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A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? The Use of Jawi Script in a Few

Early Malay Manuscripts from the Moluccas

Chapter · April 2019

DOI: 10.1515/9783110639063-009

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Jan van der Putten
A Collection of Unstandardised
Consistencies? The Use of Jawi Script in
a Few Early Malay Manuscripts from the
Moluccas
Abstract: Jawi, a form of Arabic script in use in insular Southeast Asia, has been
employed for writing Malay manuscripts for at least eight centuries (13th–20th cen-
turies). Introduced and disseminated through Islamic canonical texts such as the
Qur’an, it became the principal means of communication and knowledge pro-
duction over the years and across the region. Studies of Malay palaeography and
orthography have been rare and far between, and are mainly limited to colonial
scholars designing the rules to be taught in the educational system and a number
of surveys that record the orthography of certain texts.

Inspired by a recent publication which concisely discusses the palaeography and

orthography of 60 dated or datable Malay manuscripts, the following chapter will
expand on some of the observations made by the scholars. I will discuss a number
of 17th–19th-century manuscripts originating from the Moluccas and compare some
characteristics of their orthography with those of the Hikayat Tanah Hitu, a Malay
historical narrative compiled in the mid-17th century. In this exploration of ortho-
graphic consistencies and peculiarities in Malay manuscripts originating from one
region, I argue that the ambiguity of Jawi was a welcome characteristic that could
accommodate the needs of multilingual communities found in the Malay world.

1 Introduction
Throughout history, the writing of Malay has made use of a variety of scripts in
concordance with the prevailing influence of a major belief system or hegemonic
colonial regime: Hindu-Buddhist traditions made use of a southern Brahmi script
that spawned a number of vernacular forms; Islam brought Semitic languages
and the Arabic script; and European imperialism and ‘modernity’ brought Latin
script, which would eventually dominate the written and printed communica-
tions in insular Southeast Asia from the 19th century onwards, even though Chris-
tianity never became the dominating religion of the region. Insular Southeast
Asia, where the Malay language was developed, spread and is now widely used,

Open Access. © 2019 Jan van der Putten, published by De Gruy­ter. This work is licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
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218 Jan van der Putten

is predominantly Islamic except for the northern part of the Philippines and some
areas in eastern Indonesia. It is generally assumed that Islam gained its first firm
footing in the 13th century with the conversion of the ruler of Samudra-Pasai at the
northern tip of Sumatra. Other polities in the islands soon followed, and a Muslim
trading network in the region gradually developed, renewing ties and connecting
with larger networks across the Indian Ocean.
Islam not only introduced its canonical texts with their Arabic language and
script, it also informed and enhanced contacts with other Muslim traditions such
as Gujarati and Persian. These newly introduced traditions met with existing
ways of disseminating texts and knowledge, with which they mixed in different
ways according to local circumstances in very complex and multifarious proces-
ses that took place over a long period of time. In the multi-linguistic environ-
ment of the Indonesian archipelago, Malay was one of the vernaculars that had
been used for a long time to communicate official matters of state and religious
affairs and was apparently sufficiently known in 13th-century North Sumatra to
become the vehicle of transmission for the new religion. Although there are a
few examples of Islamic texts represented in locally derived Brahmi scripts, the
Arabic script seems to have soon taken over the dominant role in disseminating
religious knowledge and also other, more secular topics such as business affairs.
Expanding Muslim trading networks greatly stimulated the dissemination
of Islam, its texts and the languages of transmission, Arabic, Persian and, most
extensively, Malay. Due to geopolitical circumstances and reasons, the nodes of this
network dispersed over a myriad of islands, all with their own local interests and
traditions. Later, other Asian and European trading partners joined, and eventu-
ally disturbed the balance within the network. Therefore, it is difficult if not impos-
sible to discern a single and strong Arabic or Malay Islamic tradition that would
encompass the whole region and spur further developments. Throughout history,
there have been powerful centres that have extended great influence over a longer
period of time in political and cultural terms, such as Melaka in the 15th century,
Aceh and Banten in the 16th until the mid-17th centuries, and Makassar in the 17th
century. However, the impact these power centres impressed upon a more gene-
rally defined Malay culture was relatively short-lived and therefore limited in scope.
Of course, the presence and gradual expansion of the influence of the Dutch East
Indies Trading Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) also thwar-
ted the establishment and continuation of a firm Malay Islamic tradition.
Although we perhaps cannot speak of a strong, single Malay tradition, the
Arabic script which seems to have become current in insular Southeast Asia in the
16th and 17th centuries made it possible for narratives to be circulated within a cul-
tural realm heterogeneously and temporarily delineated by a combination of trade
agreements, religion and language. The Arabic script, developed to represent the

