A lack of online resources can make learning Taiwan’s Aboriginal languages incredibly difficult. But a new app called Moedict Amis dictionary (阿美語萌典—方敏英字典) has made learning the Amis language as easy as cecay, tosa, tolo (one, two, three).
A group of volunteers have come together to create the first ever Amis language dictionary app for mobile phones. The group includes both Amis and non-Amis, engineers and tech luddites — and even a former legislator and a Catholic priest.
The app’s development is not targeted at language enthusiasts but for the Amis to save their language from years of regressive government policies, and urban migration that has crippled the development of Aboriginal languages.
Photo: Aaron Wytze Wilson
“We’re not just looking to preserve the language for future generations, but also hoping to set off a cultural revival for other Aboriginal languages,” says group member Tsai Wei-ting (蔡維庭).
FACING EXTINCTION
According to a UNESCO report in 2009, Taiwan’s Aboriginal languages are in serious danger of extinction unless drastic action is taken to preserve them.
Photo: Aaron Wytze Wilson
Due to decades of regressive language policies under the Japanese and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) governments, people of Aboriginal background grew up and were educated in a language that is not originally their own.
Taiwan’s Amis are no exception. Although the government estimates the Amis population at a little over 200,000, the number of people who speak Amis as their first language is estimated to be lower than 10,000.
However, the exact number is not known because no government survey has been carried out to find it.
Photo: Aaron Wytze Wilson
With such a rapid decline in native-speaking Amis, immediate action is needed to prevent further decline. However, the government’s response has been slow because it doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge how dire the situation is.
ALINGATO, AMIS FOR THANK YOU
Just as the Amis language is facing a critical juncture in its preservation, a group of software engineers and concerned citizens have come together to create an Amis dictionary phone app.
Photo: Aaron Wytze Wilson
“We didn’t have too much interest from the Amis community at first, until Lafin Miku, who is Amis, stepped forward to help out with the project” says Miaoski Lin (林哲民), one of the app’s software programmers.
Lafin and Lin are part of the netizen collective g0v, a civic activist group that uses tech, new media and data to solve some of Taiwan’s biggest social and political problems.
Lafin has acted as a critical go-between for the group and the larger Amis community. “It’s a very meaningful project, but I was skeptical at first. Digitizing an entire dictionary is so tiring,” Lafin says.
Much of the Amis language is preserved in leather-bound dictionaries that are decades old, with very few of them making it online.
Converting them into digital content is an exhausting task, requiring weeks of monotonous scanning and data input.
To simplify the procedure, the group uses crowd-sourcing, a tactic that allows multiple group-members to work on the task of scanning and inputting at once.
The group has also been fortunate to have the help of two patron saints of the Amis language.
The first is former People First Party legislator Tsai Chung-han (蔡中涵), a respected member of the Amis community who has spent decades of his own time and money to compile an Amis-Chinese dictionary.
The second is 82-year-old father Maurice Poinsot, a French Catholic priest who moved to Taiwan when he was 21 years old to do missionary work in Hualien.
Poinsot compiled his French-Amis Dictionary along with now-deceased father Louis Pourrias.
Both Tsai and Poinsot have generously allowed the group to use the copyrights of their respective dictionaries free of charge.
“They are extremely supportive of our project,” said Tsai Wei-ting, “all they ask is that we show them the app when it’s finished.”
FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS
The group has made remarkable progress in the span of a year, with the first version of the app already online. They plan to add new features soon, including real voice pronunciation, dialect variations, and recordings of traditional Amis stories and legends.
The group hopes other Taiwanese Aborigines will feel empowered to start their own language dictionaries, and have made the programming code used to create the app available for anyone to use. “It’s important that Aborigines are not left out of the digital movement,” said Lafin.
The app is available now on both iOS and Android operating systems, and is free to download.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would