instead Pigeaud published what he called the "index" to the big dictionary, in the form of a concise or "hand" dictionary, which appeared in 1938 as the Javaans-Nederlands Handwoordenboek (Concise Javanese-Dutch Dictionary), used by generations of students at Leiden University down to the present day, and reprinted in Leiden in 1970, 1982 and 1989 by the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology.
One assumes that Pigeaud's work was halted, or delayed, by the arrival of the Japanese in Java in 1942. After World War II he was repatriated to Holland and never returned to Indonesia or sought to continue his work on the dictionary. It used to be said that the materials had been destroyed, but in fact they were preserved and kept for some time in Jakarta, before being returned to Yogyakarta, where they are now, complete, in the office of the Balai Penelitian Bahasa in Kotabaru. In response to several questions as to whether it might not be a good idea to publish them as they stand, given Pigeaud's reputation as a Javanist, on two occasions the materials were inspected: they consist of large cards kept in stout wooden boxes covering a whole wall. But the cards contain nothing but handwritten selections from sources (indicated by symbols only traceable through some long-lost key), arranged one below the other, but without any attempt at translation. In short, these materials are unusable, and the efforts of Pigeaud's team of clerks, and himself, over the years were largely wasted.
The concise "Pigeaud" of 1938 has a number of drawbacks, the main one relating to the arrangement of entries. These are given under derived forms, so that a verb, for example, will be found under both active and passive forms. Furthermore, the definitions are deliberately highly concise, and this does not promote clarity; the non-native speaker of Dutch often has such difficulty with Pigeaud's precious use of Dutch as to be little the wiser—there are even many words there that are not to be found in Van Dale's modern Dutch-English dictionary.
At this point we must not omit to mention the lexicographical work of WJ.S. Poerwadarminta, of which the Baoesastra Djawa of 1939 is best known. This is a Javanese-Javanese dictionary, in which the all-pervading influence of Pigeaud in that period can be detected: the very title-page states: "ingkang kangge antjer-antjer serat baoesastra Djawi-Wlandi karanganipoen Dr. Th. Pigeaud ing Ngajogjakarta" ("what served as guide was the Javanese-Dutch dictionary compiled by Dr Th. Pigeaud in Yogyakarta"), showing that it is in fact largely based on Pigeaud. This was followed by an abbreviated version, the Katrangan Tegesing Temboeng-Temboeng (Baoesastra Tjilik), published in 1940. For a fuller account of the history of Javanese lexicography one can consult E.M. Uhlenbeck's The Languages of Java and Madura (1964).
With Indonesian independence and the internationalisation of the study of Indonesia, the prewar Dutch monopoly of Javanese studies was gradually broken, and non-Dutch students felt the need for a Javanese-English dictionary. The first Javanese-English dictionary was compiled by E. Home at Yale University and published in 1974 (Javanese-English Dictionary). She acknowledges a debt to Pigeaud and Poerwadarminta, but also used fresh materials in the form of postwar publications from Java and had the help a number of informants who happened to be in the USA at that time. The grammatical insights of Home are a huge advance on Pigeaud, and her dictionary has the advantages of clear setting-out and the inclusion of examples which are helpful for illustrating meanings. The spelling is of course the pre-1974 one, and a shortcoming is the failure to distinguish homonyms. But in all humility it has to be said that its main drawback is the fact that a large proportion of the definitions are wrong, based on both misunderstandings of the earlier dictionaries and informants' explanations, and a lack of familiarity with the realities of Javanese life and culture.
One has also to mention the existence of a Ramus Jawa-Indonesia published by L. Mardiwarsito (1985), and more especially S. Prawiroatmojo's Bausastra Jawa-Indonesia of 1957 and 1981 in two volumes. Furthermore, one should acknowledge the (unpublished) work of B. Karno Ekowardono and Daliman Edi Subroto, Kamus Bahasa Jawa-Indonesia, compiled as an academic exercise in lexicography with Professor A. Teeuw as consultant in 1975. Next there is a Kamus Jawa-Indonesia in two volumes produced by a team headed by Sri Nardiati at the Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, Jakarta, dated 1991/1992 and in a stencilled form.
Finally, the Djawanisch-Deutsch Worterbuch (Javanese-German Dictionary) published by Hans Herrfuerth in Leipzig in 1972 should also be listed. I do not know of dictionaries of Javanese in any other languages.
3. The Lexicography of Javanese: Some Issues
The lexicon of Javanese is undoubtedly vast. It has never been exhaustively recorded. The reliability of the older materials can no longer be checked, and there is little in the way of published sources for contemporary Javanese. In order to be reasonably complete in coverage, a large team would be required, with a big budget and the patience to put in years of painstaking work. This is only a dream, but dreams sometimes lead to a new initiative.
Experience has shown that defining the meanings of Javanese words is like aiming at a moving target. A comparison of definitions from two existing dictionaries, say Pigeaud and Jansz, seems to highlight this problem, because often the meanings given apparently differ, either in emphasis or totally, or the word is missing in one but present in the other. What is going on here? Is this the same language? Was one lexicographer right and the other wrong?
I prefer to believe that they were equally competent, but had an unavoidably limited view of the whole picture. The first factor to be noted is a relatively weakly developed notion of a standard language (compared with English, for example). In the prewar period, it was claimed, for example by Pigeaud, that the idiom of Surakarta was standard, and thus all else was dubbed gw (gewestelijk = regional); Jansz may not have been equally convinced of the validity of such claims, or he may have used a different network of informants. In particular for items which do not occur in written sources, one is dependent on informants, who report only that part of the meaning of an item they are familiar with and use regularly. Informants from Central Java, for instance, when confronted with an unfamiliar word, have a tendency to say, "Oh, that's East Javanese dialect!". It may or may not be; after all, they are not in a position to go and check.
So the first complication to be noted is regional variation, the "dialect" factor. This may well explain why different meanings are attributed to the same form: both are right, but used by different people. But are we really looking at the same word, or at homonyms? One has to make a choice here, and if there is no apparent link (semantically or historically), then they are probably separate words. While it is relatively easy to identify a generally accepted ("standard") form, the rest have to be given the blanket term reg (regional = dialect), although so far we have no way of telling to which dialect or sociolect the word belongs—obviously a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs.
The second complication is change through time. As we know, every language is changing, and this applies also to Javanese. There are shifts in meaning, including new meanings added to old ones, there are words which have dropped out of use, and there is the possibility of new words being added. These are interesting questions that need to be considered.
When a new meaning has been added, this may represent a genuine extension of the old meaning, or perhaps one that already existed but was missed by older dictionaries. In either case, we should attempt to arrange the meanings as a succession from a basic, literal or physical one to extended, figurative ones. When a word appears to have dropped out of current use, we still have to be cautious, as some listed by Pigeaud as vo (verouderd = obsolete) have turned out to be in regular use in the countryside and not obsolete at all. Seemingly obsolete words do need to be listed, on the assumption that they may occur in older published sources, even if people no longer use them in daily speech.
This is in turn connected with the huge changes that have taken place in Javanese culture during the past 100 years: all sorts of objects and customs that were once well known, both in the countryside and at court, have now disappeared. And yet one still has to be careful in case they survive in some isolated spot after all. In any case their historical value is undoubted. For example, much of what is provided in L. Th. Mayer's Een Blik in het Javaansche