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 219

Semitic language in close connection with the writing down and distribution of
the holy Qur’an and other liturgical and theological texts, was adjusted to enable
the translation of these texts into languages of other language families. Probably
based on a familiarity with similar adjustments made for Persian and Indian langu-
ages, five consonants were added for writing Malay (<p>: ‫ ڤ‬, <c>: ‫چ‬, <ng>: ‫ڠ‬, <ny>:
‫ ڽ‬and <g>: ‫)ݢ‬, while in the Javanese system an extra two characters were added
to represent the retroflex stops /ʈ/and /ɖ/. These modifications were realised by
adding diacritical dots to the existing forms of the Arabic characters, e.g. the Malay
voiceless palatal stop /ʧ/ is represented by the addition of three dots below the
Arabic ‫< ح‬ḥ>. The set of Arabic characters to write Javanese is called Pégon. It is
used next to locally developed Brahmi-derived as well as Latin scripts, while Jawi is
the common name to refer to the alphabet used to write texts in Malay and several
other regional languages. Palaeographical and orthographical studies of Jawi as
used in manuscripts are rare, and were mostly carried out by colonial officials and
missionaries who made it their business to disparage Jawi spelling. They argued
that it was defective in terms of not representing the full range of vowels and, pro-
bably more importantly for most of them, that it was connected to Islam. Inspired
by such considerations, they made efforts to ‘force Jawi spelling into a Procrustean
bed of presumed rules and standards’ (Kratz 2002, 22).
On the other hand, Ulrich Kratz (2002) also contends that it may in fact be
this ‘defective’ nature of the Jawi spelling not fully indicating the vowels of a
word which allows for a variation in pronunciation and writing, a characteristic
well appreciated in a multilingual environment and conducive to joining people
together in a common cultural realm. In a recent publication, issued as a tribute
to Ulrich Kratz’s scholarship on Malay manuscript studies, Annabel Teh Gallop
refers to this particularity in Malay spelling as a ‘tradition of inconsistency’ which
may provide a good way of describing the impressions one gets upon reading
Malay manuscripts (Gallop 2015, 29).
In this chapter I would like to follow up on some of the points Kratz and Gallop
have indicated in their recent publications and explore a few characteristics of
the Jawi spelling as found in a small number of manuscripts originating from the
Moluccas in the 17th century. I must emphasise here that this is a first preliminary
exploration of this kind, building on what has been displayed in A Jawi Source-
book for the Study of Malay Palaeography and Orthography (Gallop 2015), which
contains a concise survey of the writing in 60 dated Malay manuscripts spanning
almost 350 years. In the next section, I will concisely discuss some earlier studies
about Jawi spelling before going on to introduce and contextualise the manuscripts
I explore in the remainder of this paper. As will become clear, the state of the art
does not allow me to make any sweeping conclusions about standardisation of the
Jawi script or the development of the orthography in Malay manuscripts.

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220 Jan van der Putten

2 Studies in Malay orthography

With reference to the recent studies by the above-mentioned scholars of Jawi
script, earlier studies about Jawi orthography in general have put much effort into
determining how ill-equipped the modified Arabic script was for the representa-
tion of Malay sounds. Moreover, they sought to prescribe certain rules that would
improve the deplorable state of affairs and make the Malays write their language
in a proper manner (see Kratz 2002 and Gallop 2015). In an elaborate survey of
the history of the scripts used for writing Malay, Hashim Musa (1997) understan-
dably focuses on a description of the Jawi script which to a certain extent is still
being used and propagated in certain Malaysian quarters. His book presents long
lists of spelling particularities that were gleaned from a wide array of Malay texts,
ranging from a number of early inscriptions on tombstones and the earliest evi-
dence of Jawi script in the region on the Trengganu Stone (dated 1303 CE) to a
selection of manuscripts from the 16th up to the 19th century, to the spelling of a
few books, treatises and news items in periodicals published in Malaysia in the
20th century. In a concise discussion of earlier studies on this topic, the author
simply reverberates a well-known proposition made by the British missionary-
cum-scholar William Girdlestone Shellabear (1901) that the relatively fixed stan-
dard of the writing in early Malay manuscripts was due to the recent transfer
of the script from Arab teachers to Malay pupils. This standard for the writing
of Malay is supposed to have gradually faded in subsequent periods as more
local particularities seeped into the writing system. These local particularities
mainly pertain to the representation of a few consonants, such as the opposition
between f and p, g and glottal stop, and especially the writing of vowels in the
words. Hashim Musa also refers to a study by the Korean Kang Kyoung Seok, who
proposed the thesis that the Jawi spelling had gone through three stages in its
development for the purpose of representing the Malay language. The first phase
is characterised by a faithful rendering of Malay sounds by applying an Arabic
standard with a full set of diacritics, including vowel points. In the second phase,
this standard was gradually left behind and vowel points were replaced by a set
of semi-vowels comprising alif, wāw and yā’ . These represent the vowel pairs a/ə,
o/u and i/e (è, é), which were inserted in the penultimate syllable of normal two-
or three-syllable words in Malay which contains the word stress.1 The third phase
was characterised by the inclusion of these semi-vowels also in the ultimate syl-
lable, a feature which is visible in the standard Jawi spelling systems developed
in modern-day Malaysia (Hashim 1997, 78–80, Kratz 2002, 23).

