Orthography 53
Seven vowels were represented:
sound symbol
i
ɛ è^
a a
ɤ â/ă^
ə e
u oe
ɔ oIn 1973, there was a meeting of scholars in Pamekasan, the purpose of
which was to establish a standard orthography for Madurese. This orthography
is used in the chapters that follow. A decision was made to adopt a system that
paralleled the official spelling system used for Bahasa Indonesia and generally
accepted for Javanese. Like Javanese, Indonesian has only a two-way phona-
tion contrast for stops (voiceless and voiced). Therefore, the same dilemma is
faced regarding the representation of the aspirated series of stops. Unlike Indo-
nesian, Javanese includes a set of retroflex stops in addition to the dental-
alveolar stops. The standard orthography for Javanese represents the retroflex
stops with the symbols th and dh. This convention was adopted in setting the
standard for Madurese. As dh was adopted for the voiced retroflex stop, the di-
graph dh (used in the Dutch system) was unavailable for [], and consequently
the digraphs with h were not available for any of the aspirated stops. Further-
more, no symbols were adopted that required special typesetting or keystrokes.
The result is a system in which the voiceless aspirated stops are represented
with the same symbols as their voiced counterparts; thus aspiration is not
represented in the orthography and can lead to confusion. So, for example, b
represents both [b] and [p].
Similarly, not all differences in vowel quality are represented in this sys-
tem. Adhering to a principle of no diacritics or unusual symbols, [ɛ] and [ə] are
represented by the symbol e. This parallels the use of e to represent [e] and [ə]
in the Indonesian standard orthography. (Occasionally è is used to represent [ɛ]
to orthographically distinguish it from [ə], as is done for Javanese. But this is
not the normal practice.) Additionally, a is used for both [a] and [ɤ]. The other
vowels each take a different orthographic symbol. The potential for ambiguity
between a and e is reduced to varying degrees because of some distributional
regularities of [ɤ] and [ə]. First, as discussed above, [ɤ] is not phonemic and its
distribution is predictable: without exception, it occurs only following voiceless
aspirated and voiced stops and in the appropriate environment following a
transparent consonant ([r], [l], [w], [j]). [ɤ] never occurs as a non-alternating
vowel. Thus, it is transparent that the a’s in maca, the actor voice form for