Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/225

 with it. Now in Mentaway the preposition ka has also considerably extended its functions, so that it is now able to introduce almost any syntactical relation; and moreover before vowels it often appears in the abbreviated form k.*

143. The emphasizing of the predicate.

I. Nearly all IN languages possess particles which serve to emphasize some particular part of the sentence, so that this phenomenon must be styled Common IN. The most widely distributed is the particle ma, which also appears as mo, mĕ, mama, and man; it occurs in the Philippines, in Celebes, in the islands lying near New Guinea, and in Sumatra. Mal. has an emphatic particle lah, Mkb. ma + lah, etc.

Note.—Though some languages have ma, others mo, others again mĕ, this change of vowel does not as a rule correspond with the phonetic laws of the languages in question; we must, therefore, provisionally call it variation.

II. Now though it is true that these particles can be used to emphasize any part of the sentence, yet they are most frequently put after the predicate. In the Sumbawarese text about Dog's Dung — 27 lines of print — mo occurs eleven times, of which nine are cases where it follows the verb.

III. A minority of the languages makes but sparing use of the particles of emphasis; thus Kupangese, for example, where in the Story of the Fool — 10 pages of print — ma occurs only once, viz., in the phrase baku ma, “it is enough”. The majority use them very plentifully, e.g. Toba. In the Toba Story of Sangmaima the particle ma occurs in the ordinary course of the narrative after nearly every predicate. Illustration: “Sangmaima ate, and then took his provisions and went into the depths of the forest” = Then ate the S.,
 * [The second mode of formation of the status constructus is explained by the author in his monograph “Indonesisch und Indogermanisch im Satzbau”, § 180, as resulting from the carrying on of the “voice” of the final vowel (with which all Nias words end) onto the initial consonant of the following word, when it is closely connected with what immediately precedes, thus changing the unvoiced consonant into a voiced one. See also Essay IV, § 302, II.]