Makassar_language

Makassarese language

Makassarese language

Austronesian language of South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Makassarese (basa Mangkasaraʼ or basa Mangkasarak), sometimes called Makasar, Makassar, or Macassar, is a language of the Makassarese people, spoken in South Sulawesi province of Indonesia. It is a member of the South Sulawesi group of the Austronesian language family, and thus closely related to, among others, Buginese.

Quick Facts Makasar, Native to ...
This article contains Lontara script. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Lontara characters.

Phonology

The following description of Makassarese phonology is based on Jukes (2005).[2]

Vowels

Makassarese has five vowels: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/. The mid vowels are lowered to [ɛ] and [ɔ] in absolute final position and in the vowel sequences /ea/ and /oa/.

Consonants

More information Labial, Alveolar ...

Makassarese consonants except the glottal stop and voiced plosives can be geminated. Some instances of these might result from Proto-Malayo-Polynesian schwa phoneme *ə (now merged into a), which left gemination into the following consonant (*bəli → *bəlli → balli "to buy, price", compare Indonesian beli, contrasting with Makassarese bali "to oppose").[3]

  • /ɲ/ is written ⟨ny⟩ before a vowel, ⟨n⟩ before ⟨c⟩ and ⟨j⟩
  • /ŋ/ is written ⟨ng⟩
  • /ɟ/ is written ⟨j⟩
  • /j/ is written ⟨y⟩
  • /h/ only occurs in loanwords
  • The glottal stop /ʔ/ only occurs in syllable-final position. It is written as ⟨k⟩ in the orthography promoted as the standard by the government and based on the practice in Indonesian, as an apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩ in other orthographic standards, sometimes as ⟨q⟩ in academical writing, or not written at all in informal writing.

Phonotactics

All consonants except for /ʔ/ can appear in initial position. In final position, only /ŋ/ and /ʔ/ are found.

Consonant clusters only occur medially and (with one exception) can be analyzed as clusters of /ŋ/ or /ʔ/ + consonant. These clusters also arise through sandhi across morpheme boundaries.

More information nasal/lateral, voiceless obstruents ...

The geminate cluster /rr/ is only found in root-internal position and cannot be accounted for by the above rules.

Sequences of like vowels are contracted to a single vowel, e.g. sassa 'to wash' + -ang 'nominalizing suffix' > sassáng 'laundry', caʼdi 'small' + -i 'third person' > caʼdi 'it is small'.

Current writing systems

Although Makassarese is now often written in Latin script, it is still widely written using Lontara script, which once was used also to write important documents in Bugis and Mandar, two related languages from Sulawesi.

1. Makasar script
2. Lontara script
3. Serang Alphabet
4. Latin alphabet

Examples

Some common words/phrases in the Makasar language, transcribed in the Latin script, are as follows (ʼ = glottal stop):

More information Lontara, Romanized ...

Historical writing systems

See also: Makasar script
Sample of a handwritten book, written in Makassarese using the Makasar script, of a diary of the Princes of the Sultanate of Gowa. The palláwa punctuation signs, typical of this script, are drawn and colored in red, as well as a few proper names and some inserts in Arabic.
Museum display showing script comparison of Makasar (left), Lontara (center), and Bilang-bilang (right) at Balla Lompoa Museum, Sungguminasa, Gowa

Makassarese was historically written using Makasar script (also known as "Old Makassarese" or "Makassarese bird script" in English-language scholarly works).[4] In Makassarese the script is known as ukiriʼ jangang-jangang or huruf jangang-jangang ('bird letters'). It was used for official purposes in the kingdoms of Makasar in the 17th century but ceased to be used by the 19th century, being replaced by Lontara script.

In spite of their quite distinctive appearance, both the Makasar and Lontara scripts are derived from the ancient Brahmi script of India. Like other descendants of that script, each consonant has an inherent vowel "a", which is not marked. Other vowels can be indicated by adding diacritics above, below, or on either side of each consonant.

Further, Makassarese was written in the Serang script, a variant of the Arabic-derived Jawi script. Texts written in the Serang script are relatively rare, and mostly appear in connection with Islam-related topics. Parts of the Makassar Annals, the chronicles of the Gowa and Tallo' kingdoms, were also written using the Serang script.[3]

See also

Further reading

  • Tabain, Marija and Jukes, Anthony (2016). "Makasar". Illustrations of the IPA. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 46 (1): 111–99. doi:10.1017/S002510031500033X{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link), with supplementary sound recordings.

References

  1. [1]
    Makasar at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. [2]
    Jukes, Anthony, "Makassar" in K. Alexander Adelaar & Nikolaus Himmelmann, 2005, The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar, pp. 649-682, London, Routledge ISBN 0-7007-1286-0
  3. [3]
    Jukes, Anthony (2020). A Grammar of Makasar: A Language of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Leiden & Boston: BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-41266-8.
  4. [4]
    Pandey, Anshuman (2015-11-02). "L2/15-233: Proposal to encode the Makasar script in Unicode" (PDF).
Look up Appendix:Makasar Swadesh list in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Makassarese language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Makassar_language, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.