In 1624, the Dutch East India Co. established a trading post on Taiwan's southwestern coast, at what is now Tainan City's Anping District. Dutch merchants, soldiers and administrators were joined by a small number of Protestant missionaries who traveled into the interior to convert to the Christian religion the aborigines who, at that time, outnumbered Han Chinese settlers.
To reach out to the native population, the pastors studied the language of the Siraya tribe, the ethnic group that once dominated what is now Tainan County. Few people alive today know much about their culture, and even fewer identify themselves as part of the tribe, but this is something the Siraya Culture Association is endeavoring to change.
The SCA is a non-profit organization that, according to its mission statement, aims to 'reconstruct Siraya culture seek government recognition, and revitalize the Siraya tribe.'
Prior to the arrival of the Dutch settlers, the Siraya people had no writing system, so the missionaries devised an orthography based on the Roman alphabet which they used to translate the Gospel of Matthew; copies survive of a bilingual edition which has Sirayan on the right side of each page and Dutch on the left.
This writing system lasted much longer than the Dutch occupation, which came to a violent end in 1662. For at least 150 years after the Europeans left, the Siraya people in the Tainan region used the Roman script when drawing up leases and mortgages contracts. More than 100 such documents, collectively called the Sinckan Manuscripts, were gathered by Japanese scholars in the 1930s. Many of them are bilingual Sirayan-Chinese, presumably because they pertain to transactions between lowland aborigines and Han Chinese.
These fragments, together with the Gospel of Matthew and a Sirayan-language catechism of the Dutch Reformed Church, are now being used in an attempt to revive the language.
According to many linguists, the Sirayan language was last spoken natively in 1908. However, SCA activists such as Jimmy Huang, a doctoral student at the University of Florida, hate to call it a 'dead' or 'extinct' language. They believe this labeling has a negative connotation which implies the Siraya people and their culture have disappeared. 'We would like to think that the language is just sleeping, or dormant,' Huang stressed in an email interview. 'Since we, Siraya folks, are still living and strong, we should have a chance to bring our mother tongue back.'
Huang explained that most of the people in the SCA have chosen a Sirayan name for themselves as a cultural/identity statement. 'Mine is 'Paparil,' meaning 'wing,' because I am a 'wing'--an assistant--of Uma Talavan, the chairwoman of the association,' he said.
Uma Talavan is the Sirayan name of Wan Shu-chuen. According to Talavan, Wan--a somewhat unusual family name in Taiwan--is an attempt to transliterate Talavan, which she believes to have been a common Sirayan surname, into Chinese. However Huang, who hails from Tainan County's Jiali Township, does not use a family name. 'Some old documents suggest that Sirayan people used first names only,' he explained.
Talavan is a native of Jiucengling, a small village where most families are said to descend from Sirayans. In Tainan County, a handful of Sirayan place names have survived into the 21st century, albeit in a corrupted form. Where the town of Madou now stands, there used to be an indigenous village called Mattauw, and the settlement name of Xiaolong survives in Jiali Township.
The Siraya people are not one of the 14 indigenous tribes recognized by the central government, but the group has received some assistance from officialdom.
In 2005, the Tainan County government established a Siraya Aboriginal Affairs Committee. Also, the county's Cultural Affairs Bureau has agreed to subsidize the printing and distribution of a Sirayan-language glossary being compiled by the SCA.
To mark the formal publication of this dictionary Nov. 29, Sirayan-language songs and other tribal activities were performed at three locations in Tainan County on that day.
Much of the work on the glossary has been done by Talavan's husband, Edgar Macapili. Though he is not of Sirayan descent, his background helped with the overall project. A native of Zamboanga in the Philippines, Macapili grew up speaking two languages: Chavacano, a Spanish-based Creole, and Bisaya. Like Sirayan, Bisaya is a language that belongs to the Austronesian language family, which includes as well all of Taiwan's indigenous languages.
Huang explained that as an Austronesian language, Sirayan is distinctively different from the Chinese languages such as Holo, Hakka or Mandarin spoken in Taiwan.
'For example, Sirayan uses much reduplication mechanism in its morphology: 'talag' means home or house; 'tatalag' means welcome. 'Alid' means god; 'alilid'--literally 'gods'--means to thank,' he said. Huang also pointed out that while all three Han languages spoken in the island have tones, the Formosan Austronesian languages do not have any.
The analysis of a dormant language can reveal some elements about the society in which its speakers lived. For example, because it seems there were no words meaning 'steal' or 'rob' in Sirayan, K. Alexander Adelaar, an Australian linguist, believes 17th-century Sirayan society was communal, and that property was shared rather than owned.
Daniel Gravius, one of the Dutch missionaries who worked on the Siraya-language Gospel of Matthew published in 1661, could not identify a Sirayan term for 'gambling.' Nor could he find any word meaning 'servant' or 'slave.'
Macapili and Talavan have also been drawing on field research conducted by SCA volunteers. 'We went to talk to people, especially older folks, and asked them what words they can remember,' Talavan said. Many of the terms retrieved this way, she explained, described plants, animals, and creatures such as freshwater clams.
The newly published glossary contains over 3,500 words. Working from the original Dutch-era Romanization, Macapili has compiled the equivalent Chinese character(s), the English translation, as well as the Peh-oe-ji (POJ) spelling. POJ is a popular Roman alphabet created in the 19th century by Presbyterian missionaries working in Holo-speaking areas of Taiwan and Fujian.
'We had to modify Gravius' spelling so sinicized Sirayans can read the words and learn them,' Macapili said. 'We had to think about the people we were going to share this with,' he emphasized.
To further promote the Siraya culture, the SCA has been organizing Siraya-language summer camps since 2002. The first few events were for local children only, but since 2007 they have been open to anyone interested, even if they are not of Siraya descent. The 2008 event, sponsored by the Tainan County government, was to be limited to 80-100 people, but because the association received over 150 applications, this was increased to 120.
'These camps have concretized the revitalization efforts of the SCA, and assisted in promoting awareness of the Siraya culture,' Macapili said. 'Many people are still ignorant about the Sirayans.'
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