Linguist urges preservation of Taiwan’s Austronesian languages

The dispersal of the Formosan aborigines in Taiwan is illustrated in Paul Jen-kuei Li’s latest book. (Photo Avant Garde Publishing)


By June Tsai

The Formosan languages is the most important cultural heritage of Taiwan and is in dire need of preservation, according to Paul Jen-kuei Li, a Taiwanese linguist who has spent four decades studying Austronesian, the vast family of languages to which the Formosan languages belong.

“Most people don’t understand the importance of aboriginal languages in Taiwan, not even the aborigines themselves,” Li said in a Jan. 25 interview with Taiwan Today.

It is estimated that today more than 250 million people speak around 1,000 varieties of Austronesian—including Malay, Filipino, and Indonesian. It is spoken in such far apart places as Madagascar in the west and Easter Island in the east, from New Zealand in the south to Taiwan in the north.

Scholars believe that in the distant past, Austronesian speakers must have spread out from some common point of origin, and more and more of them now assert that it is in Taiwan.

One piece of evidence comes from a theory first proposed by the German-American anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir, who posited that a language family will have its source wherever it has the greatest internal linguistic variety.

Following Sapir’s insight, the American historical linguist Robert Blust proposed that Austronesian derives ultimately from Taiwan, according to Li.

“Formosan languages are generally believed to be the most diverse in the entire Austronesian language family,” Li said, noting that decades of research by international scholars has led to this conclusion.

“Drawing on evidence from linguistic studies, leading scholars from around the world are convinced that the Austronesian-speaking peoples dispersed from Taiwan around 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, and that the island is the closest thing to an Austronesian homeland,” he said.

Archeological excavations support this conclusion, Li said, adding that linguistics, along with archeology and genetics, holds the key to understanding a people’s remote past and the whence and whereto of a people.

Another important finding with the Formosan languages is that they have retained the most archaic features of Austronesian, and for this reason they possess a critical value for Austronesian researchers.

“If scholars are to reconstruct the ancient languages and trace the migration of the Austronesian-speaking peoples, they must make use of data and language phenomena found in Taiwan’s aboriginal tongues,” Li said.

“Thus any new discoveries with Taiwan’s Austronesian languages, even if they are descriptive, receive attention internationally,” he said.

Making use of his linguistic studies, Li has mapped the migration of the Austronesian peoples on Taiwan over the past 5,000 years, with his latest findings published in January.

Li, 74, has served in Academia Sinica since 1970 and helped establish its Institute of Linguistics. He was awarded Honorary Membership in the Linguistic Society of America in 2008. A year later he won the Presidential Science Award for significantly raising the visibility of Taiwan’s scientific achievements in the world.

Such recognition was totally unimaginable when Li first chose to focus on the study of the Austronesian languages. That was in the late 1960s, when he was a doctoral student at the University of Hawaii. During that time, he conducted field research in the New Hebrides, today’s Vanuatu, located in the South Pacific.

In 1969 Li was commissioned to prepare an indigenous language learning textbook in Micronesia’s East Caroline Islands.

The beginning was humble and difficult. “I became engaged [in the field] by accident,” he said. “But the more you study it, the more you understand; you feel interested and know the importance of your work.

“I live in Taiwan. When you possess the tools and knowledge of a specialized study, you want to apply them to things closest to you. For me, that was the various Austronesian languages, spoken for hundreds and thousands of years on this island,” Li said.

According to Li, the first comprehensive investigations into the Formosan languages were conducted by Japanese linguists Naoyoshi Ogawa and Erin Asai a hundred years ago, during Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan (1895-1945).

When he returned to work in Taiwan in 1970, Li was to become a local pioneer. Few linguists at the time chose to study Austronesian languages.

They are unwritten languages, and field studies were difficult considering the conditions of transportation and communications back then. For local scholars, it would have been easier to study Sino-Tibetan languages such as Mandarin and Holo, he noted.

The condition of the languages, which were rapidly disappearing, was not favorable. The living Formosan languages have now dwindled to around 14.

“Those languages facing immediate extinction were my priority,” Li said. He often packed up and went into mountains alone to meet tribal peoples. He sought out their speakers, put their words down and recorded their speech.

Recalling some of the difficulties he encountered, Li said, “Speakers were sometimes reluctant to spend time with you, having more important farm work to take care of. Those with time to sit down and talk were the elders, but then you needed an interpreter, mostly younger people in the tribe who spoke both the native language and Mandarin.”

Aborigines might even have questioned the value of preserving their languages, though they were happy some people from the outside world were interested, he said.

