ABSTRACT
The Old Javanese literary language is attested from the tenth century AD. It is known as Kawi (< Sanskrit kavi ‘sage, seer, poet’), and it was written in a script which is clearly based on Brāhmī. The same script was used for Old Balinese and Sundanese. Typically Indic features in the script are: (a) its syllabic character: as in Devanāgarī the vowel /a/ inheres in all base-form consonants; (b) the consonantal inventory is ordered in positional (velar, palatal, dental, labial) rows, each of five terms (see Devanāgarī); in Kawi, however, the retroflex series is represented by ṭa and ḍa only.
