What is a pantun?
Easy answer will be: a form of traditional Malay poem.
And by Malay I do not mean exclusively Malaysia, nor exclusively Indonesia, nor Singapore, nor Brunei. Well you get the idea. By Malay, I mean of Malay origin, belongs to the Malay community, regardless of the country, sharing the common heritage of culture and language – woah – I’m kinda trying to sound like a lecturer here.
What makes a Pantun a Pantun?
Pantun has a strict form, in a way. Things to look for will be the rhyme scheme and the structure.
Pantun is usually structured in a stanza (rangkap) of even number of lines (2, 4, 6, 8 … .) This number of lines in a stanza is termed kerat.
The first half of it call the Pembayang (foreshadow) and the rest (the last half) is called Maksud (meaning). Together, this two sections of a pantun will give a certain message or to serve a certain function.
Rhyme of a Pantun
Given the structure, the rhyme scheme of a pantun is set this way: the 1st line of Pembayang will rhyme with the 1st line of Maksud, the 2nd line of Pembayang will rhyme with the 2nd line of Maksud, so on and so forth. and this rhyme, like most of how rhyme scheme works, based on the sound, won’t be necessarily based on the spelling.
Therefore, using the convention to state the rhyme scheme, the rhyme scheme for pantun of different kerat is as follows
4 kerat: abab
6 kerat: abcabc
8 kerat: abcdabcd
A special case will be for pantun 2 kerat where the rhyme scheme will be aa instead of ab.
There’s still some more details one should know in able to fully be able to recognize, identify, characterize, and analyse a pantun. Sometimes thing may look like a pantun but actually not, and sometimes thing may doesn’t sound really like a pantun but actually is. Therefore knowing this basic won’t be fully enough, but adequate for now.
We will unravel all these extra things in due time.
Summary
As summary for now:
A pantun is a form of traditional Malay poem
A pantun is structured in a form of stanza (rangkap), made up of even number of lines (kerat).
The rhyme scheme in general follows abcd… n/abcd…n
Thank you for visiting, and be sure to come again as we update more and more on pantun.