Yami
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Documenting and Revitalizing Austronesian Languages: free online book
Posted by site admin on 30 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: Aborigine languages, Taiwan, Yami, aborigines, languages, linguistics
Language Documentation & Conservation, a refereed, open-access journal sponsored by the National Foreign Language Resource Center and published online by the University of Hawai‘i Press, has released its first online book: Documenting and Revitalizing Austronesian Languages, edited by D. Victoria Rau and Margaret Florey.
Half of the chapters in the new book (ISBN 978-0-8248-3309-1) focus specifically on Austronesian languages of Taiwan. I have indicated those with bold text below.
Contents:
Introduction: documenting and revitalizing Austronesian languages
I. International capacity building initiatives
- The language documentation and conservation initiative at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa
- Training for language documentation: Experiences at the School of Oriental and African Studies
- SIL International and endangered Austronesian languages
II. Documentation and revitalization activities
- Local autonomy, local capacity building and support for minority languages: Field experiences from Indonesia
- Documenting and revitalizing Kavalan
- E-learning in endangered language documentation and revitalization
- Indigenous language-informed participatory policy in Taiwan: A socio-political perspective
- Teaching and learning an endangered Austronesian language in Taiwan
III. Computational methods and tools for language documentation
- WeSay, a tool for engaging communities in dictionary building
- On designing the Formosan multimedia word dictionaries by a participatory process
- Annotating texts for language documentation with Discourse Profiler’s metatagging system
There have also been two issues of the journal issued to date, though neither of these has anything specific about languages spoken in Taiwan.
This is indeed a promising beginning. I look forward to more such titles from the journal.
Tao (Yami) language materials
Posted by site admin on 23 Oct 2006 | Tagged as: Chinese, English, Mandarin, Taiwan, Tao, Yami, aborigines, dictionary, linguistics, literacy, romanization, writing systems
Providence University of Taizhong County, Taiwan, has put online a site about the language of the Tao (Yami) people of Taiwan’s Orchid Island (Lanyu). It contains complete the text of a 690-page book on the language. It offers readings in Tao (romanized) with not only interlinear English and Chinese characters but also audio files.
The sample sentences range from the mundane to the unexpected, such as Ji na ni’oya o nitomolok sia ori, ta isáray na jia. (”He wasn’t angry at the person who poked his buttocks, but instead he thanked him.”)
This site, which has interfaces in both English and Mandarin, is a terrific resource. Check it out.
source: Women compile dictionary and grammar text for Yami language, Taipei Times, October 23, 2006
