Balinese script
Encyclopedia
The Balinese alphabet (Balinese
: Aksara Bali) is an abugida
that was used to write the Balinese language
, an Austronesian language spoken by about three million people on the Indonesia
n island of Bali
. The use of the Balinese script has mostly been replaced by the Roman alphabet. Although it is learned in school, few people use it. It is mostly used in temples and for religious writings.
The Balinese script was derived from the Old Kawi
script, which ultimately derived from the Brāhmī script
, the root of all the Indic and Southeast Asian abugidas. The abugida consists of 47 characters, 14 of which are vowels (aksara suara), and the remaining 33 are consonants (aksara wianjana).
The consonant ha is sometimes not pronounced. For example, hujan is pronounced ujan.
The exact form of ca laca is unknown because only the appended (gantungan) form is left. However, the independent form is included in Unicode
.
The letter form of ja jera is exactly the same as the independent vowel airsanya.
The unaspirated and the aspirated consonants share the same letter. However, the diacritic tedung can be attached to the aspirated one to differentiate the two.
Da madu murdhanya
Very seldom used
Actually an alveolar consonant
, but classified as dental by tradition
The former of the two letter forms is more frequently used.
Among the 33 consonants letters above, only 18 are commonly used for writing the Balinese language:
The rest are mainly used for writing Sanskrit
and Kawi
loanwords.
)
are symbols that cannot stand by itself. When they are attached to the independent letters, they affect the pronunciation. The three types of diacritics are pangangge suara, pangangge tengenan and pangangge aksara.
Many consonants can form ligatures with tedung:
, bisah is analogous to visarga
, cecek to anusvara
, and adeg-adeg to virama
.
Gantungan and pangangge (diacritic) can be applied together to a letter. However, attaching two or more gantungan to one letter is forbidden; this condition is known as tumpuk telu (three layers). Adeg-adeg may be used in the middle of a sentence to avoid such situation.
The forms of gantungan are as follows:
Balinese numerals are written in the same manner as Arabic numerals
. For example, 25 is written with the Balinese numbers 2 and 5. If the number is written in the middle of a text, carik has to be written before and after the number to differentiate it from the text. Below is an example of how a date is written using Balinese numerals (date: 1 July 1982, location: Bali):
Balinese script
s are essentially typographic variants.
Standard in July, 2006 with the release of version 5.0.
The Unicode block for Balinese is U+1B00 ... U+1B7F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.
Balinese language
Balinese or simply Bali is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by 3.3 million people on the Indonesian island of Bali, as well as northern Nusa Penida, western Lombok and eastern Java...
: Aksara Bali) is an abugida
Abugida
An abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is obligatory but secondary...
that was used to write the Balinese language
Balinese language
Balinese or simply Bali is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by 3.3 million people on the Indonesian island of Bali, as well as northern Nusa Penida, western Lombok and eastern Java...
, an Austronesian language spoken by about three million people on the Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
n island of Bali
Bali
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east...
. The use of the Balinese script has mostly been replaced by the Roman alphabet. Although it is learned in school, few people use it. It is mostly used in temples and for religious writings.
The Balinese script was derived from the Old Kawi
Old Kawi
Kawi is the name given to the writing system originating in Java and used across much of Maritime Southeast Asia in inscriptions and texts from the 8th century to around 1500 AD...
script, which ultimately derived from the Brāhmī script
Brāhmī script
Brāhmī is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best-known Brāhmī inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE. These are traditionally considered to be early known examples of Brāhmī writing...
, the root of all the Indic and Southeast Asian abugidas. The abugida consists of 47 characters, 14 of which are vowels (aksara suara), and the remaining 33 are consonants (aksara wianjana).
Vowels
Vowels (aksara suara) can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks (pangangge). The independent forms are used when the vowels appear in initial position. They are described in the following list:| Aksara suara (Vowels) | |||||||
| Warga(Place of articulation Place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location... ) |
Aksara suara hresua(Short vowels) | Name | Aksara suara dirgha(Long vowels) | ||||
| Symbol | Transliteration | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Symbol | Transliteration | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kantya(Guttural) | A | [a] | A kara | Ā | [ɑː] | ||
| Talawya(Palatal) | I | [i] | I kara | Ī | [iː] | ||
| Murdhanya(Retroflex Retroflex consonant A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology... ) |
Ṛ | [ɹ̩] | Ra repa | Ṝ | [ɹ̩ː] | ||
| Dantya(Dental) | Ḷ | [l̩] | La lenga | Ḹ | [l̩ː] | ||
| Osthya(Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... ) |
U | [u] | U kara | Ū | [uː] | ||
| Kanthya-talawya(Palato-guttural) | E | [e]; [ɛ] | E kara (E)Airsanya (Ai) | Ai | [aːi] | ||
| Kanthya-osthya(Labio-guttural) | O | [o]; [ɔ] | O kara | Au | [aːu] | ||
Consonants
Like most abugidas, each consonant (aksara wianjana) has an inherent vowel of /a/. Other vowels are indicated by using diacritics (pangangge), which can appear above, below, to the left, or to the right of the consonant.| Aksara wianjana (Consonants) | ||||||||
| Warga(Place of articulation Place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location... ) |
Pancawalimukha | Ardhasuara(Semivowels) | Usma(Fricatives) | Wisarga | ||||
| Unvoiced | Voiced | Nasal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kanthya(Guttural) | (Ka)Ka | , (Kha)Ka mahaprana | (Ga)Ga | (Gha)Ga gora | (Nga)Nga | (Ha)Ha | ||
| Talawya(Palatal) | (Ca)Ca murca | (Cha)Ca laca | (Ja)Ja | (Jha)Ja jera | (Nya)Nya | (Ya)Ya | (Śa)Sa saga | |
| Murdhanya(Retroflex Retroflex consonant A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology... ) |
(Ṭa)Ta latik | (Ṭha)Ta latik | (Ḍa)Da madu m. | (Ḍha)Da madu m. | (Ṇa)Na rambat | (Ra)Ra | (Ṣa)Sa sapa | |
| Dantya(Dental) | (Ta)Ta | (Tha)Ta tawa | (Da)Da lindung | (Dha)Da madu | (Na)Na kojong | (La)La | (Sa)Sa danti | |
| Osthya(Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... ) |
(Pa)Pa | (Pha)Pa kapal | (Ba)Ba | , (Bha)Ba kembang | (Ma)Ma | (Wa)Wa | ||
The consonant ha is sometimes not pronounced. For example, hujan is pronounced ujan.
