Helong language

Helong (alternate names Helon, Kupang and Semau[1]) is a Central Malayo-Polynesian language of West Timor. Speakers are interspersed with those of Amarasi. This language has become endangered as a result of its native speakers marrying those who do not speak Helong, and as a result of coming in contact with the outside community.[1] Helong speakers are found in four villages on the South-Western coast of West Timor, as well as on Semau Island, a small island just off the coast of West Timor.[2] The mostly Christian, slightly patriarchal society of Semau do their best to send their children away to Bali (or elsewhere) to earn money to send home.

Helong
Native toIndonesia
RegionWest Timor
Native speakers
(14,000 cited 1997)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3heg
Glottologhelo1243
ELPHelong
Location of the Helong Language in blue (Western Tip)

Classification

Helong is an Austronesian language and belongs to its Malayo-Polynesian branch. The Endangered Languages Project has classified Helong as "vulnerable", based on the most recent data from 1997.[3] The largest threat to Helong is a dialect of Malay spoken in Kupang, called Kupang Malay, as the native Helong speakers often visit Kupang, and use that dialect when there.[2]

History

Helong was once the primary language spoken in Kupang, but the language has since fallen out of popularity, and is now used sparsely around Kupang, but mostly used on Semau Island just off the coast of Kupang.[4] In recent years, the people in Kupang have spoken a local dialect of Malay, resulting in Helong being largely forgotten by those who visit the capital city often. While the new language has left behind a lot of the region's history, experts believe that Helong speakers contain a vast wealth of knowledge around the past, specifically, the spreading of Atoni culture when the Dutch gave them weapons, which wiped out many of the other cultures that existed in West Timor, but leaving Helong traditions and culture widely intact.[5]

Grammar

Morphology

Helong word structure follows a standard C(C)V(C)V(C) (where (C) indicates that a consonant can appear here but does not have to) word structure. Additionally, there is always a consonant at the beginning of every non-clitic word. Ignoring suffixes, the last consonant in any word can only be a few things, the glottal or apical consonants found in the table in the Phonology section, with the exception of the letter d, which does not satisfy this rule. On the contrary, there are no such limits on the last vowel of a word, which can be any of the five.[2]

Syntax

Helong follows a VSO word order like the other languages closely related to it.[6][2] Helong is similar to languages like Spanish when it comes to noun-adjective order. The noun will come before the adjective describing it in a sentence. For example, ana hmunan directly translates as 'child first', but refers to somebody's first child. However, unlike in Spanish, punctuation will only come at the end of a sentence. Like most languages, the first word of each sentence, as well as proper nouns are capitalized.[6] Helong uses negative modifiers to change the meaning of a sentence to the opposite. For example, "... parsai lo" means 'do not believe', with parsai meaning 'believe', and lo being a negative modifier.[6]

Writing system

Helong uses the same Latin script used in the majority of languages around the world. While Helong does not use the full 26-character ISO basic Latin alphabet, but contains 27 characters total, which can be seen in the Phonology section below.[6][2] While most of Helong words are written in the same format as English words, one key difference is that when using modifiers such as plurals, distributive numerals, and frequencies, Helong uses Hyphens or Tildes to connect the base word to the modifier.[6]

For example, in the sentence "Tode-s dua~dua le halin nahi-s deken", tode means lay, so tode-s would refer to laying multiple things, as the -s indicates plurality. Dua is the number 'two', so dua~dua would translate to the English 'pair'.

