A CHAIN OF KINGS - Books and Journals

II The chronicle texts 17
they are comparatively inconsequential. The lone exceptions are deliberate
‘corrections’ which if consequential are discussed in the notes to the translation.
Most importantly, it needs to be stressed that all of these minor scribal
variations were not considered significant in Makassarese eyes: the new copy
still faithfully preserved the same significant past.
Indeed, from one perspective to consider any of this scribal ‘error’ is
misleading. In its written form the Makassarese language is graphically
incomplete ‒ glottal stops, doubled consonants, and velar nasals are not
written. Words are in fact phonograms: symbols meant to represent sound,
and reading a means of reconstructing the spoken word from graphic cues.
A more extreme version of this is evident among the Kodi, who reported to
Janet Hoskins that, ‘their language could never really be written down, since
it could not be pronounced the way it was spelled. When they could recognize
a few words, they still maintained that the “tune” of their own tongue,
its special texture and resonances, could never be captured on the page’
(Hoskins 1998:178). Because Makassarese writing was regarded as a mechanism
by which spoken utterances could be produced, variations in spelling
alone did not result in confusion or ‘mistakes’ when read aloud. There is also
considerable variation in where stops (.) are written, but this too would
have had little effect when spoken.
The graphically incomplete nature of the Makassarese script and the
scribal variations have little effect on the translation, but they do affect how
the text of BL is transliterated. In place of fetishizing every minor variation,
stop within the text, and scribal error, I have chosen to transcribe BL with the
following guidelines: 1. glottal stops, doubled consonants, and velar nasals
are added where appropriate; 2. variations in spelling are not corrected; 3.
scribal errors such as dittography or transposition are corrected; 4. stops
within the text are omitted. In making these decisions I have opted for ease of
use over laboring to produce what would otherwise be virtually a facsimile
of the original manuscript. The transliterated texts generally follow spellings
in A.A. Cense and Abdurrahim (1979) with a few exceptions that I believe
more closely approximate spoken Makassarese. In terms of glottal stops,
while some authors prefer to use a ‘k’ or a conventional mark (’) to indicate
glottal stops, I use a ‘q’ simply because it avoids the problem of doubling
when marking possessives; thus Tunijalloq’s rather than Tunijallo’’s. Velar
nasals are written ‘ng’ and in doubled combined consonants only the first
letter is written twice; thus manngalle rather than mangngalle.