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VARIATION IN THE BUGISIMAKASARESE SCRIPT''...there can he no writing of history without a history of writing. ' Yuen Ren Chao (196159) As is wel1 known to those interested in the languages and literature of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, the Bugis and Makasarese living there have been using a specific script of their own for severai centuries.As to its structural, inner form, this Bugis/Makasarese script belongs to the Indian and Indian-derived scripts. As is characteristic of this type of script, it is made up of basic characters representing syllables each consisting of a consonant followed by the inherent vowel lal and diacritic marks representing vowels other than /a/ added to the basic character and replacing the inherent /al. A significant aspect of the BugislMakasarese script is that it has no sjxxial basic characters for syllable-initial vowels other than lal; the basic character for initial lal is useù for the other initial vowels by adding the appropriate vowel marks. The script is defective or incomplete in that it does not express consonant gemination, syllable-tinal consonants (nasals, except some homorganic ones in Bugis, and glottal stop) and (Bugis) finai vowel lengthening.The outer form of this syllabic-phonemic script can most adequately be illustrated with its special font of printing types, in their characteristic, (distantly) Indian-derived order (see Table 1).General works on the writing systems of the world seldom make mention of the Bugis andor Makasarese script (or of Indonesi'w scripts in general, for that matter). Even those which aim at exhaustiveness pay -t little attention to it, usually only including the characters in a table and giving a