Buru language
Buru or Buruese is a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Central Maluku branch. In 1991 it was spoken by approximately 45,000 Buru people who live on the Indonesian island of Buru. It is also preserved in the Buru communities on Ambon and some other Maluku Islands, as well as in the Indonesian capital Jakarta and in the Netherlands.
The most detailed study of Buru language was conducted in the 1980s by Australian missionaries and ethnographers Charles E. Grimes and Barbara Dix Grimes.
Dialects
Three dialects of Buru can be distinguished, each of which is used by its corresponding ethnic group on Buru island: Rana, Masarete and Wae Sama. Some 3,000–5,000 of Rana people along with their main dialect use the so-called "secret dialect" Ligahan. The dialect of Fogi which once existed in the western area of the island is now extinct. Lexical similarities between the dialects are about 90% between Masarete and Wae Sama, 88% between Masarete and Rana and 80% between Wae Sama and Rana. Aside from native vernaculars, most Buru people, especially in the coastal regions and towns, have at least some command and understanding of the official language of the country, Indonesian. The coastal population also uses Ambonese Malay.Naming and taboo
Buru people use traditional names, along with Muslim or Christian names, the most common being Lesnussa, Latbual, Nurlatu, Lehalima, Wael and Sigmarlatu. The language has several sets of taboo words, which are both behavioral and linguistic. For example, relatives refer to each other by kin names, but not by proper names. However, contrary to many other Austronesian cultures, Buru people do refer to the deceased relatives by name. Other restrictions apply to the objects of nature, harvest, hunting and fishing, for which certain words should be chosen depending on the island area. These taboos have explanations in associated myths of legends. In all cases, the words for taboo items are not omitted, but substituted by alternatives. All Buru dialects have loanwords. Many of them originated from Dutch and Portuguese during the Dutch colonization and referred to the objects not previously seen on the island. Other types of borrowed words came from Malayan languages as a result of inflow of people from the nearby island.Phonology
The Buru language has 5 vowels and 17 consonants. They are illustrated on the tables below:| Labial | Apical | Laminal | Dorsal | |
| Stop | p b | t̪ d | tʃ | k g |
| Fricative | f | s | h | |
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |
| Lateral | l | |||
| Trill | r | |||
| Semivowel | w | j |
| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | |||
| Mid | |||
| Open |
Writing system
Contrary to other indigenous languages of Buru and the nearby island of Ambelau, Buru has a functional writing system based on the Latin alphabet. Buru Christians worship with a Bible written in their native language, the first translations of which were made back in 1904 by Dutch missionaries.Grammar
The Buru language can be classified as an SVO language, prepositional, with modifiers following the head noun in a noun phrase, and the genitive occurring before the noun.Negation
In Buru, a speaker's perspective or evaluation of one or several utterances often appears at the end. Even whole stories may be concluded with a sentence or two expressing the speaker's attitude to what was just said, where or who they heard it from, or similar judgements. This is reflected at both the sentence and even clause level by means of auxiliaries, parts of the TAM system, tags, and other such modifiers. Grimes classifies these items as "external to the clause proper". This comes to include speaker evaluation of the truth value of what is said, marked by moo, the main negative adverbial in Buru.All page references refer to Grimes.
Such clause-final negation is atypical of Austronesian languages, in which the negative almost exclusively appears before the verb or predicate. This feature appears to have crossed the linguistic boundary between neighbouring Papuan languages and Buru, as well as other languages of the Moluccas. This is substantiated by the fact that "historical records indicate long-term and extensive interactions between Austronesians and Non-Austronesians in Halmahera and the Moluccas”. Consequently, Klamer concludes that it is “reasonable to analyze … final negation in … Buru … as having a origin for which there is substantial historical and linguistic evidence”.
By combining with moo, other negative adverbials have been derived throughout the language's history, giving rise to mohede and tehuk moo. Mohede is a frozen compound of the words moo and hede, where hede is an adverbial with a continuative aspect. Unlike other negative adverbials and auxiliaries, the segment tehuk may appear in both the "nucleus" or clause-final, as well as in both positions at once.
The deictic element sa can be combined with moo to mean "nothing, no, nobody”. Sa is related to the quantifier sia, and, as such, constructions involving sa … moo may be glossed as “not one”. Where exactly a speaker places this element sa indicates the intended scope of the negation, whilst the negative, as is mandatory for Buru, remains clause final. The negative polarity items “anyone” and “anything” are represented consistently in Buru as ii sa and geba sa respectively.
Moo may also be employed to add stronger emphasis to prohibitive clauses that are introduced by the prohibitive marker bara.
In the event that moo directly follows a verb, the cliticised object marker -h, if present, will attach to it to form of mohe.
Pronouns and person markers
Free pronouns may be used equally for the subject and object of intransitive verbs.Examples:
Examples:
Possession
Depending on its distribution a possessive word can behave verbally or nominally, or as the head of a predicative possessive construction or as the modifier of the possessive NP.The possessive word is the only word in the Buru language obligatorily inflected for person and number and behaves much like a verb in its affixing possibilities. All examples in this section have been taken from Grimes, 1991 chapter 14.
The basic structure of the constituent is SVO.
Functional and distributional behaviour of the possessive construction:
Applicative /-k/ is used to indicate a definite pronominal object.
The possessive word can also accept valence changing verbal prefixes however this is restricted to the third singular form 'nake'.
People can be put at someone’s disposal through the combination of /ep-em-/.
The possessive word, with or without a proceeding cliticised free pronoun, functions as a possessive pronoun with a NP.
Used with verbs of exchange, the possessive word can have the force of a dative argument.