| Ledo Kaili | |
| Region: | Sulawesi |
| States: | Indonesia |
| Speakers: | 350,000 |
| Date: | 2000 census |
| Ref: | e18 |
| Familycolor: | Austronesian |
| Fam2: | Malayo-Polynesian |
| Fam3: | Celebic |
| Fam4: | Kaili–Pamona |
| Fam5: | Northern |
| Fam6: | Kaili |
| Iso3: | lew |
| Glotto: | ledo1238 |
| Glottorefname: | Ledo Kaili |
| Glottopedia: | Kaili |
| Notice: | IPA |
Ledo Kaili is the largest member of the Kaili languages, which are a dialect chain within the Kaili–Pamona language family. These languages are spoken in Central Sulawesi (Indonesia). Kaili with all of its dialects is one of the largest languages in Sulawesi. One third of the population of Sulawesi Tengah province were (1979) native speakers of a Kaili language. The object language of this article is the main dialect Ledo, which is spoken in the Donggala and Sigi districts (Kabupaten) in and around the provincial capital Palu.
Ledo has Kaili–Pamona morphological and grammatical features, while its lexicon is mainly of Wotu–Wolio origin.[1]
| style= | labial | style= | alveolar | style= | palatal | style= | velar | style= | glottal | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasals | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| Plosives | style= | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| style= | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| style= | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||||
| style= | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||
| Fricatives | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||
| Vibrants | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||||
| Laterals | pronounced as /link/ | |||||||||||
| Semivowels | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||||||
| style= | front | style= | central | style= | back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| style= | close | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| style= | mid | pronounced as /link/ ~ pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| style= | open | pronounced as /link/ |
Kaili has word-level stress on the penultimate syllable, secondary stress alternates from there on.
Unaffixed words have up to four (in most cases two) syllables with CV structure:
Kaili has a Latin alphabet without, and (which only occur in loan words) and without diacritics. The orthography follows the reformed (1975) rules for Indonesian:
pronounced as //tʃ// :, pronounced as //dʒ// :, pronounced as //ɲ// :, pronounced as //ŋ// :, pronounced as //j// :
pronounced as //ʔ// can be written if necessary (e.g. between identical vowels)
In some grammars and papers long vowels are represented by doubling them (e.g. pronounced as //aː// :), this seems not to be a standard, however. Kaili did not have a writing system and a written tradition before the introduction of the Latin script.
Kaili is a typical Malayo-Polynesian language with a morphology that has isolating as well as a few agglutinative features. There are many affixes for derivation and verbal inflection. Nouns and adjectives do not have any inflection. There is no overt marking (and no category) of gender, number, and case. (Natural) gender and number (plurality) can be expressed by lexical means if necessary, semanto-syntactic roles are indicated by syntax and verbal inflection, but not morphologically on nouns/NPs.
Comparation and gradation of adjectives are partly morphologic, partly lexical. See section 4 for verbal morphology. Some vowels or nasals might undergo or set off (progressive and regressive) morphophonological processes (nasalization, labialization, and palatalization) at morpheme boundaries.
Unaffixed words out of context tend to be neutral with respect to word class and grammatical categories.
The inflection of Kaili verbs (some authors prefer: predicatives) is dominated by the two categories of mood and voice, which are conjoined by fused affixes. Apart from voice in the stricter sense there are many other valency-related functions, e.g. causative and factitive. Only direct objects and undergoers of passive sentences are marked by cliticized personal markers.
Esser (1934) described this category as two distinct tenses comparable to nonfuture/future, even though temporal relations are mostly expressed by lexical rather than morphological means. It should therefore rather be regarded as a distinction between realis for (factual) actions in the present or past from irrealis which is used for future actions/events on the one hand and putative, imaginary, fictional (Van Den Berg: “contrafactual”) actions on the other hand.
The allomorphs ~~ stand for realis, the allomorphs ~~ for irrealis; the form of the allomorphs is constituting a kind of inflectional classes and is (synchronically at least) not conditioned by phonology. There are few exceptions where a stem can take two or all three of the allomorphs, yielding verbs with different meanings: e.g. kande 'eat'
na-ngande / ma-ngande 'eat' (transitive)
ne-kande / me-kande 'cut or bite into' (intransitive)
no-kande-si / mo-kande-si 'eat up sth. from so.'
Kaili has two different verbal diatheses which can be described either as focus (agent focus vs. object focus) or voice (active vs. passive), the latter being more suitable if one follows Himmelmann’s (2002) definitions of focus and voice.
Valency can be increased or realigned/shifted by transitivizations, factitives or causatives. Here a few of these mechanisms are demonstrated, which might be interesting from a typological perspective.
Intransitive verbs can be transitivized by, making the S of the intransitive verbs not the A but the O of the transitive verbs (hidden causative):
If is added once more, the transitivized verb can be augmented by a causative. Historically, is thus bimorphemic; there are, however, verbs that synchronically do not have a form with only one attached to them.