Koda Kiwa: Dreisprachiges Worterbuch des Lamaholot (Dialekt von Lewolema).

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book Review

Koda Kiwa: Dreisprachiges Worterbuch des Lamaholot (Dialekt von Lewolema). By KARL-HEINZ PAMPUS. Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, no. 52.4. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1999. Pp. 646. DM 144.

Lamaholot is an Austronesian koda kiwa "language of the hinterland" used by more than 200,000 speakers in the eastern part of Flores and other smaller Sunda Islands. It is represented by some thirty-five dialects, of which only the dialect of Lamalera (on Lembata island) has been the object of a descriptive grammar. The present volume is devoted to the study of the Lamaholot dialect of Lewolema (l** wa lema "five villages"), spoken by about six hundred residents on the northern coast of eastern Flores. More specifically, it is the language of one of these villages, Belogili, "das die Basis fur die gesamte Datenergebung hildete" (p. 402). It may be worth noting here that, when the ministry of religion made Indonesians declare to which of the five accepted religious groups they belonged, four centuries of Christian missionary presence led nearly the entire population of Flores to opt for Catholicism.

The volume is divided into four parts: 1) notes on phonetics and morphology; 2) a trilingual Lamaholot-Bahasa Indonesia-German word list, to make the book useful not only to Western but also to Indonesian scholars; 3) specimens of texts with German translation (including specimens from a cluster of four villages about ten kilometers south of Belogili); and 4) in an appendix, a German-Lamaholot word list.

The author repeatedly stresses the tentative character of his enterprise, from "Bedenkungen..., ob die Veroffentlichung Uberhaupt schon gewagt werden sollte" (in the preface, p. 8), to the caveat that "die sprachlichen Strukturen [des Lamaholot sind] noch langst nicht vollstandig analysiert, so dass die nachstehende Darstellung zum Teil nur vor1laufigen Charakter besitzt" (for the notes on phonetics and morphology, p. 23).

The backbone...