Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/272

260 77. Syllables which come after the accentuated one are not infrequently long, especially when they end in a vowel. In Dayak all vowels at the end of words are long; thus hūmā, "house", has both vowels long, the penultimate one being accentuated. Bugis in certain cases has vowel length in the unaccentuated final syllable, even when it ends in a consonant, e.g. in dīmēṅ, "longing". 78. The phenomenon that syllables which precede the accent are hardly ever long, while those that follow it are often long, is parallelled by the fact that the former hardly ever contain diphthongs, whereas the latter often do (see § 171). 79. In Bugis, when a word accentuated on the final syllable becomes the first member of a compound, the accent may be thrown back; in that case, if the final syllable was long, e.g. on account of contraction, it loses its length. From WB táppa is derived tappāṅ, "creation, model" < tappa + āṅwith the accent on the final syllable; in the compound táppāṅ-matuwa, "model for a father-in-law" = "future father-in- law", the accent has been thrown back and the vowel has become short. Quantity in Old Javanese.

80. The Old Javanese manuscripts indicate the length of the vowels. But it is noticeable how seldom the marks of length occur in them. Judging from the quantity of Modern Javanese they ought to be much more frequent. In the Ramayana the long vowels are found, apart from Sanskrit loan-words, only in interjections, in certain monosyllabic words of substance, as in kūṅ, "longing", but not in sih, "pity", in contractions like matī, "to let die" < mati + i, and in compensatory lengthenings, as in ikū, "tail" < Original IN ikur2. Hence we meet with whole verses without a single long vowel, e.g. Ramayana, V, 68, 2 : "She then, quite alone, entered unafraid" = sira juga tuṅga-tuṅgal anusup tamatar matakut. Were there perhaps in Old Javanese three gradations of quantity, as in Sangirese (§ 67), and is only extreme length marked in the manuscripts?