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Since I read about the Javanese script a couple of years ago, I’ve been kind of fascinated by the idea of its collation, formerly quoted on Omniglot, and – with better quotability – at the moment to be found in a paper by Michael Everson: The traditional order of the Javanese script is: ha na ca ra ka da ta sa wa la pa dha ja ya nya ma ga ba tha nga and this order has some currency. (The order is hana caraka, data sawala, padha jayanya, maga bathanga, a sentence which means ‘There were (two) emissaries, they began to fight, their valour was equal, they both fell dead’.) (Everson 5) ...

I made a big effort recently to shoehorn this site into WordPress, which replaces my old clumsy custom-built content management system. The contents of the site have been overhauled as well, most importantly the dictionary. Granted, the tabular layout of the new dictionary may not be as pretty as the file-card records the database spat out earlier, however, this way, maintaining the code is much easier, as well as adjusting the output if fields in the database change. The advanced search of the dictionary now also offers a couple more options, e.g. searching with regular expressions. As the script that queries the dictionary database is now called dynamically by a jQuery function (Yes, you must have Javascript enabled in order to use the dictionary!), forms will not be empty anymore after the request is sent. The only thing the advanced search can’t handle so far is searching by multiple attributes of a word, that is, something along the lines of “Return all words that are 3rd person singular animate,” which would return a number of pronouns. At the time of writing this, building such a function with MySQL seems a little overkill, as you’d ideally do it with Temporary Tables or Views and I still need to read up on that. However, the advanced search feature of the old website couldn’t deal with this either. ...