KAVI, Ici've, the ancient language of Java in use down to about the year 1400. It is a Malayo-Polynesian tongue resembling, in its in flections, the Javanese language, but has many words borrowed from Sanskrit. This Sanskrit vocabulary is due to various influence, all com ing from contact with the earlier language of India. Many of the Sanskrit words were intro duced into Kavi by Brahmans from India shortly before the beginning of the Christian era. Since then the contact of the two peoples has been almost continuous. This contact with Brahmanism resulted in malting Kavi the ecclesiastical and, hence, semi-sacred language of Java, which it remains to-day. This rela tionship with India is strongly marked by the fact that much of the religious literature of Java is based on that of India. Now Kavi is no longer the spoken language of Java, having been superseded, in the 15th century, by the so-called vulgar tongue of Javanese, which is in reality but a modern development of the ancient Kavi tongue subject to various foreign and internal influences. This, in its turn, dif fers considerably from the educated or polite dialect or speech in use in Java. These three developments of the ancient Javanese tongue are written in alphabets borrowed from the alphabet of the Devanagari script and adapted to the needs of the borrowers. Consult Fried
rich, (Arjuna-Vivaha) (Batavia 1850) ; Kern, various native texts (The Hague 1871) ; Raf fles,
KAW (more correctly KANZA ), a branch of the Osage division of the Siouan Indian stock, formerly living on the lower Kansas River, and early in the 19th century estimated at 1,300. In 1846 the government removed them to a reservation in the present Oklahoma, west of the Osage River. where they dwindled so rapidly that in 1910 there were only 238, over half of them of mixed blood.