1 For a discussion about the alif used to represent /ə/, see below.

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 221

As a general rule of thumb, the most obvious characteristic of the second

phase often found in Malay manuscripts produced between the 16th and 19th cen-
turies is the spelling of common words such as jadi ‘to be, become’ as ‫< جاد‬jad>,
and orang ‘human being’ as ‫< اورڠ‬awrng>.2 However, this feature of not indicat-
ing vowels in certain positions and the use of a set of ambivalent indicators (i.e.
the use of semi-vowels), or even the total absence of any indication of vowels,
which regularly occurs in the spelling of certain words,3 charges the written texts
with a certain degree of ambiguity which has led to severe criticism of past and
present scholars and other observers imbued by a print-literate-inspired longing
for unambiguousness of written texts (cf. Milroy and Milroy 1991, 64–69). Such
criticism, of course, tacitly ignores similar inconsistencies in spelling and other
linguistic peculiarities which were common in European written texts from an
earlier period when mass education was not yet established and the standardi-
sation of language usages was much less developed than it is now. Written com-
munication is usually considered superior to speech in Western civilisations and
by consequence applied as a yardstick to measure cultures in other parts of the
world. However, two caveats must be brought forward with respect to ‘meas-
uring’ Malay writing in accordance with such a ‘universal’ truism. Besides the
fact that we are dealing with texts which were written down during a time when
virtually no structured formal education existed in the Malay world, it may also
be conceived that there are languages in which a certain degree of ambiguity in
texts may be more appreciated than a formal, unambiguous form of communi-
cation. Such a consideration was proposed by Geoffrey Benjamin with regard
to the informality and situatedness of colloquial Malay, which cherishes a high
degree of ambiguity and invites interlocutors to join the ‘language play’. This
informal or condensed variety of the language shares certain important char-
acteristics with the Malay used in narratives recited for local audiences, such
as a-historicity, a lack of interest in the relations between events, and a down-
playing of individuality. Benjamin describes this condensed form of Malay as a
system in constant flux, where we are faced with contextual and fleeting shifts
in cultural meanings projected by native speakers on the linguistic forms being
used (Benjamin 1993, 355–56).

2 Words starting with the vowels i/e or u/o are introduced with the alif-yā’ and alif-wāw res-
pectively.
3 This commonly leads to consonant frameworks which can accommodate different vocalisa-
tions. The framework ‫( سنتق‬s-n-t-q), for instance, is interpreted in Klinkert’s Malay-Dutch dictio-
nary (1947, 603–4) as santak (‘to thump’), səntak (‘to pull’), santuk (‘sleepy; to accidentally hit
something’), suntuk (‘being obstructed’), sintok (‘tree species: cinnamomum sintoc’), sintik
(‘type of small oyster’).

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222 Jan van der Putten

A similar proposition is made by Ulrich Kratz, who calls the major perceived
shortcoming of not indicating all vowels of the words in what is to a certain extent
a received Jawi spelling a ‘major strength’. Part of his attractive contention is that
Jawi had established a ‘shared written link’ among regions and dialects (Kratz
2002, 23). This kind of written link seems to have existed in particular between
Malay and Minangkabau cultural realms in Sumatra, whose languages share a
large number of lexical items but differ in their pronunciation. In the case of such
similar languages it seems quite straightforward to conceive that the inherent
ambiguity of linguistic expressions in the writing system of these languages was
considered to be a positive feature, as it marks a more open venue for commu-
nication than a form rigidly controlled by non-negotiable rules for the spelling
of particular words. The consonant framework ‫( سنج‬s-n-j), for instance, allows
speakers of these languages to realise a different pronunciation, [sənja] and
[sanjo] for Malay and Minangkabau respectively, which in the oral/aural mode
of communication may not be readily recognised by them as one and the same
word. However, its visual representation in written form is identical in Arabic
script and therefore the meaning is readily understandable for speakers of both
languages as ‘dusk’.
A second caveat we need to make in this respect concerns the disregard of a
differentiation of certain textual genres and the possible existence of more stable
local traditions that produced Malay texts in which a higher degree of consistency
was applied than general statements allow for. As the accuracy of Malay scribes’
copying of doctrinal Islamic texts is generally considered higher than in more
secular texts (see e.g. Voorhoeve 1964), it seems likely that the former textual
genre will show a higher degree of consistency in spelling in comparison to the
latter. We should also be aware that, although Malay was the language of state
and religious learning from the 16th century onwards in many parts of the archi-
pelago and beyond, people used different local languages in daily conversation
in polities such as Aceh, Makassar, Bima and the Moluccas. These distinct polities
were nodes in Islamic trading and linked scholarly networks; here local traditions
may have developed their own particularities in terms of textual layout, shape
and spelling in manuscripts produced at the courts of the rulers and other centres
of learning. The study of these kinds of regional traditions found in clusters of
related and datable documents may be a more fruitful approach, leading to a
certain understanding about developments in the palaeography and orthography
of Jawi writing, as Annabel Teh Gallop convincingly proposes in her recent publi-
cation. As preliminary examples of such traditions she mentions a few characte-
ristics of an Acehnese religious book hand which was current in religious writings
in the 18th and 19th century, and a Moluccan chancery hand found in documents
from the royal courts in the Moluccas (Gallop 2015, 34–36). It is this notion of a

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 223

local tradition in the production of manuscripts I will engage in here and explore
to what extent it can be applied to a number of manuscripts that originate from
the Moluccas and the royal court of Makassar on the island of Sulawesi.

