The Balinese alphabet is a type of alphabet called an abugida that was used to write the Balinese language, an Austronesian language spoken by about three million people on the Indonesian island of Bali. The use of the Balinese alphabet has mostly been replaced by the Roman alphabet, and very few people are familiar with it. It is mostly used for religious writings. An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ... An abugida or alphasyllabary is a writing system composed of signs (graphemes) denoting consonants with an inherent following vowel, which are consistently modified to indicate other vowels (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel). ... Balinese is the language spoken by people in the island of Bali, Indonesia. ... The Austronesian languages are a family of languages widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ... Topography Map showing Bali within Indonesia Sunset at Jimbaran Beach, Bali Young Balinese Dancers Rice terraces at entrance to Gunung Kawi Temple Balis Sanur Beach Statue of Dewi Sri — Ubud, Bali Bali is an Indonesian island. ... ...
The Balinese alphabet was probably derived from Pallava and Old Kawi alphabets, which ultimately were derived from the Brahmi alphabet, the root of almost all the Indic and Southeast Asian abugidas. The Pallavas were hereditary Hindu rulers who dominated southeastern India between the 4th and 9th centuries. ... Old Kawi is the oldest Kawi script used on Bali in 775 AD. It is written on palm leaves. ... The Brahmi alphabet was the first of a type of alphabet called an abugida. ...
Like most abugidas, each letter has an inherent vowel of /a/. Other vowels are indicated by using diacritics, which can appear above, below, to the left, or to the right of the consonant. A diacritical mark or diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a words pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ...
An abugida is to be contrasted with a syllabary, where symbols with similar sounds look nothing like one another, but also to be contrasted with an alphabet proper, where separate symbols are used to denote the consonants and the vowels.
For example, the Meroitic script of ancient Sudan did not indicate an inherent a (one symbol stood for both m and ma, for example), and is thus similar to Brahmic family abugidas.
That is, it is equivalent to an abjad with obligatory vowel marking, like the Arabic alphabet as used for Kurdish in Iraq, as is thus essentially alphabetic.
And the ancient Balinese god Twalen, who is a buffoon in contemporary Balinese epics and in the wayang, the shadow play, and is made the servant of the Hindu gods, is still considered older and more powerful than all the Hindu gods, being really the elder brother of Siva (Siwa in Balinese).
The old Balinese nature god, the great earth serpent Anantaboga, with "indianisation" was symbolically buried in the Balinese earth, his head at the centre of the island underneath the crater lake of Batur and his tail touching the sea at Keramas.
Balinese temples follow the plan of ancient Malayo-Polynesian megalithic shrines and within the temples space is ordered along a continuum, a concept followed in Malayo-Polynesian times.
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