“I told them I wanted to record the languages, not just for their academic values, but also to let our children know that there once existed such languages and cultures in the world.”

Since 1970 Li has investigated almost all the living aboriginal languages, including Rukai, Saisiyat, Yami (Tao), Amis, Tsou, Atayal, Seediq, Kanakanavu, Saaroa, Bunun, Puyuma and Paiwan, mostly spoken by indigenous peoples living in mountainous areas.

The Formosan languages spoken by the plains-dwelling aborigines all disappeared two hundred years ago except Pazih, spoken around Puli of Nantou County, Kavalan, in northeastern Taiwan, and Thao, around central Taiwan’s Sun Moon Lake.

Beginning in the 1970s, Li worked with Japanese scholar, Shigeru Tsuchida, in trying to rescue these languages with few speakers left. They collaborated on Pazih and Kavalan dictionaries, which were published in 2001 and 2006, respectively. The last Pazih speaker passed away in October 2010.

Li has also made an effort to look for written documents of extinct languages. He helped uncover some tracing back to the 17th century, relating to Siraya, once spoken in southern Taiwan’s Tainan area, and Favorlang, in the coastal area of central Taiwan.

Of particular note, Li led a research team in the transcription and deciphering of the “Sinkan Manuscripts,” a batch of land deeds and documents written in Siraya between 1683 and 1818, using a system of Romanization introduced by the Dutch to the plains aboriginal group.

His work has been a race against time, as fewer and fewer people speak the Formosan languages in the now largely Han Chinese-inhabited country.

He began drawing attention to the rapid disappearance of Taiwan’s Austronesian languages in the 1990s. At the time, the country was undergoing a democratization process, and aboriginal activists rose to demand their rights covering employment, education, recognition and traditional lands.

The situation of the languages, however, continued to worsen.

“Language is the essence of a culture, and when a language becomes extinct, a whole culture and the system of knowledge implied in the language disappears,” Li said.

“Forty years ago, I could still hear children speaking their native tongues, but now this is impossible. It is sad to think languages that have existed for thousands of years should disappear on such a large scale in a few decades,” he said.

Government assimilation policies have played a major role in causing this to happen. Native languages were banned under the old Kuomintang government to promote the ubiquitous use of Mandarin.

More recently, television—where programs are mostly in Mandarin—has had an insidious influence as well, Li said.

In an age of globalization, Li lamented, the dying of indigenous languages seems an irreversible trend.

Over the past years, Li has urged the government and the public to do more to protect Taiwan’s aboriginal tongues, stressing that the Formosan languages are the nation’s and the world’s unique heritage.

“It is much easier for government policy to wipe out a language than to revive it,” he noted, adding that respect for other cultures and the willingness to use native languages at home might help.

“Rulers often prefer uniformity to differences, because uniformity facilitates policy implementation. But with regard to culture, diversity enhances its value,” he said.

“What is the value of Taiwan’s culture as a whole when the only language we speak is Mandarin?” he asked.

This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today Feb. 25.

Taiwan painter blends art and life in retrospective

"Hunted Bird and Still Life" (1967) suggests sacrificial rituals.

By June Tsai

For Taiwanese painter Liu Keng-i, there is no distinction between art and life—there is just the work he does.

“Painting is my life. I have tried to capture the scenes in my life as they pass in front of me,” the 72-year-old artist said Jan. 20 at the opening of “Aria of Life,” a retrospective on his art and life at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Sixty oils and pastels as well as dozens of pieces of handcrafted furniture, on view in the TFAM through April 3, provide a glimpse into the mind of this visionary artist.

Images in his works appear blurred, in a manner reminiscent of impressionism, to the extent that human expressions cannot be read and objects and natural forms have more shape and shadow than detail.

Upon a closer look, the objects give way to the exercise of color and composition: shades of brown, red, green, white or blue begin to play a greater role than the objects in reaching the aesthetic goal Liu has in mind.

“Trends in art come and go, but I chose to follow on what the preceding generation of Taiwanese painters accomplished, trying to improve my skills from that basis, broaden my vocabulary and enrich the connotations of each painting,” Liu said.

Son of the renowned Taiwanese painter Liu Chi-hsiang (1910-1998), Liu Keng-i acknowledged the lifelong influence of his father, who was representative of the Japanese-educated generation of Taiwanese painters. Liu Chi-hsiang studied art in Japan when Taiwan was under its colonial rule (1895-1945), marrying a Japanese woman.

At the end of World War II, the Lius moved back to the family home in Tainan, southern Taiwan. The homecoming did not prove to be blissful for an ambitious painter such as Liu Chi-hsiang.