3 Malay documents from the Moluccas and

Makassar
Although it was already widely used as a trading language in eastern parts of
the archipelago at an early stage, Malay was not the only or the most dominating
language of the region. In the 17th century, Malay had to compete with Portuguese,
Spanish and Arabic as language of diplomacy; it was used in combination with
Arabic in the dissemination of religious knowledge; and it also served as contact
language next to a welter of local languages in daily conversations and trade
negotiations. Because of the invaluable spices grown in the Moluccan islands, for
centuries the region had been a trading hub which attracted a host of merchants,
priests and soldiers from the archipelago, such as Javanese, Makassarese and
Butonese, and from other parts of the world, including Arabs, Chinese, Indians
and Europeans. Quite a few minor local rulers tried to establish their own polity
to surf the prosperous wave of increasingly globalised trading networks, which
inevitably led to harsh competition and full-scale wars between local contenders
who frequently called in the assistance of outside forces to decide the conflicts
with their neighbours and other contenders. In the 16th century the islands were
alternately dominated by the northern polities of Ternate and Tidore. The former
first secured Portuguese support for their political agenda, and later the Dutch
helped the rulers to consolidate their power and prosperity into the 17th century,
ironically also making Islam the dominant religion in the islands, despite Por-
tuguese and Dutch proselytising activities. Not long after its arrival, the Dutch
VOC implemented a gruesome monopoly on the cultivation and trade of cloves
and nutmeg by forcefully expelling all foreign competitors and playing regional
powers off against each other, or killing them if they failed to comply with the
new rules.
It is in this highly volatile context that the documents I will discuss are set. The
first and most important document is the Tale of Hitu (Hikayat Tanah Hitu). Hitu
was a polity which had united 30 settlements on the north coast of Ambon, and it
was jointly ruled by four prominent families. Imam Sifar Rijali, a learned member
of one of these four ruling families, is reported to have written Hikayat Tanah
Hitu while he was staying at the viceroy’s court of Gowa in Makassar. Because of
severe reductions in the clove production imposed by the Dutch VOC, the govern-

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224 Jan van der Putten

ment of Hitu had declared a war that would rage in the central Moluccan islands
with intervals during the 1640s and 1650s. Rijali had taken refuge in Makassar to
ask the assistance of the Makassarese at Gowa as the main competitors of the Ter-
natean overlords of Hitu. The rulers of Ternate were too much inclined to go along
with Dutch rule. Subsequently, in the 1650s one of the factions of the Ternatean
ruling family rebelled against this pro-Dutch stance of the sultan and open figh-
ting broke out on the islands under the leadership of Majira, a distant member
of the ruling family of Ternate. As one of the Hituese leaders, Rijali intended to
restore the authority of his government. It was perhaps to provide documentation
of the ongoing war to support his appeal or at the personal request of the enligh-
tened viceroy of Makassar, Karaeng Pattingalloang, that Rijali compiled a prose
narrative about the events and their historical context.4
Hikayat Tanah Hitu more or less chronologically deals with the early state
formation in Hitu (1500–38), wars the Hituese waged on the Portuguese (1538–
1605), the monopolisation of the clove trade by the VOC (1605–43), and Hituese
armed opposition against the abolition of the Hituese government (1643–46).
After writing the tale during his exile in Makassar, Rijali went back to the Moluc-
can islands in 1653, where a copy of the work was made in the 1650s for another
member of his family. It is this copy that was passed on into the hands of the
well-known German-born merchant, botanist and historian Georg Eberhard
Rumphius, who spent most of his life in Ambon. This copy then, possibly by way
of the Dutch Reverend Valentijn, eventually ended up in Leiden. Both Rumphius
and Valentijn, well-known contemporaneous commentators on Moluccan affairs
and important contributors to its historiography, used the tale to mine informa-
tion for the writing of their own histories of the region. In his monumental Oud en
Nieuw Oost Indiën (1724–26) Valentijn mentioned the tale as one of the texts being
circulated within Muslim quarters. He interpreted this as an indication of the
scholarship of the Muslim part of the Moluccan population, whose knowledge
and ability to speak and write Malay he considered much better developed than
the level of proficiency of the Christians under his tutelage. He was convinced
that this better command of Malay by Muslims was due to the fact that they pos-
sessed a number of Malay writings, which they lent to each other to read or copy.
Among the other texts he found in Ambon, Valentijn listed works which are now
considered as classics in Malay traditional writing, including Sulalat al-Salatin
or Sejarah Melayu, containing historical tales focusing on Malacca; Hikayat Amir

4 For a full account of the historical context and a description of the manuscript containing this
text, see Stravers, Van Fraassen, and van der Putten 2004. The unique manuscript is preserved
under Cod. Or. 5448 in Leiden University Library.

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 225

Hamzah, a tale about Prophet Muhammad’s uncle; and Hikayat Nabi Muhammad
and Hikayat Nur Muhammad, two tales about the Prophet Muhammad.
Hikayat Tanah Hitu is one of the very few relatively old text examples we have
from eastern Indonesia, which adds to its importance for manuscript studies in
general and the study of the development of the Jawi script in particular. The
manuscript originally consisted of 53 folded folio pages which seem to have been
bound with thread in quires. Since most of these pages are torn in the fold, the
manuscript now almost exclusively comprises loose pages, measuring about 32
by 20 centimeters. The beginning of the tale is missing and the pages have been
numbered using Arabic numerals from 2 up to 107 by one of the later owners
or users. The first 80 pages each contain 17 lines in orderly Arabic characters,
whereas the script in the remaining pages is less regular and these pages contain
15 to 17 lines. The manuscript held at Leiden University Library is still clearly
legible, but the paper is rather worn and tattered at the edges. Even though the
manuscript was probably originally bound, there is no sign of any covers or end-
papers. The first and last pages are provisionally repaired with Japanese tissue
and quite a few pages have greasy stains.
The extant text starts with the end of what must be the initial episode of
the tale, which indicates that not many pages have gone missing from this
manuscript. A few doodles that embellish the pages which now serve as first and
last page, indicating the beginning and end of the extant manuscript, suggest
that any covers and the beginning of the text might have been missing already by
the time the copy was made or passed on into Dutch hands. The remaining part
is complete, since the last page of the manuscript contains the end of the text.
The paper used for the copy of Rijali’s text reveals some indications about
the age of the manuscript, as the last 14 pages contain a watermark (a fool’s cap)
and a countermark (consisting of the initials for VOC). The typical fool’s cap
watermark indicates that the paper dates from the second half of the 17th century,
whereas the countermark shows that the paper was ordered by the VOC.5 There-
fore the manuscript may be dated to the second half of the 17th century and is
among the oldest Indonesian manuscripts extant. This is in contrast with most
of the preserved Malay manuscripts which contain copies of texts made during
the 19th century for successive generations of owners, as climatic conditions in
the tropics render paper a highly perishable medium for the distribution of texts.