The exact form of ca laca is unknown because only the appended (gantungan) form is left. However, the independent form is included in Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
.
The letter form of ja jera is exactly the same as the independent vowel airsanya.
The unaspirated and the aspirated consonants share the same letter. However, the diacritic tedung can be attached to the aspirated one to differentiate the two.
Da madu murdhanya
Very seldom used
Actually an alveolar consonant
Alveolar consonant
Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...
, but classified as dental by tradition
The former of the two letter forms is more frequently used.
Among the 33 consonants letters above, only 18 are commonly used for writing the Balinese language:
The rest are mainly used for writing Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
and Kawi
Kawi language
Kawi is a literary and prose language on the islands of Java, Bali, and Lombok, based on Old Javanese, a language with a sizable vocabulary of Sanskrit loanwords. Kawi is the ancestor language of modern Javanese. The name "kawi" is derived from the root ku, which in Sanskrit means “poet”, and, in...
loanwords.
Diacritics
Diacritics (pangangge, pronounced /pəŋaŋɡe/, also known as sandhangan when referring to the Javanese scriptJavanese script
The Javanese alphabet, natively known as Hanacaraka or Carakan , known by the Sundanese people as Cacarakan is the pre-colonial script used to write the Javanese language....
)
are symbols that cannot stand by itself. When they are attached to the independent letters, they affect the pronunciation. The three types of diacritics are pangangge suara, pangangge tengenan and pangangge aksara.
Pangangge suara
If a consonant letter is embellished with a pangangge suara, its vowel is changed. For example, the letter na with ulu becomes ni; ka with suku becomes ku. The diacritics in this category is summarized in the following list:| Pangangge suara | |||||
| Warga(Place of articulation) | Symbol | Transliteration | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Name | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kanthya(Guttural) | ě | [ə] | Pepet | ||
| ā | [ɑː] | Tedung | |||
| Talawya(Palatal) | i | [i] | Ulu | ||
| ī | [iː] | Ulu sari | |||
| Osthya(Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... ) |
u | [u] | Suku | ||
| ū | [uː] | Suku ilut | |||
| Kanthya-talawya(Palato-guttural) | é | [e]; [ɛ] | Taling | ||
| ai | [aːi] | Taling detya | |||
| Kanthya-osthya(Labio-guttural) | o | [o]; [ɔ] | Taling tedung | ||
| au | [aːu] | Taling detya matedung | |||
Many consonants can form ligatures with tedung:
Pangangge tengenan
Pangangge tengenan, except adeg-adeg, adds a final consonant to a syllable. It can be used together with pangangge suara. For example, the letter na with bisah becomes nah; ka with suku and surang becomes kur. Adeg-adeg kills the inherent vowel /a/ in the consonant letter. Compared to DevanagariDevanagari
Devanagari |deva]]" and "nāgarī" ), also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
, bisah is analogous to visarga
Visarga
Visarga is a Sanskrit word meaning "sending forth, discharge". In Sanskrit phonology , is the name of a phone, , written as IAST , Harvard-Kyoto , Devanagari . Visarga is an allophone of and in pausa...
, cecek to anusvara
Anusvara
Anusvara is the diacritic used to mark a type of nasalization used in a number of Indic languages. Depending on the location of the anusvara in the word and the language within which it is used, its exact pronunciation can vary greatly....
, and adeg-adeg to virama
Virama
Virama is a generic term for the diacritic in many Brahmic scripts, including Devanagari and East Nagari, that is used to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter. The name is Sanskrit for "cessation, termination, end"...
