Laidlay felt that the square shape of the characters had misled Prinsep into concluding that the inscription was in Pali. In fact, the characters bore no resemblance whatsoever to Pali. Laidlay was unable to identify the characters with those of any published Sinhala inscriptions, but found it identical with Kawi, a literary language from the islands of Java, Bali and Lombok based on Old Javanese with many Sanskrit loanwords. He noted, "With the alphabet of this language, ... I can identify all, or nearly all, of the characters; but of course no clue to the purport of the inscription can be obtained without some knowledge of the language itself." Relying on Begbie, he, too, "conjectured with probability that the inscription is a record of some Javanese triumph at a period anterior to the conversion of the Malays to Muhammadanism".