5 The paper shows a fool’s cap with a seven-pointed collar of a kind which is likely to have been
manufactured in the second half of the 17th century, while fool’s caps with five-pointed collars are
generally from the first half of that century (see Laurentius and Laurentius 2008, 2: vii).

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226 Jan van der Putten

Fig. 1: First page of the Tale of Hitu (Hikayat Tanah Hitu), Leiden University Library, Cod. Or. 5448.
© Courtesy of the University Library Leiden.

The Hikayat Tanah Hitu manuscript not only contains indications about its age,
but also about its origin. In this respect a piece of calligraphy that appears twice
in the manuscript deserves special attention: in the top margin of pages 77 and 78
of the manuscript (shown in Fig. 2), we find the phrase Min Bulan Nustapi (written
as ‫( من بلن نسطفي‬m-n-b-l-n n-s-ṭ-f-y) and meaning ‘belonging to Bulan Nusatapi’,
the sobriquet of one of Rijali’s cousins). This may be interpreted as the hallmark
or inscription of the original owner(s) of the manuscript; Nustapi or Nusatapi was
the name of Rijali’s lineage. The manuscript also offers indications that it was a
copy of an older one, perhaps even of the original text by Rijali. At certain inter-
vals in the manuscript we find a word in the margin that has served as a sign for
someone to indicate that the reading during a certain session had come to that

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 227

particular point in the text. Although quite common in the Islamic tradition of the
Middle East, this Arabic word, balagh (‫‘ ;بلغ‬reach, transmit, report’), is not a mark
that appears frequently in Malay manuscripts. In this manuscript it seems to indi-
cate the reading by an authoritative reader who compared the copy with the orig-
inal and in the end gave his approval to the copy. This approval is found on page
92, where the word saḥḥ (‫‘ ;صح‬authentic, acknowledged, legal’) is written in the
margin. These marginal notes of balagh and saḥḥ suggest that a member of the
Nusatapi family carefully checked the manuscript, gave his approval to the copy
and eventually inscribed the name of his family as an indication of ownership in
the manuscript.

Fig. 2: Inscription of the name of the original custodians of the manuscript; pages 77 and 78 of
the Hikayat Tanah Hitu, Leiden University Library, Cod. Or. 5448. © Courtesy of the University
Library Leiden.

As indicated before, there are not many Malay documents that have been preser-
ved from this period and region, but some scattered manuscripts may serve as
extant material with which the orthography and some palaeographic characteris-
tics of the handwritten Tale of Hitu can be usefully compared. These documents
include a manuscript preserved in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin which contains
(1) a (fragment of an) undated letter from one of the Hituese leaders probably com-
piled in connection with one of the other texts in the manuscript, namely (2) an
agreement between the Ternatean Sultan Mandar Syah and the Dutch Governor-
General of 1652; and (3) the text of an agreement between the Dutch and Sultan
Hamza in Ternate from 1638 (Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Or. Fol 409, 1–3).6 The other
documents comprise a letter from a Ternatean leader in exile in Makassar, Kime-

6 The text of the letter seems closely related to the problems surrounding the visit the Ternatean
Sultan Hamza paid to Hitu and the consequences of the new political relations as imposed by
the VOC in 1637 (see Stravers, Van Fraassen and van der Putten 2004, 61–62; 178–85). I surmise
that the letter originally may have been an attachment of the agreement between Sultan Hamza
and the VOC.

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228 Jan van der Putten

laha Salahak Abdul Kadir ibn Syahbuddin, to the British East India Company
dated 23 May 1658 (Gallop and Arps 1991, 38), and two handwritten narratives
copied in Ambon at the beginning of the 18th century as presented in A Jawi Sour-
cebook by Vladimir Braginsky (2015, 54–55; 62–63). As Annabel Teh Gallop notes,
even a cursory comparison between these documents and two early-19th-century
letters from Ternate and Tidore she scrutinises for the same publication (Gallop
2015, 82–85) already shows that the handwriting of these documents differs mar-
kedly from the ‘wispy and spidery’ hand and specific form of some letters that
are characteristic for the Moluccan chancery hand (Gallop 2015, 36). Below I will
discuss a few palaeographic and orthographic characteristics of the writing in
the copy of the Hikayat Tanah Hitu and indicate similarities with the other extant
Malay documents mentioned above.

