Perbedaan Struktur Aksara Sunda Pra-Islam di atas Bahan Organik sebagai Bukti Masyarakat Sunda Aktif dalam Budaya Tulis

Abstrak

Old Sundanese society was always regarded as an oral society, but recent studies in the area of philology reveal rich information of the old Sundanese writing tradition in the pre-Islamic era. The Sundanese people wrote on various media, both of unperishable and perishable nature, namely gebang, lontar and bamboo. These media show some striking diversity of letters, not only in style, but also in structure. This research aims at finding how far the writing tools and media can influence the structure of letters by using formal and visual analysis and it is limited to only the letters on perishable media and to the consonants. Thirteen artifacts, which have already been transcribed and translated by former researchers, were used as samples for this research. The results show that the letters on lontar and on bamboo have developed far from the Late Southern Brahmi script as their origin and they show a pattern of structure which facilitates faster writing. On the other hand, the letters on gebang still remain very close to the script of origin with minor changes. It might be assumed that the changes of the letters on lontar and bamboo were the result of standardisation due to the needs of an active writing tradition.