Javanese Grammar for Students (review)

This small book, published for the Monash Asia Institute of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, is a revised edition of one published in 1992. It does not purport to be a linguistic description of Javanese but is intended as a reference for students beginning the study of the language. This characterization is almost too modest, as the work is linguistically well informed, and a good deal of typological and morphosyntactic information can be adduced from the text and accompanying examples. The difficulty for the linguist is that the examples do not have morpheme-by-morpheme glosses, but this is not to be expected in a book of this kind.

The book is divided into unnumbered sections, with subsections each summarizing an aspect of the grammar. These are deliberately written in nontechnical language, but there is an unexpected amount of descriptive detail. A detailed list of contents provides an excellent navigational aid.

The introduction (3–4) gives brief sociolinguistic information about Javanese. ‘The sounds of Javanese’ (5–10) is a nontechnical account. ‘Ngoko and krama’ (11–13) is a short but insightful introduction to the famous ‘speech levels’.

The sections on grammar fall into two groups. The first twelve sections mostly describe morphology, the other eleven, syntax. The sections on morphology are as follows, with subsections in parentheses after the page numbers: ‘The noun’ (14–24) (definition, types, affixation), ‘The pronominal system’ (25–32) (personal pronouns, demonstratives, interrogative and indefinite words, relative pronouns, reflexive pronouns),‘The adjective’(33–37) (affixation, doubling, intensity, degrees of the adjective), ‘The verb I’ (38–44) and ‘The verb II’ (45–53) (classes of intransitive and transitive verbs respectively), ‘Auxiliary words’ (54–56), ‘Prepositions’ (57–61) (seventeen subsections, one per preposition), ‘Numerals’ (62–67) (cardinal numbers, measurement, ordinal numbers, fractions, numerical expressions), ‘Adverbs and prepositional phrases’ (68–73) (adverbs of time, adverbs of place, particles, the prefix sa-), ‘The verb III: The passive’ (74–78) (the four passives), ‘The verb IV’ (79–84) (propositive, imperative, reciprocal), and ‘The verb V’ (85–90) (miscellany).

The titles of the sections on syntax are less transparent. The first four are labeled ‘Simple sentences I–IV’ (91–101) and deal respectively with (i) nominal predicates and possession, (ii) adjectives in NPs and as predicates, (iii) auxiliaries and verbs, and (iv) passive usage and other topics. ‘The split subject’ (102–3) concerns topicalization, ‘Transposition’ (104–6) describes nominalization, ‘Balanced clauses and extended predicates’ (107–9) examines parataxis, and ‘Syntactic doubling’ (110) whole-word reduplication for intensity. ‘The subjunctive’ (111–17) describes its uses in independent and dependent (adverbial and complement) clauses. ‘Conjunctions’ (118–21) is a simple catalogue, and ‘Particles’ (122–24) touches on the use of four discourse particles.

‘Appendix I’ (125–26) outlines the various calendrical systems in use in Java, ‘Appendix II’ (127) lists kinship terms, and ‘Appendix III’ (128–30) is a collection of ‘polite phrases’.

Finally, a glance through the bibliography (131–32) confirms a point touched on in the foreword: there are amazingly few descriptions of modern Javanese, considering that it is spoken by about half the population of Indonesia (apparently two written in Dutch between the World Wars, one in Indonesian, and, more recently, one in English). So this portable reference may fill a gap for the linguist that its author did not envision.