Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese Vol II. - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/23

 been followed by the Javanese and Sundanese,—a method which certainly appears more rational, but which is on the other hand so fraught with difficulties, that most of those who adopt it lose courage long before they attain their purpose.

Thus in Java the preparatory subjects (Arabic grammar etc.) so indispensable in theory are left in abeyance and often not practised till the very end. The pupil after being grounded in a few elementary manuals is immediately introduced to the greater Arabic text-books.

These he reads sentence by sentence under the guidance of a teacher who probably knows as little of Arabic grammar as his pupil, so that if he makes no serious mistakes in vocalizing the Arabic consonants, he owes it to his good memory alone. After each sentence is read, the teacher translates it into Javanese; the language employed of course differs greatly from that of daily life, as it is a literal rendering of the Arabic text, dealing with learned subjects and leaving technical terms untranslated as a rule. It is only the similarity of these subjects one with another and the unvarying style of the writers that assist the pupil in committing to memory the text (lapal) and translations (maʾna or logat). The teacher follows up his word-for-word translation with an explanatory paraphrase (murad), designed to make the author's meaning comprehensible.

Strange as it may appear, diligent students attain in the end so much proficiency by this curious method, as to be able to translate from Arabic into Javanese simple text-books. They are of course liable to gross errors, and even their vocalizing of the Arabic words is seldom entirely accurate. Much depends on the comparative age of their traditions in affairs of grammar. Where for instance their teacher or their teacher's teacher was well grounded in grammar, they are likely to pass on the text in a more uncorrupted form than if it had been for a long time past transmitted from the memory of one to that of his successor.

The chief reason why the patience of the Javanese students does not become exhausted in this process, is that they feel the sum of their knowledge augmented by each lesson. They take a pleasure in the consciousness of having read the authoritative text (lapal) in the original and this they would miss did they like the great majority limit them-