“The February 28 Incident in 1947 and the white terror rule that followed led the country into isolation and cut off the cultural resources most needed for a spiritual life,” Liu Keng-i wrote in an article commemorating his father.

He described his father as a quiet man who loved nature and freedom. In the turmoil of the transition from colonial rule to the Kuomintang government in postwar Taiwan, the family lost its land, allegedly to a government agent. Liu Chi-hsiang then took his wife and children to Kaohsiung, where they settled down in a small village. He was admired as “the father of Western painting in Kaohsiung.”

The younger Liu began painting under his father’s tutelage at the age of 18. Music had been his first love. “I enjoyed Bach’s music. His pieces create a musical church, and I felt the peace and comfort inside it.”

Religious architecture made a similar contribution to his pictorial art. In a dimly lit local temple he discovered a brown tone that fit his expressive purposes. Liu used this color to probe the effects of light and shadow, and he immediately knew that the element of contrast was what he wanted to grasp.

With this epiphany, around 1960, he knew that he would always be a painter. He spent the 60s in a brown period that has influenced all his later work. “It took me almost 30 years to realize that my personal style and interest in the twilight zone of the mind had already emerged at that early stage,” he wrote later.

A typical example of the period is “Self-Portrait” (1963), in which layers of brown in varying shades and thicknesses outline a male profile with one hand holding a brush, half raised to a canvas. It seems all outlets for the painter’s expression are stopped up by thick clay.

Besides the exercise of color for self-expression, exhibition curator Liu Yung-jen detected a theme of death and ritual in his “Hunted Bird and Still Life,” painted in 1967. This image evolves in later works exploring the dialectical relationship between life and death.

In 1969, Liu moved to Hengchun in Taiwan’s southernmost county of Pingtung, where he began working as a crafts teacher in a local school.

During this time he was inspired by his father’s ardent pursuit of joy in the contemplation and depiction of nature. The experience of living in the tropics, where things grow—and decay—quickly left a lasting mark on his art. “I’ve been trying hard to make what is transient in life permanent,” he said.

It was also during this time that Liu first tried his hand at making furniture. Most of his pieces are wood, made using mortise and tenon joints, and show the precision of which the artist is capable.

In the beginning, Liu only wanted to make furniture for his apartment. He took to the activity, however, applying his art training to woodworking and sourcing local timber. In the process, Liu said, the furniture went beyond being merely functional and took on the character of sculpture.

Another turning point came when he married Tseng Ya-yun, also a painter. With her support, he quit teaching, moved to Kaohsiung City and became a professional painter in the early 1980s.

Of particular note in the exhibition are some works with his wife as the model, including “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” (1984) and “Woman in Red” (1985). In these paintings he began exploring the symbolic possibilities of the color red.

To fend off the pettiness and atrocities he saw in the human world, Liu said, he sought elegance, nobility and spirituality in red.

At the time Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s No. 1 port city, was booming with the expansion of heavy industry and an export processing zone. While huge foreign reserves piled up, the countryside was scarred by heavy pollution.

“Natural landscapes swiftly disappeared and became only memories,” Liu said. “In the meantime, in the 1980s and 1990s social movements such as environmental protection picked up strength as people struggled for a more livable world.”

Affected by the social atmosphere, Liu put his longing for nature, expectations for change and political criticism into his art. The faceless figures in “On the Way to Execution” (1992), for example, seem to represent a victim and his persecutors, making a statement about human rights violations.

Having lived in different cultures, moving among the Taiwanese, Japanese and Mandarin languages, Liu has also been particularly absorbed in the issue of identity.

“On the Bridge” (1993), for instance, expresses hesitation about which way to go, as well as a desire to return to nature.

In “Crying Dawn” (1996), a shadowy person dressed in red holds a body covered in white cloth against a blue and brown backdrop, forming a highly symbolic image: something unknown is taking shape.

This work in a way represents the general sentiments of the time, Liu said, as Taiwan was holding its first direct presidential election. It was a critical crossroads, as a person or a country without a clear identity is at the juncture of death and rebirth.

The issue of identity has continued to preoccupy Liu since he began spending most of his time in New Zealand more than 10 years ago.

“Nature is my spiritual homeland, and not much is left of it in Taiwan anymore,” Liu said. The south Pacific country offers many quiet moments in which he can reflect and paint, in contrast to the hustle and bustle of Taiwan.

Liu’s art, consistent in style throughout his career, exudes pensiveness, perplexity and great expectations with regard to life and society. Taken together, his work amounts to a metaphor for an artist who is continually asking questions about his life and art.

This article first appeared in online Taiwan Today Feb. 18.