the sake of convenience and consistency the following is applied throughout the volume:

I have attempted to retain the original spelling as much as possible, therefore words used in both Javanese and Malay or modern Indonesian are spelled according to the context in which they are discussed or quoted (e.g., pĕsantren in Javanese, pesantren in Indonesian). When citing secondary works that used an older form of spelling, it was left as is.

For Javanese, I have opted for a consistent usage of <ĕ> rather than <ê> or <e> for pĕpĕt and <e> rather than <é> or <è> for taling, including in the names of people, places, and literary works. Any exceptions to this are explained in the relevant footnotes.

For Arabic, transliteration follows the International Journal of Middle East Studies, using full diacritical marks.

Loanwords commonly used in English (e.g., Muhammad, Qurʾan, imam, gamelan), are spelled according to English convention.

When citing manuscripts, the available information, often incomplete, is given in the first citation. Non-English terminology is italicized on first appearance only. Capitalization and punctuation have sometimes been added to Javanese citations and their translations in order to make them more legible to the reader.

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