12 ADJECTIVES IN SEMELAI
Nicole Kruspe- Introduction
Semelai is a Southern Aslian language (Benjamin 1976). Aslian languages belong to
the Mon-Khmer division of Austroasiatic. Semelai is spoken in Peninsular Malay-
sia around Tasek Bera in Pahang and in settlements along the Bera, Triang, Serting,
and Muar Rivers, straddling an area of south-west Pahang, north-east Negeri Sem-
bilan, and northern Johore. In 1999, the population figure given in the government
census was 4,055. This figure would be representative of the number of Semelai
speakers. Semelai of all ages exhibit a preference for speaking their own language,
and the use of Malay is limited to dealings with non-Semelai. The language is not
written.^1 Malay, the national language and language used in education, is the lin-
gua franca used with all other peoples, including those from other aboriginal mi-
norities in the Peninsula.
2 Typological profile
2.1. THE LEXICON
2.1.1. Word classesSemelai has clearly distinguished word classes, both syntactically and morpho-
logically. The open classes are Nominal, Verb, and Expressive (Kruspe 2004: 97-
102).
Nominals function as the heads of NPs, complement arguments in non-verbal
clauses and nominal modifiers in associative constructions.
Verbs function as predicates. The majority of verbs are clearly transitive or
intransitive; there are also a small number of ambitransitive verbs. The distinction
(^1) The orthographic system used in this chapter is essentially phonemic, differing from the stand-
ard IPA only with regard to l]l, /)/, and /e/, which are represented here as Ijl, l]l, and /s/ respectively.
Semelai words frequently contain strings of consonants separated by the non-phonemic vowel [a] or
one of its conditioned variants [a, i, u]. In order to accommodate the reader, these vowels have been
included in the orthography. See Kruspe (2004) for a detailed analysis of Semelai phonology.
The chapter is based on data collected in 1990-1 for my Ph.D. and in 2000-1 during a post-doctoral
position at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Particular thanks go to
my teacher Normah Het and the Kampong Putat community, Malaysia.