The modern Malay language has been written in two scripts: Jawi, based on Arabic letters and Rumi, based on Roman letters. From the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries, Jawi was the dominant script in the region but Rumi overtook Jawi in popularity and official usage in the twentieth century. Thus, all the medical manuscripts in Malay examined in this project were written in Jawi. Many scholars born after the 1960s in Malaysia and Indonesia are not fluent in the reading of the script, especially its handwritten varieties, as the Rumi form became the de facto national script for the language. The Jawi-Rumi converter that we created facilitates in the readings of these historical sources as it allows machine-led conversion from one script to another. Besides the conversion of scripts, much work is still needed in unpacking these manuscripts - deciphering handwriting, tracking down herb names, cross-referencing religious allusions, among others - but the converter provides a step forward towards this end. 

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Access the converter here: https://goodmami.org/rumi-jawi-web/

 

Read more about the history of the language scripts here: https://goodmami.org/rumi-jawi-web/about.html

 

Read more about technical process in converting from one form to another here: https://goodmami.org/rumi-jawi-web/details.html

 

Converter creator: Michael Wayne Goodman, NTU

 

Blog entry by Faizah Zakaria, NTU

 

Image of keyboard from Wikimedia Commons.