Are these pantun?
Easy answer: Yes
Another easy answer: No
Not-so-easy answer: Maybe (Depends)
Ok, where to begin?
Why YES?
Because both of them are sampled from writings that explicitly refer to it as ‘pantun’.
The first pantun is from Hikayat Inderaputera. It’s a pantun delivered by a prince to this princess (puteri) as a kind gesture because the princess has offered him sirih (betel). And it has been made clear that this is not just a rhythmical or lyrical prose (bahasa/prosa berirama). The verb 'pantun' is used as a signal in the text.
So yeah, it is a pantun.
The second one is recorded by François-René Daillie in his Alam Pantun Melayu: Studies on the Malay Pantun as an example of pantun which he noted as recorded from a native. It’s put as an example of pantun in the book, not as a counter-example.
So yeah, the second one is a pantun too.
Why NO?
Because it breaks the rule, a well known rule of pantun i.e. that pantun 4 kerat (lines) must have rhyme scheme of abab, with exception that the a sound could be the same with b, then the rhyme scheme could be aaaa.
For convenience of future reference, I'll put it here as the abab rule
The rhyme scheme of the first pantun is abcb (only the second and the fourth line rhymes) whereas for the second pantun, it is abac (only the first and the third line rhymes).
By abab, we mean that the first line rhymes with the third, AND the second line rhymes with the fourth. It’s AND not OR. Both of the condition must be satisfied.
If it’s aaaa, could still be accepted, because the condition satisfied. It’s just that in this case, the first and the second line also rhyme, making the whole 4 lines rhyme.
Therefore, NO. Both of them are not pantun. They look like pantun, the have the pembayang and maksud pair, which is characteristic of pantun, but it violates the rule on rhyme scheme. So NO.
Why MAYBE?
Well it must depends on how you define a pantun. If you stick to pantun 4 kerat must have abab rhyme scheme, then obviously they are not pantun.
But, if you subscribe to a school which identify pantun 4 kerat to be having 3 rhyme schemes
abab (the dominant form)
aaaa (less favoured, but exist in quite a number too, second to abab)
other rhyme schemes (smallest in number, negligible perhaps, but still exist. E.g. abac, aaba, abcd)
This categorization of pantun 4 kerat rhyme scheme (of which not simply made up by me) will be elaborated in our future entry. So, just stay tuned.
So, it will depends on which “school of pantun characterization” you subscribe to. So, you could take the middle stance: some will say it is a pantun (of which they have their justification) and some may not take it to be pantun (of which they also have their justification).
It has been standardized nowadays that the rhyme scheme of a pantun 4 kerat is either abab (preferable) or aaaa. But, corpus doesn’t lie, and we can’t delete the corpus of pantun since the old days. There are example of what taken and accepted as pantun, at that time, that have rhyme scheme other than abab and aaaa.
And since we can’t (shan’t) change history, we can’t deny the fact that this kind of pantun 4 kerat (with rhyme scheme other than abab and aaaa) exist. As long as the “pantun” exhibits clear correspondence of pembayang-maksud pair, then that is still pantun.
And to make things more complicated, both of the pantun could actually satisfy the abab rule.
What?
It’s not conventional though, and no, we are not talking about spelling, because we know that pantun which emerged from oral tradition require the sounds to rhyme, not spellings.
But how? How could they satisfy the abab rule?
The last syllables of ‘dirampai’ and ‘puteri’ don’t sound the same. The same goes with the last syllables of ‘berkilau’ and ‘tahu’. So how could the pantun satisfy the abab rule?
Well, at least not conventionally. Of course by pronouncing the word pair in the conventional sense, you won’t get it to rhyme. However, if you let yourself to accept that different people may have different way in pronouncing words, then it could be fathomed that the word pairs could be made to rhyme, and thus the explanation on why this kind of pantun exist in the first place.
As for how it could be made to rhyme, it will be left as an exercise to the readers.
So, there you go. You may take it as a pantun, you may disregard it, or be safe and take both answer to be probable depending on how you want to see things.
Much of the rhyme scheme of pantun will be explained in another posting, specially dedicated to this issue. We’ll put up an update once ready. Therefore, be sure to follow us on our Facebook and Instagram.
Till then.
Yorumlar