Silent Letters in the Balinese Script | | Adeg Adeg: A Graphetic and Graphematic Feature Analysis

The concept of “silent letters” relates to graphic symbols that are not pronounced or that do not have mapping with a specific linguistic unit. In the context of processing the mapping of sequences of linguistic units to writing, this concept often results in ambiguity. The Balinese script, which refers to a silent letter, appears in a basic shape || adeg adeg. Scholars of Balinese script define adeg adeg as a process to eliminate characters (Akshara’s), resulting in consonants without inherent vowels. This explanation is very metaphorical, ambiguous, and not based on adequate terms to describe graphetic and graphematic features that are related to mappings between graphic unit sequences and linguistic unit sequences. Balinese script || adeg adeg as primary data comes from the 16.162 lemma in the Balinese dictionary - Indonesian with Latin and Balinese script. Adeg adeg is analyzed both graphically and graphematically to identify its characteristics, with the stages of analysis adapted from the Multimodular Model of Writing System proposed by Meletis (2018). Graphetic analysis shows that the adeg adeg is identified as basic shapes || with three salient graphetic features: -recodability, -paired variants, and +additive. Graphematically, adeg-adeg is defined as a grapheme with the following features: +lexical distinctiveness, +linguistic value, and +minimality. The clarity of graphetic and graphematic characteristics significantly contributes to a more comprehensive and transparent cognitive-linguistic mechanism depiction, especially in deciphering writing systems based on Akshara’s highly complex characteristics.