The Chamic languages, today represented only by small or very small minority communities of speakers on the Chinese island of Hainan, in Cambodia and in Vietnam, form a low-order branch of the Austronesian language family. One of the Chamic languages is Cham itself, with pockets of speakers (several 100,000 in total) in some provinces of Southern Vietnam as well as Cambodia, and a bifurcation between at least two clearly distinct dialects. It is the only Chamic language with a premodern writing tradition, but one that goes as far back as the 5th century ce. While Modern Cham has been documented based on manuscripts (none earlier than the 17th century) and by consultation with native speakers, older stages in the development of Cham are preserved in an epigraphic corpus, associated with a kingdom called Campā, that covers a millennium (ca. 500–1500) and a North-South stretch over at least 1000 km of what is today Vietnam. These premodern phases of Cham linguistic history, that we may call Old Cham, have drawn virtually no attention among linguists, and have not begun to be described linguistically by epigraphists. The road towards a grammar and dictionary of Old Cham has to pass through the visual documentation of the text-bearing inscriptions (estampages, photographs), and the decipherment of the writing system. Besides the challenges inherent in relying on inscriptional data (damage to artefacts leading to textual uncertainty, constraints on the type of linguistic expression found in inscriptions, among others), the linguistic analysis of Old Cham needs to be sensitive to the likelihood of chronological and geographic variation in a small corpus covering a lot of time and space. To access Old Cham, moreover, one cannot do without a knowledge of Sanskrit (which was used in Campā for epigraphic expression besides Old Cham), closely related non-Chamic languages that have a relatively well documented history (Malay, Acehnese), the unwritten other Chamic languages (Jarai, Raglai, etc.), and an understanding of the areal pressures that have pushed the Chamic languages rather far from the typological mold of the Austronesian languages of maritime Southeast Asia. This article, conceived as the prelude to grammatical and lexicographical research to follow, presents the Old Cham corpus from the artefactual and textual points of view, outlines the history of discovery and documentation of Old Cham, sketches the challenges that face scholarship in this field, and illustrates some preliminary results of typological and historical interest with special attention to the relevance of comparison with Malay and Acehnese.
This short contribution presents two recently discovered inscriptions from Central Java that are among the oldest documents in the Old Javanese language, namely a dated stone from Kesongo (685 & Sacute;aka/743 CE) and the Disunuh inscription (709 & Sacute;aka/787 CE). These two artefacts constitute new evidence that Old Javanese had become a written language in this part of Java already in the eighth century CE. Previously, the period of use of Old Javanese in epigraphy was reckoned to have begun in the ninth century, and in East Java, based on the Harinjing A inscription from Kediri, assumed to date to 726 & Sacute;aka/804 CE. The new discoveries require a revision of the chronology of the emergence of vernacular epigraphy on the island of Java.1
In November 1815, the deadliest “natural” disaster in Balinese history was caused by the exceptional combination of multiple natural hazards that occurred simultaneously and cascaded in the present-day province of Buleleng. This major disaster, which is thought to have claimed more than 10,000 lives, has never been scientifically analyzed. The study conducts an in-depth analysis of this cascading disaster, from the root causes and chronology of natural hazards to their environmental and societal effects, by thoroughly examining all available written sources about this event, whether colonial or Indonesian. Seven months after the Tambora eruption, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake, which occurred in the Bali Sea off the northern coast of the island, triggered a very large landslide on the northern flank of the Buyan-Bratan caldera. The initial mass movement evolved into a cohesive debris flow that reached the sea after traveling up to twenty kilometers through Banyumala River Valley and Singaraja City downstream. According to historical accounts, fifteen villages were buried or devastated by the debris flow. The large volume of sediment entering the sea triggered a local tsunami along Buleleng’s coast. This geohistorical approach offers a comprehensive overview of various sources describing Singaraja’s situation before the crisis, the hazard succession, the cascading hazard intensities, and the short- to long-term impacts on Buleleng. Based on the written sources, Bali took around fifteen years to recover from the 1815 disasters.
