Among the many foreign missionaries who have preached their faith in Taiwan's remote areas using the locals' languages stands Father Fredric Weingaltner, an Austrian who has mastered many Aboriginal languages and has been working to preserve them.
At the age of 86, Weingaltner has published his latest book -- The Atayal Diacritics -- to serve as a dictionary for the Atayal tribe, who live mainly in the mountains in northern and central Taiwan.
The Atayal language has no written form, like all of the nation's Aboriginal languages.
Diacritics are phonetic marks added above or below letters to indicate changes in the way the letters are pronounced or stressed.
Since his retirement in 1995 from National Taiwan University's foreign language department, where he taught German for decades, Weingaltner has spent his time as a linguist researching the languages of mountain-dwelling Aboriginals, rather than preaching his faith.
Talented linguistically, Weingaltner, who holds a doctorate in linguistics from Hamburg University, has a good command of Latin, Greek, German, French, English, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, in addition to the spoken languages of the Saisiat, Puyuma, Atayal, Bunun and Rukai people.
Weingaltner has spent the past seven years between his home and office at the Tien Educational Center in Taipei and the "fields" -- namely the mountain areas in Chienshih, Wufeng, Hoping in Hsinchu County, Fuhsing in Taoyuan County and Wulai in Taipei County -- where he spends time meeting and talking with the people.
He likes to split his time in the mountains between compiling and teaching.
When the Aboriginal children ask him why a foreigner is teaching them their own language, he smiles and answers by saying, "Your mother tongue is your treasure."
Weingaltner completed A Survey of Taiwan Aboriginal Dialects in 1997. That book was followed by a second, Teaching Materials of the Saisiantian Dialect, in 1999 after Weingaltner spent more than a year in mountain villages of the Saisiat, a relatively small group of Aboriginal people who live in mountains in Hsinchu County.
To collect his research, Weingaltner has traveled alone from Taipei to the mountains by train and car and on foot.
Weingaltner arrived in Taiwan with a Catholic mission in 1952.
He earned his master's degree in linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1957 in just one year.
He spent another six years in Hamburg, Germany, between 1959 and 1965 to obtain his doctorate.
Since coming back to Taiwan after completing his doctorate, he has never left the country.
Greatly fascinated, maybe even obsessed, with his linguistic research, Weingaltner said he would not mind it at all if his final resting place ends up being somewhere in the mountain villages of Taiwan.
RSS