SEAlang Library Buginese Dictionary

About the SEAlang Library Buginese Resources
Although there are some 3.5 million speakers of Buganese (mainly in South Sulawesi), there is very little extant Buginese-English lexicography.

SEAlang's Buginese dictionary is primarily based on unpublished material provided by Prof. Gene Ammarell (Ohio University), and totaling about 3,000 entries. This is a work-in-progress; the dataset is extracted from "Ask Sam" database files, and is not laid out in a regular dictionary format. We have attempted to distinguish between heads, subheads, and longer examples for presentation here.

As a working database, the original text contains some duplication and/or variation in data provided by different sources. Many of the original informants provide citations in Indonesian only; for presentation here we have tried to identify material glossed in English. The underlying dataset does contain more detail than is presented here; please contact us (or Prof. Ammarell) if additional details are needed.

We will be extending the Buginese dictionary with data from two additional sources:

-- 981 items from the wordlist provided by Husan Abas for the Comparative Austronesian Dictionary (D. Tryon, editor, Mouton de Gruyter 1995).

-- 897 items from the wordlist discussed by Christian Pelras in Lexique Thematique Plurilingue de Trenete-Six Langues et Dialectes D'asia du Sud-Est Insulaire (V. Arnaud et al, Harmattan 1997).

Both these sources focus on basic wordlists; they are provided in a phonetic rendition only, and there is overlap between the two.

Examples
Search for "engkai" (without the two " signs) then try the different display settings:

-- self shows the item,

-- self/parent shows the item and its root, engka.

-- family adds other derived and compound forms as well. You can get the whole family by searching for the root as well.

Note also the examples checkbox (in the menu), and buttons:

-- local shows examples that were found under this head.

-- remote shows examples that were found under other heads (shown in bold).

Searching
Searches may:

-- include an asterisk -- * -- as a wildcard that matches any number of characters; asterisks may appear in any position.

-- require matches for both, or either, Buginese text (of the headword), or English text (in the definition).

-- be expanded to return the root form, or of all inflected forms that share the same root, as discussed above.

-- finally, the English search term can be expanded (default) to include inflected forms (a search for sing matches sings, singing, sang, sung as well).

Thanks
We would like to thank Prof. Gene Ammarell for allowing us to use his unpublished Buginese - Indonesian - English database.

Copyright notices
Comparative Austronesian Dictionary (D. Tryon, editor) is copyright Mouton de Gruyter, 1995.

Lexique Thematique Plurilingue de Trenete-Six Langues et Dialectes D'asia du Sud-Est Insulaire (V. Arnaud et al, editors) is copyright Harmattan, 1997.