Another burden for pupils to shoulder

THERE is confusion about what khat (Jawi calligraphy) actually is. A language expert friend explained to me that Jawi is a script, not a language. It is an Arabic script adapted to write the Malay language. A script can be used to write any language. Khat is therefore a stylised way of writing Jawi. What we now use for Bahasa Malaysia and English is the Roman or Latin script.

Jawi is, in a sense, a type of old Malay. The spelling may be different from Bahasa Malaysia because the script will not be adequately equal to the Roman script. Schoolchildren would have to contend with an entirely new script, with different sounds and different spelling of words, in what authorities say will be a “small part” of the curriculum.