Thanks to the dedication of a few people, Taiwan's national minorities may be on the crux of an adventurous search for their roots.
Wan Cheng-hsiung (萬正雄) and his family, all descendants of aborigines in Hsinhua Township (新化鎮), Tainan County, have spent the last ten months involved with an international effort to successfully reconstruct the language of the Siraya (西拉雅) tribe of aborigines which lived in Taiwan hundreds of years ago.
Now that the job is nearly don, Wan plans to teach the language to a smaller group of people in the hopes of bringing it back to life. He says that bringing the language back to its full flower is the key necessary to unlock the secrets of lost Siraya culture.
Beginning last year with the assistance of the Council for Cultural Affairs (文建會), Wan developed his plan to revive the all-but-dead language, which is where the term "Taiwan" comes from.
With the help of his daughter Wan Shu-chuen (
Inside the bible, the missionary had translated the Siraya language using Romanized characters. This opened the door to the language, which came back to life, word by word, sentence by sentence.
Due to difficulties understanding the 17th-century Dutch, the family has been aided by a Dutch linguist only known by his first name, Karl, who they managed to locate and contact with the help of the Internet.
Wan says that he will begin teaching the language later this year and will also arrange a class for children. He first wants each Siraya descendant to be given a name in Siraya and he has future plans to create a Siraya dictionary in cooperation with Academia Sinica.
In a related story from Hsinchu, Heitai Bayen (黑帶巴彥), who has studied the Atayal (泰雅) language for the last 30 years, recently completed a major work about Atayal life to be published by the Hsinchu Cultural Center (新竹文化中心).
Iban Nokan (伊凡諾幹) of the Examination Yuan has written the foreword where he praises Heitai as the founder of Atayal studies. Heitai, who has led a multi-fasceted life and worked in many trades, has spent much time carrying out his research among the Atayal minority, determined to restore the original concepts and appearance of Atayal culture.
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