H. Van Der Veen – författare

I wish first to express my gratitude to the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, which has kindly arranged for this book to be printed. My thanks also include Professor Dr. C. Hooykaas, who has interested himself in this treatise and has accorded it his support. I should like to render my sincere thanks to Dr. J. Noorduyn, Secre­ tary of the Institute, who has given me a miscellany of good suggestions for the compilation of the editorship of the Introduction. Further I desire to thank my former assistants, Mr. J. Tammu and Mr. L. Pak an, warmly for their work in noting down the text of the Chants for the Deceased and for their help in seeking for an explanation of various difficult places in it. Once more I owe a very great debt of gratitude to Jeune Scott-Kemball, who has been able to accomplish casting my Dutch translation in prose of the lines in trochaic metre of the Chants for the Deceased into a very elegant English verse form. This was not always very simple in view of the metaphorical manner of expression in the Toradja lines of verse.

I wish, first, to express my gratitude to the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde, which has kindly arranged for this book to be printed. I am also indebted to the Gereformeerde Zendingsbond in de Neder- lands Hervormde Kerk and the Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap for the financial aid they have given. Furthermore I would like to thank particularly Jeune Scott-Kemball for the conscientious manner, in which she has translated this paper and the pains she has taken to translate into excellent English my Dutch rendering of the difficult language of the Texts. The spelling used for the South Toradja text is that of present-day Bahasa Indonesia with the following exceptions: the glottal check, found in South Toradja only as a syllable-or word-final, is not written as k but indicated by an apostrophe, for example, untaku' not untakuk; and the velar nasal, because it is sometimes protracted in speech and must then be duplicated in writing, is not written ng but f}, for example, la13i' not langi'; tary13a not tangnga.The spelling of South Toradja words in the translation and notes differs from this system in two respects: y is used instead of j, for example, kayu = kaju (text); o-e instead of oe, for example, Lo-erara' (trans.) = Loerara' (text). The hyphen is used only to make it clear that each vowel must be pronounced.