Phonology

Helong has five vowels: /a, e, i, o, u/. These vowels are identical to those in the English language, including the pronunciation.[2][6]

Consonants [2][6]
Labial Alveolar Velar Glottal
Nasal m n ŋ
Stop voiceless p t k ʔ
voiced b d g
Fricative f s h
Approximant w l
Trill r

The palatal stops /c, ɟ/ and the voiced labio-velar approximant /w/ are marginal phonemes, only occurring in a few loanwords.[7]

Numbers
Numbers 1–30
1 mesa 11 hngul esa 21 buk dua beas esa

or

buk dua-s esa

2 dua 12 hngul dua 22 buk dua beas dua

or

buk dua-s dua

3 tilu 13 hngul tilu 23 buk dua beas tilu

or

buk dua-s tilu

4 aat 14 hngul aat 24 buk dua beas aat

or

buk dua-s aat

5 lima 15 hngul lima 25 buk dua beas lima

or

buk dua-s lima

6 eneng 16 hngul eneng 26 buk dua beas eneng

or

buk dua-s eneng

7 itu 17 hngul itu 27 buk dua beas itu

or

buk dua-s itu

8 palu 18 hngul palu 28 buk dua beas palu

or

buk dua-s palu

9 sipa 19 hngul sipa 29 buk dua beas sipa

or

buk dua-s sipa

10 hngulu 20 buk dua 30 buk tilu

The Helong language uses words for each base unit (i.e. tens, hundreds, thousands). For example, the number 27 could be said as "tens two ones seven", indicating a 2 in the tens column and a 7 in the ones column.[6]

Base Units
ones beas
tens buk
hundreds ngatus
thousands lihu
millions juta

Ordinal numbers, with the exception of the word for first, simply add ke in front of the word for the number. Researchers have been unable to determine if ke is its own word, a prefix, or a proclitic.[6]

Ordinals
First hmunan Sixth ke eneng
Second ke dua Seventh ke itu
Third ke tilu Eighth ke palu
Fourth ke aat Ninth ke sipa
Fifth ke lima Tenth ke hngulu

Non-numeric quantity
Non-Numeric Quantity
many mamo, mamamo
all toang, totang
many (crowded) hut, hutu
plenty (many lots) mamo kose
plenty (many big) mamo tene
too much (many excessive) mamo naseke
entire (complete) nuli
way too many ketang kaa to
none, nothing ase
alone, by yourself sii
each mesa-mesa

ketang kaa to is a Helong idiom that translates directly as 'cockatoos eating seeds', which they use as a saying to describe way too many of a specific item.[6]

Examples

The following are example sentences of Helong:[6]

Helong Literal Translation Actual Translation
Ni un ana ke lima la nia This child fifth hers This is her fifth child
Atuil at hngul dua na-s maa daek hulung people ten two come work help Those twelve people came to help
Laok nui kit hmake salat dua go pick (person and self) tamarind cluster two Let's go pick two bunches of tamarind
Bingin tilu halas-sam oen pait maa-s day three just then 3 people return come-plural In three days then they will come back
Kaim daad lelo ila lo se la-ng we stay day several at distant place (general) We stayed there for several days.
Oen tilu-s lii naseke people 3-plural frighten too much The three of them were very scared.
Minggua mesa-m oe dua week one (pause) time two Two times in one week.
Lahin oen maa-s se ia-s yesterday people come-plural at close place Yesterday they came here

References
  1. Helong at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) closed access
  2. Steinhauer, Hein. Synchronic Metathesis and Apocope in Three Austronesian Languages of the Timor Area. Thesis. Leiden University, 1996. Retrieved 2017-3-7.
  3. "Did you know Helong is vulnerable?". Endangered Languages. Retrieved 2017-03-08.
  4. Bowden, John Metathesis in Helong 2010. Presentation. Accessed 2017-04-26
  5. Fox, James T. (2003). Out of the Ashes. ANU Press. Retrieved 2017-04-26.
  6. Klamer, Marian; et al. (2014). Number and quantity in East Nusantara Archived 2018-04-13 at the Wayback Machine. Asia-Pacific Linguistics, College of Asia and the Pacific. Retrieved 2017-03-02 hdl:1885/11917
  7. Balle, Misriani (2017). "Phonological Sketch of Helong, an Austronesian Language of Timor". Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. 10 (1): 91–103. hdl:10524/52399.
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