Re: Caste Languages

John Cowan wrote:


>Roger Mills scripsit:
>
>> There is also the case of the 2-or-more (status) levels in Javanese--
>> _ngoko_ for everyday use among intimates and to inferiors, _kromo_
>> used toward supreriors.
>
>As of forty years ago, at least, there were six levels:  "plain", "plain
>with low honorifics", "plain with high honorifics", "fancy", "convoluted",
>"convoluted with high honorifics".
That sounds about right, actually.  I couldn't remember all the native
terms, but I suspect they correlate approximately as follows:
"plain"- ngoko (intimates and inferiors)
plain w/low honorifics- kromo desa (e.g.villagers to the village head)
ditto w/high honorifics- kromo desa madya (one vill.head to another,
slightly superior village head???)
fancy- kromo  (in a non-village context, anyone to a perceived superior)
convoluted- kromo inggil (anyone to a high govt. muckymuck)
ditto w/high honorifs-- I don't know (probably to the king/his family etc.)

ngoko BTW is always written with |o| (native or roman); kromo is written
natively with |a|, roman kromo, krama or (old) kråmå (a-rings), the latter
being closest to the actual pronunciation.

I wonder if, after 50 years of nationhood, Bahasa Indonesia, and everythng
that brought with it, the system is still alive and well.  Not being a
student (nor a fan, either) of things Javanese, I don't know.

There are some sort-of phonological rules to turn ngoko into kromo, but
mostly it's rather random.  The most common is:
final-syl liquid-vowel > -nten (e is schwa)
soré (< Skt. surya) > sonten 'late afternoon'

Sometimes this plays hob with comparisons:
sari (Skt IIRC) 'essence' ::: Jav. santen, Ml. santan 'coconut oil' (So the
Ml. word does not, as Dempwolff proposed, reflect common Austronesian)
jalu 'male' ::: Ml. jantan 'male of animals' (ditto)

The plain/fancy/convoluted levels affect
>almost every open-class lexical item in the language, whereas the
honorifics
>have more sporadic effects.  If I can dig up my materials on this, I will
>post a sample sentence in all six levels.
Please do!!
>
>In addition, there is/was a seventh level: "speak Bahasa Indonesia
instead".
>
And letter-writing to family and relatives increased many-fold when Javanese
no longer had to worry about giving offense.
Even so, careful users of BI observe a few status-y things, mainly in the
pronouns:

2d pers. kamu, engkau, yu (!), informal; saudara ('brother', falling into
disuse) or pak, bapak 'father', bu, ibu 'mother', and other kin terms, or a
title-- e.g. prof, pak jendral; and the horrible _anda_ only in ads and
mealymouthed official pronouncements.  _tuan_ for foreigners, and it still
smacks of the colonial era.

  ia -- dia (a little more respectful) -- beliau ( quite respectful) and
yang 'who' vs. respectful nan (literary & affected, probably archaic).

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