Mori Bawah, also known as Lower Mori or East Mori, is an
Austronesian language of the
Celebic branch. It is one of the principal languages of the
Morowali Regency in
Central Sulawesi
Central Sulawesi ( Indonesian: ''Sulawesi Tengah'') is a province of Indonesia located at the centre of the island of Sulawesi. The administrative capital and largest city is located in Palu. The 2010 census recorded a population of 2,635,009 fo ...
.
Classification
Mori Bawah is classified as a member of the
Bungku-Tolaki group of languages, and shares its closest affinities with
Bungku and other languages of the eastern seaboard of Sulawesi, such as
Wawonii and
Kulisusu. Together, Mori Bawah and the
Mori Atas language are sometimes referred to collectively by the cover term
''Mori''.
Dialects
Mori Bawah comprises several dialects. Following Esser, five dialects can be regarded as principal.
[Esser, S. J]
''Phonology and Morphology of Mori''
translated from the Dutch version of 1927-1933 (Dallas: SIL, 2011), pp. 2 ff.
* Tinompo
* Tiu
* Moiki
* Watu
* Karunsi’e
The Tinompo dialect is highest in prestige. Tinompo was the dialect spoken by the indigenous royal class, and in the first half of the twentieth century it was further promoted by colonial authorities as a standard throughout the Mori area, including for Mori Atas and
Padoe
Padoe is an Austronesian language of the Celebic branch. It was traditionally spoken in the rolling plains south of Lake Matano in South Sulawesi province. In the 1950s, a portion of the Padoe-speaking population fled to Central Sulawesi
...
.
Phonology
Mori Bawah has the following sound inventory:
Only open syllables of the shape V, CV are allowed. Consequently, Mori Bawah is a strictly vowel final-language.
Grammar
Pronouns
Mori Bawah has seven sets of bound and free pronouns:
[
]
Agreement
Core arguments
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectic ...
(A: subject of transitive verbs; O: object of transitive verbs, S: subject of intransitive verbs) are not marked for case, but are obligatorily indexed by a pronominal agreement marker on the verb.[
With transitive verbs, A is always indexed by a nominative pronoun, and O by an absolutive pronoun.
The indexing of the single argument of intransitive verbs shows ]split-ergative
In linguistic typology, split ergativity is a feature of certain languages where some constructions use ergative syntax and morphology, but other constructions show another pattern, usually nominative–accusative. The conditions in which ergati ...
alignment: S is always indexed by a nominative pronoun in future clauses, and also in imperative, negative and certain other dependent types of non-future clauses. In all other cases, S is indexed by an absolutive pronoun.
Voice
Mori Bawah has two valency-reducing voice types, passive voice
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or ''patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing t ...
and antipassive voice
The antipassive voice ( abbreviated or ) is a type of grammatical voice that either does not include the object or includes the object in an oblique case. This construction is similar to the passive voice, in that it decreases the verb's valency ...
.[
If a transitive verb is marked for passive voice with the infix ''<in>'', it becomes formally intransitive, and O (the "object") becomes the S-argument. The original A-argument cannot be mentioned at all.
In antipassive voice, the verb takes the prefix ''poN-''. The object can be omitted, or overtly expressed if indefinite; it is however not indexed by a person-indexing pronoun. The original subject of the transitive verb becomes the S-argument in a formally intransitive antipassive clause.
]
References
{{Languages of Indonesia
Bungku–Tolaki languages
Languages of Sulawesi