Pan Ying-chieh (潘英傑) and Wang Pan Mei-yu (王潘美玉) were honored for their poetry yesterday at a ceremony for outstanding literary works written in romanized Aboriginal languages — something they said they could not dream of five years ago.
“The treasure of a culture can only be found in its language, while the essence of the language is hidden in its literature,” Minister of Education Chen Jei-cheng (鄭瑞城) said at the ceremony. “The purpose of this competition is to preserve and promote Taiwan’s rich Aboriginal languages and cultures.”
Out of 107 works that were entered in the competition held by the Ministry of Education, a total of 49 pieces — poetry, short novels, essays and translations written in Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Rukai, Tsou, Sediq and Pazeh — were selected to receive the award.
Among them, Wang Pan and Pan’s works in Pazeh were the most eye-catching.
The Pazeh are an assimilated plains tribe that used to inhabit regions in Taichung, Changhua and Nantou counties before the Chinese migrated to Taiwan in larger numbers about 400 years ago.
Over the centuries, the Pazeh have gradually disappeared from those areas because of marriages with non-Aboriginals or cultural assimilation.
The great majority of Pazeh have adopted Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) as their native tongue.
However, about five years ago some Pazeh who did not want to see their language and culture become extinct began efforts to save the language.
“In the 1990s, many academics predicted that the Pazeh language would completely die out,” said Lai Kuan-yi (賴貫一), a linguist who played an important role in saving the Pazeh language. “It’s a miracle that they [the Pazehs] brought it back to life.”
“I knew I may be an Aborigine, but I didn’t know which tribe until someone told me about five years ago,” Pan, 60, said. “There’s only 94-year-old Pan Chin-yu [潘金玉] in Puli [埔里] — where I live — who is able to speak Pazeh, so I learned from her.”
Wang Pan, who is now 70 and also lives in Puli, began to learn Pazeh five years ago from Pan Chin-yu as well.
“Right now, there are about 200 regular students who attend Pazeh classes offered by Pan Chin-yu in Puli,” Lai said, adding that classes with fewer students also exist in Miaoli and Taichung.
The heads of three major US banks on Wednesday pledged that they would withdraw from the Chinese market if Washington imposed sanctions on Beijing in response to an invasion of Taiwan. JP Morgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, Bank of America chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan and Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser told lawmakers at a hearing of the US House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services in Washington that the three banks would follow the guidance of the US government to exit China if necessary. The three bankers made the pledge after US Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer asked the three if they
HIGH STAKES: An attack on Taiwan could prompt a joint response from the US and Japan, and trigger a global conflict that could bring down the CCP, Liu Tai-ying said The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would not be able to launch an invasion of Taiwan for at least another 10 years, Taiwan Research Institute founder Liu Tai-ying (劉泰英) said on Friday. To occupy Taiwan, China needs to transport at least 300,000 to 400,000 troops across the Taiwan Strait during battle, but it would lack the ability to do so for at least another decade, said Liu, a former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) treasurer and a close aide to former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). The challenges that China would face during an attempted invasion of Taiwan would be even greater than those
CHINA CRITIC: Prime ministerial candidate Giorgia Meloni, the front-runner in today’s election, said that she would not renew a Belt and Road Initiative deal with Beijing Italian lawmaker Giorgia Meloni, the front-runner to become the country’s next prime minister, is expected to reverse course on Italy’s support for China’s Belt and Road Initiative and strengthen ties with Taiwan if a coalition headed by her party wins the country’s general election today. “Without any doubt, if there is a center-right government, it is sure that Taiwan will be an essential concern for Italy,” Meloni told the Central News Agency in an interview. Italians are to vote in a snap election triggered by the resignation of Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi following a failed attempt to get his coalition partners
Taiwanese on average first use pornographic material at the age of 14, an international survey found on Wednesday. Researchers at National Cheng Kung University, who conducted the survey in the nation, said 50.2 percent of Taiwanese respondents said they used pornographic material two to three times per month over the past year. Lin Chung-ying (林宗瑩), an associate professor at the university’s Institute of Allied Health Sciences, said the results indicate that Taiwanese are less sexually active than people in other countries, especially in the West. Taiwanese on average masturbate 10 percent less often than respondents from other nations in the survey, Lin said. The
RSS