David Blundell will give a lecture on Saturday titled “Taiwan roots of the Austronesian Language and Culture,” at the Legislative Yuan, sharing the stage with Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kolas Yotaka, who will discuss the current state of Aboriginal affairs in Taiwan.
Blundell, a professor at National Chengchi University who has been doing anthropological and archaeological research in Taiwan since the early 1980s, will discuss how the majority of Austronesian languages find their origins in Taiwan.
“It’s a history that dates back between 4,500 to 3,500 years,” Blundell told the Taipei Times, when Taiwan’s Aboriginal groups first started to travel to what is today’s Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Photo: Huang Ming-tang, Taipei Times
“They weren’t colonists,” Blundell says, “but traders.”
Blundell, who has recently edited Taiwan Since Martial Law: Society, Culture, Politics, Economics and Austronesian Taiwan: Linguistics, History, Ethnology, Prehistory, says that the “Formosans” would trade nephrite jade, grain and pottery to southeast Asia where they would also pass on their languages.
Their languages became incubators for other languages, which Blundell numbers at around 1,200 today, all of which fall under the Austronesian family.
“If the language incubated in Indonesia, it became a different kind of language ... just as European languages became differentiated,” he says, a pattern that repeated itself throughout the region and as far as Madagascar.
Kolas told the Taipei Times through a spokesperson that she will discuss the current land rights issues facing Aborigines.
The lectures will be held at 10am in English at the Legislative Yuan complex, 1 Jinan Rd, Taipei City (台北市濟南路1號). Admission is NT$100 and includes light refreshments.
Attendees must register with Jerome Keating by 10pm tomorrow at: jkeating@ms67.hinet.net.
The Taipei Times last week reported that the rising share of seniors in the population is reshaping the nation’s housing markets. According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, about 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident. H&B Realty chief researcher Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨), quoted in the article, said that there is rising demand for elderly-friendly housing, including units with elevators, barrier-free layouts and proximity to healthcare services. Hsu and others cited in the article highlighted the changing family residential dynamics, as children no longer live with parents,
It is jarring how differently Taiwan’s politics is portrayed in the international press compared to the local Chinese-language press. Viewed from abroad, Taiwan is seen as a geopolitical hotspot, or “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” as the Economist once blazoned across their cover. Meanwhile, tasked with facing down those existential threats, Taiwan’s leaders are dying their hair pink. These include former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁), among others. They are demonstrating what big fans they are of South Korean K-pop sensations Blackpink ahead of their concerts this weekend in Kaohsiung.
Taiwan is one of the world’s greatest per-capita consumers of seafood. Whereas the average human is thought to eat around 20kg of seafood per year, each Taiwanese gets through 27kg to 35kg of ocean delicacies annually, depending on which source you find most credible. Given the ubiquity of dishes like oyster omelet (蚵仔煎) and milkfish soup (虱目魚湯), the higher estimate may well be correct. By global standards, let alone local consumption patterns, I’m not much of a seafood fan. It’s not just a matter of taste, although that’s part of it. What I’ve read about the environmental impact of the
Oct 20 to Oct 26 After a day of fighting, the Japanese Army’s Second Division was resting when a curious delegation of two Scotsmen and 19 Taiwanese approached their camp. It was Oct. 20, 1895, and the troops had reached Taiye Village (太爺庄) in today’s Hunei District (湖內), Kaohsiung, just 10km away from their final target of Tainan. Led by Presbyterian missionaries Thomas Barclay and Duncan Ferguson, the group informed the Japanese that resistance leader Liu Yung-fu (劉永福) had fled to China the previous night, leaving his Black Flag Army fighters behind and the city in chaos. On behalf of the
RSS