Hidden or cognitive rhymes and dirty joke in javanese pun

Abstract

Purpose: This article tries to overview different forms of rhyme in Javanese literature to exhibit the existence of possible distinct rhymes in it. This article puts more emphasis on the logical riddle of wangsalan, which invites readers to frown at it. This kind of rhyme may be unclassified in English so that it may be proper to name it cognitive rhyme. This article also tries to see the use of repetition in a Javanese pun, which can be considered to be a dirty joke. Methodology: The data of Javanese literary works, which are obtained from fossilized wangsalan and puns found in songs and sayings, are analyzed in terms of the existing repetitions. Results: Hidden rhyme and dirty joke in Javanese pun lead results that Javanese literature like literature in common employs repetition or parallelism to produce good memory of the words. Implications: Repetition is the heart of language art. Whether a whole or a part, different linguistic units repeat their beats to create good feats. Poets make use of repetition to cling words’ images in our mind. Livingstones (1991) says: ‘A good rhyme, a repetition of sound, pleases us. It gives a certain order to our thoughts and settles in the ear pleasantly.’ As a universal phenomenon, rhyme exists in all literary languages including in Javanese literary texts and oral tradition.