.
| Symbol | Pronunciation | Name |
|---|---|---|
| /h/ | Bisah | |
| /r/ | Surang | |
| /ŋ/ | Cecek | |
| - | Adeg-adeg |
Pangangge aksara
Pangangge aksara is appended below consonant letters. Pangangge aksara are the appended (gantungan) forms of the ardhasuara (semivowel) consonants. Guwung macelek is the appended form of the vowel ra repa.| Symbol | Pronunciation | Name |
|---|---|---|
| /ra/ | Cakra/Guwung | |
| /rə/ | Guwung macelek | |
| /ʋa/ | Suku kembung | |
| /ja/ | Nania |
Gantungan
Adeg-adeg may not used in the middle of a sentence, so we have to use gantungan (appended letters) to kill the vowel of a consonant letter in such case. Each consonant letter has a corresponding gantungan form, and the gantungan eliminates the inherent vowel /a/ of the letter it is appended to. For example, if the letter na is appended with gantungan da, the pronunciation becomes nda.Gantungan and pangangge (diacritic) can be applied together to a letter. However, attaching two or more gantungan to one letter is forbidden; this condition is known as tumpuk telu (three layers). Adeg-adeg may be used in the middle of a sentence to avoid such situation.
The forms of gantungan are as follows:
| Gantungan/Gempelan | ||||||||
| Warga(Place of articulation Place of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location... ) |
Pancawalimukha | Ardhasuara(Semivowels) | Usma(Fricatives) | Wisarga | ||||
| Unvoiced | Voiced | Nasal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kanthya(Guttural) | Ka | Ga | Ga gora | Nga | Ha | |||
| Talawya(Palatal) | Ca murca | Ca laca | Ja | Nya | Ya | Sa saga | ||
| Murdhanya(Retroflex Retroflex consonant A retroflex consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consonants, especially in Indology... ) |
Ta latik | Da madu m. | Na rambat | Ra | Sa sapa | |||
| Dantya(Dental) | Ta | Ta tawa | Da lindung | Da madu | Na kojong | La | Sa danti | |
| Osthya(Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... ) |
Ba | Ba kembang | Pa | Pa kapal | Ma | Wa | ||
Numerals
| Balinese numeral | Arabic numeral | Name | Balinese numeral | Arabic numeral | Name | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Bindu/Windu | 5 | Lima | |||
| 1 | Siki/Besik | 6 | Nem | |||
| 2 | Kalih/Dua | 7 | Pitu | |||
| 3 | Tiga/Telu | 8 | Kutus | |||
| 4 | Papat | 9 | Sanga/Sia |
Balinese numerals are written in the same manner as Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals or Hindu numerals or Hindu-Arabic numerals or Indo-Arabic numerals are the ten digits . They are descended from the Hindu-Arabic numeral system developed by Indian mathematicians, in which a sequence of digits such as "975" is read as a numeral...
. For example, 25 is written with the Balinese numbers 2 and 5. If the number is written in the middle of a text, carik has to be written before and after the number to differentiate it from the text. Below is an example of how a date is written using Balinese numerals (date: 1 July 1982, location: Bali):
| Transliteration | |
|---|---|
| Bali, 1 Juli 1982. |
Other symbols
There are some special symbols in the Balinese script. Some of them are punctuation marks, and the others are religious symbols. The symbols are described in the following list:| Symbol | Name | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Carik or Carik Siki. | Written in the middle of a sentence, like a comma Comma A comma is a type of punctuation mark . The word comes from the Greek komma , which means something cut off or a short clause.Comma may also refer to:* Comma , a type of interval in music theory... . Also, written surrounding numerals to differentiate them from the text. |
|
| Carik Kalih or Carik Pareren | Written at the end of a sentence, like a full stop Full stop A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people... (.). |
|
| Carik pamungkah | Functions like a colon Colon (punctuation) The colon is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots centered on the same vertical line.-Usage:A colon informs the reader that what follows the mark proves, explains, or lists elements of what preceded the mark.... (:). |
|
| Pasalinan | Used at the end of a prose, letter, or verse. | |
| Panten or Panti | Used at the beginning of a prose, letter, or verse. | |
| Pamada | Used at the beginning of religious texts. This symbol is a ligature of the letters ma, nga, ja, and pa, forming the word mangajapa, which roughly means "praying for safety". | |
| Ongkara Aum Om or Aum Om or Aum Om or Aum (also , written in Devanāgari as and as , in Sanskrit known as (lit. "to sound out loudly"), ', or ' (also as ') (lit. "Auṃ form/syllable"), is a sacred/mystical syllable in the Dharmic or Indian religions, i.e... |
Sacred symbol of Hinduism Hinduism Hinduism is the predominant and indigenous religious tradition of the Indian Subcontinent. Hinduism is known to its followers as , amongst many other expressions... . This symbol is pronounced "Ong" or "Om". |
Similarities with the Javanese script
The Balinese and Javanese scriptJavanese script
The Javanese alphabet, natively known as Hanacaraka or Carakan , known by the Sundanese people as Cacarakan is the pre-colonial script used to write the Javanese language....
s are essentially typographic variants.
|
 |
| Balinese script | Javanese script |
Unicode
Balinese script was added to the UnicodeUnicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
Standard in July, 2006 with the release of version 5.0.
The Unicode block for Balinese is U+1B00 ... U+1B7F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.