An Introduction to Abjad Pegon (أبْجادْ ڤَيࢴَونْ)
This will be the first of two parts: this first part will explain the details of the rules of Abjad Pegon. The second part will be the details of the transliterator once it’s finalized.
This article exists for mainly two reasons: The first is that, obviously, I should explain what Pegon is and how it works since it’s integral to the project. The second is that my friend published a similar and monstrous article that was entirely written in Pegon, which is useless for anyone who can’t read it on account of its orthography and useless for anyone who can read it on account of its content. But it is very funny. Also fair warning: Medium, at the time of writing, has a hard time displaying right-to-left paragraphs, so some displays might be wonky.
Bones to the flesh: the consonants
The consonants are the most frequent part of Pegon and are, luckily, the most relatively simple. You can find a lot of charts online that detail what these consonants are and they’re mostly correct. One example is the one from Wikipedia:
Now why did I say “mostly correct”? The reason is that there’s not really a single canonical version of Pegon; it’s by its very nature a non-standard riff on the original Arabic script. You’ll notice that some of the letters in this table are colored yellow, which denote which letters are not originally from Arabic and are added for use in writing Javanese, Sundanese, and Indonesian. These letters may vary: in older Pegon manuscripts, you might find that some of these additional letters are missing the three dots and instead have one or two dots in its place. For example, you might see the letter ڊ instead of ڎ. Some of these older versions aren’t even included in the Unicode standard. For example, an older version of ڟ is طٜ, which does not exist in the current Unicode standard and is still in proposal. You have to use a diacritic to write down exactly that letter. Just keep that in mind when using these letters.
Another thing to note is that consonants may be written with this ◌ْ, a sukun, if they are not followed by vowels. However, as noted, it may only be implied and is not mandatory if the context suffices.
The vowels
The happiest days of our lives: the single vowels, in position
Vowel sounds in Pegon aren’t indicated exactly like it is in Arabic, using harakat. They’re indicated using matres lectionis — or as its known in Hebrew, its most frequent user, אֵם קְרִיאָה. They’re indicated by the use of existing consonants for vowels. These consonants are also the ones used in Hebrew, given both of their Semitic roots: ا (or alif), ي (or ya), and و (or waw). These are used for the sounds /a/, /i/, and /u/ respectively. However to get the full range of vowels in our languages, we have to add several new tools: ◌ََ , also known as a fatha and◌ࣤࣤ, also known as a curly fatha.
- The fatha is placed on the consonant before a ya to indicate an /é/ sound,
- The fatha is placed on the consonant before a waw to indicate an /o/ sound.
- Lastly, the curly fatha is placed on the consonant directly to indicate an /ê/ sound.
- Additionally, one may distinguish an /é/ sound from a /è/ sound by indicating the latter with a ◌ٰ also known as a superscript alif or a alif khanjaria.
There’s also some cases where sometimes two different representations of a sound may exist: the first is that the /ê/ is represented by ◌ٓ which is called a madda, but for the rest of the article, we’ll just be using the curly fatha. The second is that the /a/ sound can be represented by a single fatha or just nothing at all, but it may only do so if that sound cannot be pronounced as an /o/ in Javanese, for example “kang”, but not “Jawa” or “sapa” which can be pronounced as “Jowo” and “sopo” respectively.
To illustrate, here are some examples:
كا: /ka/, كَ:/ka/, ك:/ka/
كو: /ku/, كَو:/ko/
كي: /ki/, كَي:/ké/, كٓ: /kê/, كࣤ: /kê/, كٰي:/kè/
The use the alif khanjaria specifically is not as popular due to the fact that the sound is hard to distinguish in the first place. As a demonstration, the word “lele” is pronounced /lélé/ and the word “lelet” is pronounced /lèlèt/. We personally had a big debate about this in the dev team because I can’t tell the difference while some of the other developers claimed they can. I still do not believe them as of the time of writing right now.
كي: /ki/, كو: /ku/ كَي:/ké/ كَو:/ko/ كٓ: /kê/ كٰي:/kè/
Now comes a bit of headache. Every single vowel has a special way of writing when it’s in the front of a word, while /i/ specifically has a special way of writing when it’s in the end of a word and two ways of writing at the beginning of a word. They’re mostly just alifs with decorations.
The normal ones are as follows:
أ: /a/, او: /u/, اَي: /é/, اَو: /o/, اࣤ: /ê/.
The special case falls on /i/. If an /i/ sound at the beginning of a word is followed by what’s called a dead consonant — i.e. a consonant that is not followed by a vowel — it is written as إ. But if it is not followed by a dead consonant, it is written as اي.
As for the endings, the /i/ it is not written as a regular ya like ي, but rather ى, or what is referred to as a maksurat.
Prepare for vowels, and make it double
Now we have the double vowels, which also have different rules depending on where they are on the word. Any standalone diacritic here will be prefixed with an additional consonant to avoid formatting issues. And here they are:
Ending in /a/:
/ia/ is to be written as ييا or يٸا
/aa/ and /(n)oa/ at the end of a word is to be written as اها and نَوها respectively
/ia/ and /(n)éa/ at the end of a word is to be written as ييا and نَييا respectively
/(t)ua/ at the end of a word is to be written as تووا.
Ending in /i/:
/ai/ is to be written as اهي or اٸي, with the ya being replaced by a maksurat if it’s the end of a word.
Ending in /u/:
/au/ at the end or the middle of a word is to be written as اهو or ااو.
/iu/ at the beginning of a word is to be written as ييو or يٸو.
Ending in /é/:
/aé/ at the end or the middle of a word is to be written as اهَي or اٸَي.
Ending in /o/:
/ao/ is to be written as اهَو or ااَو
/(t)eo/ or /io/ is to be written as تَيٸَو or يٸَو respectively.
Ending in /ê/:
/aê/ is to be written as اٸࣤـ, with a tatwil or an elongator at the end.
That’s a lot of rules! I wrote this at 3 AM! Hopefully this is useful to whomever reads it. That is all. Cheers and ويلوجٓڠْ وٓڠى.