Lontara script


The Lontara script is a Brahmic script traditionally used for the Bugis, Makassarese and Mandar languages of Sulawesi in Indonesia. It is also known as the Bugis script, as Lontara documents written in this language are the most numerous.
It was largely replaced by the Latin alphabet during the period of Dutch colonization, though it is still used today to a limited extent. The term Lontara is derived from the Malay name for palmyra palm, lontar, whose leaves are traditionally used for manuscripts. In Buginese, this script is called urupu sulapa eppa which means "four-cornered letters", referencing the Bugis-Makasar belief of the four elements that shaped the universe: fire, water, air and earth.

History

Lontara is a descendant of the Kawi script, used in Maritime Southeast Asia around 800 CE. It is unclear whether the script is a direct descendant from Kawi, or derived from one of Kawi's other descendants. One theory states that it is modelled after the Rejang script, perhaps due to their graphical similarities. But this claim may be unfounded as some characters of the Lontara are a late development.
The term Lontara has also come to refer to literature regarding Bugis history and genealogy, including the Sure’ Galigo creation myth. Historically, Lontara was also used for a range of documents including contracts, trade laws, treaties, maps, and journals. These documents are commonly written in a contemporary-like book form, but they can be written in a traditional palm-leaf manuscript also called Lontara, in which a long, thin strip of dried lontar is rolled to a wooden axis in similar manner to a tape recorder. The text is then read by scrolling the lontar strip from left to right.
Although the Latin alphabet has largely replaced Lontara, it is still used to a limited extent in Bugis and Makasar. In Bugis, its usage is limited to ceremonial purposes such as wedding ceremonies. Lontara is also used extensively in printing traditional Buginese literature. In Makasar, Lontara is additionally used for personal documents such as letters and notes. Those who are skilled in writing the script are known as palontara, or 'writing specialists'.

Usage

Lontara is an abugida with 23 basic consonants. As of other Brahmic scripts, each consonant of Lontara carries an inherent /a/ vowel, which is changed via diacritics into one of the following vowels; /i/, /u/, /e/, /ə/, or /o/. However, Lontara do not have a virama, or other consonant-ending diacritics. Nasal /ŋ/, glottal /ʔ/, and gemination used in Buginese language are not written. As such, text can be highly ambiguous, even to native readers. For instance, can be read as sara 'sorrow', sara' 'rule', or sarang 'nest'.
The Buginese people take advantage of this defective element of the script in language games called Basa to Bakke’ and Elong maliung bəttuanna riddles. Basa to Bakke’ is similar to punning, where words with different meanings but same spelling are manipulated to come up with phrases that have hidden message. This is similar to Elong maliung bettuanna, in which audience are asked to figure the correct pronunciation of a meaningless poem to reveal the poem's hidden message.
Lontara is written from left to right, but it can also be written boustrophedonically. This method is mostly applied in old Buginese journals, in which each page are reserved for record of one day. If a scribe ran out of writing space for one day's log, the continuing line would be written sideways to the page, following a zig-zag pattern until all space are filled.

Variants

An extended variant of the Lontara script is Lota Ende, which is used by speakers of the Ende language in central Flores.

Form

The contemporary Lontara script is distinctively angular compared to other Brahmic scripts, succeeding from two older, less angular variant called Toa jangang-jangang and Bilang-bilang. Lontara are written without word space.

Consonants

The consonants consist of 23 letters. Like other Indic abugidas, each consonant represents a syllable with the inherent vowel /a/.
As previously mentioned, Lontara does not feature a vowel killer mark, like halant or virama common among Indic scripts. Nasal /ŋ/, glottal /ʔ/, and gemination used in Buginese language are not written.
Four frequent consonant clusters however, are denoted with specific letters. These are ngka, mpa, nra and nca. "Nca" actually represents the sound "nyca", but often transcribed only as "nca". Those letters are not used in the Makassarese language. The letter ha is a new addition to the script for the glottal fricative due to the influence of the Arabic language.

Vowels

The diacritic vowels are used to change the inherent vowel of the consonants. There are 5 ana’ surə’, with not used in the Makassarese language. Graphically, they can be divided into two subsets; dots and accents.
Additionally, the third vowel must appear before the consonant that it modifies, but must remain logically encoded after that consonant, in conforming Unicode implementations of fonts and text renderers. Currently, many fonts or text renderers do not implement this single reordering rule for the Bugis script, and may still incorrectly display that vowel at the wrong position.

Other diacritics

To transcribe foreign words as well as reducing ambiguity, recent Bugis fonts include three diacritics that suppress the inherent vowel, the nasalize vowel, and mark the glottal end or geminated consonant, depending on the position. These diacritics do not exist in traditional Lontara and are not included into Unicode, but has gained currency among Bugis experts, such as Mr Djirong Basang, who worked with the Monotype Typography project to prepare the Lontara fonts used in the LASERCOMP photo typesetting machine.

Punctuation

Pallawa is used to separate rhythmico-intonational groups, thus functionally corresponds to the period and comma of the Latin script. The pallawa can also be used to denote the doubling of a word or its root.

Unicode

Buginese was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2005 with the release of version 4.1.

Block

The Unicode block for Lontara, called Buginese, is U+1A00-U+1A1F:

Sorting order

To get the correct display of the prepended vowel , installing a font conforming to the standard Unicode encoding of the Buginese script is not enough, because you also need either:
As a consequence, there is still no complete support for this Buginese script in most major Operating Systems and applications.
And the script can only be rendered correctly, temporarily, using either:
For example, the normal and expected encoding of the Buginese syllable ke in texts conforming to the Unicode standard is
which currently renders as ᨀᨙ.
With the third solution above, it could instead be specially encoded in tweaked texts as:
which should now render correctly as ᨙᨀ. Although this solution is not ideal for the long term, text indexers may be adapted for compatibility of this encoding with the recommended encoding exposed in the previous paragraph, by considering this character triple as semantically equivalent as the previous character pair; and future fonts and text layout engines could also render this triple by implementing a non-discretionnary ligature between the two graphemes, so that it will render exactly like the standard character pair.
There still remain problems with fonts that have minimum coverage in their mapping, because text renderers still not correctly reorder the isolated Buginese vowel e when it follows something else than NBSP or a Buginese consonant, or because fonts do not have correct kerning rules for additional pairs using any one of the 5 Buginese vowel signs.

Sample texts

An extract from ''Latoa''

What is this text?