4 Characteristics in the writing of the Tale of Hitu

Taking a glance at the mise-en-page of the first page of the Hikayat Tanah Hitu
text (Fig. 1), it is obvious that the text block takes a central position on the page
with three wider and one smaller margin, the narrowest margin being on the side
of the paper where the manuscript is bound. This layout is consistent throughout
the manuscript, and we can see that the first page of the manuscript with the
doodles in the left-hand, wider margin is the recto side while a possible title page
(first recto) and start of the text (first verso) are missing (see Fig. 1).
The writing is regular but not refined. The most obvious characteristic is
the rather elongated, slightly slanted top stroke of the letter kāf (k/g) above its
straight upright ‘trunk’.7 While the tails of certain letters, particularly the rāʾ and
wāw, are often nicely rounded and elongated, the handwriting overall does seem
to be quite common and does not show any distinct characteristics which would
set the manuscript apart from the bulk of other Malay manuscripts.
The orthography of some of the words is arguably more specific to this text or
copyist, and to a certain degree also represents the conventions of the period and

7 See Fig. 1, but it may be even more obvious on other pages, such as the page of the manuscript
which was included as an illustration in van der Putten 2015, 51. The <g> can be distinguished
from the <k> in the Jawi script by placing one or three dots above or below the character kāf (‫)ک‬.
In Malay texts, these dots quite often are omitted, especially in common words such as juga
(‘also’; spelled ‫[ جوك‬j-w-k]), but in Hikayat Tanah Hituthe opposite idiosyncrasy is applied by
adding dots to the kāf in some words, even though these are normally spelled with a <k>, as for
instance in the word kəluarga (‘siblings, family’) spelled ‫[ ڮولورڮا‬g-w-l-w-r-g-a].

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 229

place where the copy was made. What must be mentioned first and foremost here
is the use of the tashdid or shaddah, a diacritical mark to strengthen and normally
double the consonant in Arabic, which takes the form of small ‘w’ on top of the
enhanced character. The borrowing of this diacritic in Jawi orthography has trig-
gered quite a number of comments from scholars’ earlier studies of Malay texts,
which are described and discussed by Russell Jones (2005). The most common
explanation for the use of the tashdid in Jawi orthography is that it would indicate
a schwa (a mid central vowel [ǝ]) in the preceding syllable. As there is no specific
diacritic in Arabic script for the schwa, most frequently referred to with the Java-
nese name pĕpĕt in Malay studies, an alif may possibly be used to indicate this
vowel. However, as mentioned above, the half-vowels alif, wāw and yā’, used in
Malay spelling to indicate the vowel, are normally included in the penultimate
syllable which contains the word stress, whereas syllables containing a pĕpĕt
most often are not stressed. The convention of the use of the tashdid in these
cases seems logical, because geminating a consonant does seem to have an effect
on the quality of the preceding vowel (cf. Khattab and Al-Tamimi 2008). As has
been noted by several scholars, a similar method of geminating the following
consonants to indicate a schwa is also found in Old Malay and especially Java-
nese inscriptions from South Sumatra and Central Java, which were written in a
script derived from the southern Brahmi script (Jones 2005, 281–2). Mahdi notes
that for the Brahmi script used in Old Malay inscriptions, consonants are gemi-
nated following a prefixal –r, such as in marvvaṅun (‘to rise’), while in root words
it is only once found in the Old Malay inscriptions found in South Sumatra in the
cognate for Malay bətuṃ (‘bamboo’, pattuṃ in the inscription), but occurs more
frequently in later inscriptions (see Mahdi 2005, 187–8).
Although logically we tend to look at Arabic phonology to describe the
tashdid’s function and effect with regard to Malay orthography, most interestin-
gly the indicated function of the diacritical mark for Malay is in agreement with
James Collins’s comments about the historical development of a Malay dialect in
eastern Kalimantan. In a concise overview about these dialects, he notes that the
Proto-Malay pĕpĕt in Berau Malay has merged with /a/, and that the gemination
of consonants following a penultimate syllable which originally contained *ə is
historically related to this merger (Collins 2006, 39).
Although he states that these characteristics are not shared by Kutai Malay,
the major other dialect in the region, the examples Collins gives for the Malay
dialect of Berau mirror the system of Jawi spelling as we find it in the Hikayat
Tanah Hitu and other texts and may indicate a common characteristic in Austro-
nesian languages in which consonants are geminated under influence of a schwa
in a preceding syllable.

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230 Jan van der Putten

In discussions about the inclusion of the tashdid in Jawi manuscripts, its

use is usually considered as being an indication of the relatively old age of the
manuscript, but as Russell Jones (2005, 289) has noted, this interpretation is not
absolute, as we can also find tashdids in 19th-century manuscripts. This being the
case, however, I think that a frequent use of this diacritical mark in original Malay
words does represent a somewhat archaic tradition which can tell us something
about the age of the particular manuscript. I would argue that this is also the
case with regard to the manuscript under discussion here and that, to a certain
degree, the use of the tashdid indicates a certain convention which was current in
the Malay world, more specifically in the eastern archipelago, in the 17th century.
In the Hikayat Tanah Hitu, then, we find a rather frequent use of the tashdid on
the following consonant after a pĕpĕt in a penultimate syllable of words such
as bənar (‘right, correct’, ‫ بنّر‬spelled [b-nw-r]), bərkəlahi (‘to fight’, spelled ‫بركل‬
ّ
8 ّ
[b-r-k-l -a]) , tətak or mənətak (‘to slash’, spelled ‫[ منتع‬m-n-t -‘]), mənang (to win,
w w

