Makasar

The Makassar script was used in Indonesia, in the province of South Sulawesi to write the Makassar language. As for the shape of the characters, in English-language literature it is called ‘bird‘. It was invented in the 17th century for administrative purposes based on Rejang. In the 19th it was completely replaced by Buginese.

Makassar is an abugida. The words go horizontally from left to right. The sound /a/ is added to the base consonant by default. The other 4 vowels can be added to the consonant, each strictly from its side: top, right, bottom or left. They are encoded as attachable. The independent letter ‘a‘ can be used in combination with other vowels when a syllable does not have a consonant.

The Makassar script does not have its own writing of numbers. Instead, European or Indo-Arabic numerals were used. Punctuation marks include a character for sentence division, and an end-of-text icon. Words were not always separated by spaces.