A 36-year-old Swedish academic was on Friday awarded the Academia Sinica Early-Career Investigator Research Achievement Award for his study of the critically endangered Manchu language.
Marten Soderblom Saarela, an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History, was among nine recipients of this year’s award.
The research institution said that Soderblom has spent nearly eight years researching the Manchu language, which is related to Chinese as well as central Asian languages.
Soderblom has also studied interactions between Qing Dynasty China, and populations across Asia and as far as eastern Europe, with a focus on the role of the Manchu language, Academia Sinica said, adding that the language had an official status at the Qing court from 1636 to 1912.
Soderblom said that he had already been interested in linguistics when he grew up, adding that his mother is a French-language teacher.
He has traveled to many places to research the Manchu language, but Taiwan and Japan offered him crucial access to documents and other historical sources, Soderblom said.
For instance, the National Palace Museum Library in Taipei granted him access to important first-hand materials, he said.
Taiwan’s community of researchers devoted to a host of aspects of Chinese culture also gave his work a boost, he said.
The annual award — which also recognizes early-career achievements in mathematics, physics, life sciences, humanities and social sciences — is aimed at encouraging academics in Taiwan to conduct in-depth research that makes significant contributions to their fields, Academia Sinica said.
This year’s nine awardees, chosen from 103 candidates, each received a medal, a NT$300,000 prize and a research grant of NT$300,000, it said.
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