spelled ‫[ منّڠ‬m-nw-ng]), sri (honorific title in combination with sultan, spelled ‫سرّي‬
[s-r w-y]). This use of the tashdid occurs a few times in the other documents orig-
inating from the same time frame and region, for example, tətak and bəsar with
a tashdid on the second consonant is found in the fragment of an undated letter
preserved in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (MS Or. Fol. 409-1, see Fig. 3), while in
the Malay contract from the same collection of manuscripts (MS Or. Fol. 409-2, 3),
the tashdid only occurs systematically in the word dia (third person pronoun sin-
gular, spelled ‫ي‬ ّ ‫[ د‬d-y w]), which was possibly done to distinguish the word from
the preposition di (‘in, at’). The page of the manuscript copy of the Tale of Isma
Yatim (Hikayat Isma Yatim) which illustrates Vladimir Braginsky’s concise notes
on the same (Braginsky 2015, 55) yields a better crop of tashdids: in the first seven
lines we find these diacritical marks used in the words majəlis (‘council’, spelled
‫[ مجلّس‬m-j-l w-s]), sekalian (‘all’, spelled ‫[ سكلّين‬s-k-l w-y-n]) and duli (‘dust’, part
of a formula referring to the king, spelled ‫[ د ّل‬d-l w]). The latter spelling, which
also occurs regularly in the Hikayat Tanah Hitu, may be connected to the San-
skrit origin of the word, while the other two both may indicate the schwa in the
preceding syllable.

8 This spelling occurs a few times in the Hikayat Tanah Hitu, sometimes without a tashdid and
all of them without a final yā’. The undated letter in the Staatsbibliothek contains twice the same
word spelled with the final yā’ and without a tashdid (‫[ بكالي‬b-k-l-a-y], see Fig. 3, beginning of
line 11 and 12).

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 231

Fig. 3: Fragment of the undated letter from Hitu, probably late 1630s, Staatsbibliothek Berlin,
MS Or. fol. 409-110. © Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Orient­abteilung.

The same page of the Tale of Isma Yatim also shows another characteristic which
may be described as a spelling convention it shares with the writing of the Tale of
Hitu. In line 4 of the page displayed in Braginsky’s description (Braginsky 2015,
55), we find the word jənis (‘sort’) spelled as ‫( جينس‬jinis), where the insertion of
the half-vowel in the penultimate syllable may be observed as indication for the
vowel of the final syllable. The same spelling method of writing the vowel of the
ultimate syllable in the penultimate syllable which contains a schwa occur in
a few instances in Hikayat Tanah Hitu, in words such as kəris (‘dagger’, spelled
‫[ كيرس‬k-y-r-s]), bəlum (‘not yet’, spelled ‫[ بولم‬b-w-l-m]) and Jəpun (‘Japan’, spelled
‫[ جوڤن‬j-w-p-n]). In a few instances in the Tale of Hitu we find pəti (‘trunk, coffin’)
spelled as ‫[ ڤيتّي‬p-y-t w-y], in which the convention of writing the assimilated half-
vowel is found in combination with the inclusion of the tashdid on the following
consonant. This spelling convention is restricted to a few words only, and it is
obscure what might have triggered it. It seems clear, however, that representing
the schwa in Malay texts in the Moluccas caused some problems, possibly related

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232 Jan van der Putten

to specific traits of local languages, and Malay dialects of the region generally
lack this phoneme in their phonological system.9
Besides these regularities which are to a certain extent shared with some other
texts from the early period of Malay writings, Hikayat Tanah Hitu also shows some
particularities which may be considered idiosyncrasies of the scribe, possibly
induced by the spoken vernacular, while others are rather commonly found in Malay
manuscripts. These spelling particularities concern a somewhat regular, albeit cer-
tainly not consistent, omission of the voiceless glottal fricative /h/ in initial, medial
and final positions, while in other instances the h is added in words which do not
originally contain it. For instance, on the first page of the text in lines 6, 7 and 8, we
find respectively məmbawah, dibawah (‛to bring’) and labuan (‛mooring’), which
in a perhaps more common orthography would be spelled məmbawa, dibawa and
labuhan (see Fig. 1). Apart from this very common characteristic which is also found
outside Old Malay manuscripts and the Malay language, we find a particular confu-
sion of certain nasals and the omission of a glottal stop, most frequently before the
suffix –kan is attached to the words. Some examples in the Tale of Hitu comprise
buankan (‘to discard, exile’, instead of buangkan), sampang (‘small boat’, instead
of sampan), Seran (name of an island, instead of Seram), dinaikan (‘to rise, install’,
instead of dinaikkan), enda (‘to want, will’, instead of hendak) and anaku (‘my
child’, instead of anakku). Both these characteristics may have been influenced by
a vernacular language or a local dialect of Malay.10
The use of vowel points in the Arabic script in the Tale of Hitu is mainly
limited to the spelling of Arabic words and a few proper names, such as ‫ك‬ ْ ِ‫فَرْ ديْري‬
‫[ ح ُو ْت َم ْن‬fi-rº-dyº-ryi-kº ḥwu-tº-ma-nº] (firdirik hutman: Frederik de Houtman). In a
few other instances diacritics are provided to indicate the exact spelling of the
word, which may be due to a lack of familiarity with the word on the part of the
writer or copyist or due to his intention to highlight the word for another reason.
If the spelling may be considered rather inconsistent at times in this
manuscript, the opposite can be said about the morphology, which quite closely
follows common practice of most of the texts comprising the bulk of extant clas-
sical Malay narratives.11 One of the basic characteristics of Malay morphology of
transitive verbs is the assignment of roles to agent and object through the use of

9 The local Malay dialect, Ambonese Malay, does not have a schwa (Collins 1980, 18), while in
the local Austronesian languages, the schwa was changed into other vowel sounds (see Strese-
mann 1927, 95–100).
10 I am very grateful to Annabel Teh Gallop for providing me with the photographs of the ma-
nuscript held in Berlin. For a description and illustrations of these documents, see Wieringa and
Hanstein 2015, 62–65.
11 In this category of traditional Malay narratives I do not include doctrinal Islamic treatises,

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 233

a specific form of the verb: when the action is viewed from the agent’s perspec-
tive, the verb will be prefixed with mə- and a nasal which is homorganic with the
initial sound of the verbal root. The nasal will precede the initial voiced sound of
the root or will replace the initial sound if it is voiceless. For instance, the root
buang will change into məmbuang (‘throw away’), while panggil will transform
into məmanggil (‘to call’). It has been noticed that this general rule of prefixing
voiced sounds is relatively new and that the occurrence of deviating forms in
texts is an indication of their age (see Jones 2005). In older texts, we occasionally
find forms such as məmunuh instead of məmbunuh (‘to kill’) and məmuat instead
of məmbuat (‘to make’), but the form mənəngar (and not məndəngar, ‘to hear’) is
quite persistent and commonly found in texts from the 19th century as well (for an
early example see Braginsky 2015, 55, line 2).
The text of Hikayat Tanah Hitu somewhat consistently follows this general rule,
which forms an indication that the author and/or copyist was well acquainted with
the rules of the formal written register of this language. In prefixing the active verb
marker məN-, hardly any deviating forms emerge compared to common practices.
The text furthermore frequently and consistently uses the morphological possibilities
available in Malay grammar to indicate a reciprocal action. In traditional Malay texts,
the most obvious instance for this form is in the frequent war or fighting scenes in
which the adversaries shoot, stab, hack or curse at each other. This is also the case in
Hikayat Tanah Hitu, which contains forms such as sərang-mənyərang (‘to attack each
other’), alah-mengalah (‘to defeat each other’) and tembak-mənembak (‘shoot at each
other’) as examples in which the second part of the reduplication is affixed while the
first part consists of the root of the verb.12 Another way to indicate reciprocity is by
using the circumfix bər-…-an with possible reduplication of the root, which we find in
examples such as bərjanji-janjian (‘promise each other’), bərtikam-tikaman (‛to stab
at each other’) and bərsumpah-sumpahan (‘make a vow to each other’).
Only in a few single instances do we find examples of more archaic gram-
matical forms, such as dipəpatutan (‘to put in order’, modern Indonesian
dipatutkan) and dibəbohonkan (‘to lie about something’, modern Indonesian
dibohongi).13 These forms contain a partly reduplicated root form, which is
extinct in modern standardised Malay.

which seem to follow other standards heavily influenced by the Arabic originals they were trans-
lated from or based on.
12 Sarang-manyarang is spelled with alif in the penultimate syllable, while tembak-menembak
is spelled with a final –h (‫ )ه‬instead of a normal qaf (‫)ق‬.
13 Again in the Hikayat Isma Yatim, copied in Ambon, we find a similar irregular form,
bəpərsəmbahkan (‘to present’; Braginsky 2015, 55, line 11), while a few lines further down we can
find the regular passive form of the word in dipərsəmbahkan (ibid., line 17).

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234 Jan van der Putten

5 Conclusion
I need to emphasise that the limited scope of this paper only allows for a perfunc-
tory and preliminary discussion of a topic as broad as the use of Jawi spelling in
Malay manuscripts during a period of over three centuries and a distribution over
such a vast region. I have given a short survey of points brought forward in previ-
ous studies and described some palaeographic and orthographic characteristics
of the writing found in a manuscript copied in the mid-17th century in Ambon,
which I compared with the writing in a few documents originating from the same
period and region.
Older discussions about Jawi orthography mainly deal with the ways in which
vowels are represented, since Arabic usually indicates only three long vowels. I
have given specific attention to the tashdid, frequently occurring in the text of the
Hikayat Tanah Hitu and in some of the other extant Malay documents, demonst-
rating a usage which may be in agreement with certain historical developments
in geminating consonants and a merger of the schwa into /a/, as noted by James
Collins for Berau Malay.
Furthermore, the inconsistencies in the spelling of words I have touched on
may reflect phonological characteristics of vernaculars and local dialects which
are accommodated by the Jawi script, thereby providing a written link bridging
the different repertoires of communication. It does not seem too surprising that
the majority of correspondences in the use of tashdid in the Tale of Hitu were
found in texts of the same genre of extended narratives which were also circu-
lating in the Malay world by way of mouth, next to their written form preserved
in the extant manuscripts. In the vast cultural realm of the Malay world it may
be difficult to find a homogeneous body of texts that provide many indications
of standardised traditions, but collections of unstandardised consistencies as
accommodated by the Jawi script have certainly proven to be sufficient to com-
municate through time and space and provide the ambiguity appreciated by
interlocutors with different linguistic backgrounds. This shared cultural feature
of different literary traditions from such a vast geographical space has certainly
assisted in considering their ensemble as one ‘Malay’ tradition, however hetero-
geneous this may be.

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 A Collection of Unstandardised Consistencies? Jawi Script in Malay Manuscripts 235

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