A miraculous linguistic renaissance
In going from feeling bewildered at being called a “savage” by Han Chinese to discovering his identity as an indigenous person, Cheng-hiong Talavan also found out that he knew nothing at all about his culture.
Even today, the Sirayan language is listed on the UNESCO website as an “extinct” tongue which has been gone for over 200 years, never being heard or spoken in that whole period of time.
However, from historical evidence we know that when the Dutch arrived in Taiwan in the 17th century, they wrote out Sirayan using the Latin alphabet. Siraya people continued to use and pass down this Romanized writing system. For example, they used it to draw up land contracts and trading contracts with Han Chinese. These are the well-known “Sinckan manuscripts.”
In their quest to recover Siraya linguistic culture, Cheng-hiong and Uma Talavan searched everywhere to collect words and phrases in Sirayan from elders. But the results were very meager. The dramatic turning point came after they obtained a Sirayan translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew, made by early Dutch missionaries. After Cheng-hiong had invested so much effort in the hope of opening the door to the Sirayan language, amazingly the key to unlocking its secrets turned out to be his Filipino son-in-law, Edgar Macapili.
Macapili is a member of the Bisaya indigenous people of the Philippines. Like Sirayan, Bisayan is a branch of the Austronesian language group, and when he opened up the Sirayan Gospel of St. Matthew that it had taken Cheng-hiong Talavan so long to find, Macapili found he could read most of the content. He recalls his impression of Sirayan: “This language is like the mother or older sister of the Bisayan language—they have a family relationship. What’s more, Sirayan is purer, having not been impacted by too many foreign terms.”
Originally a musician, Macapili turned himself into a linguistics scholar. He compared texts in Dutch, English, Sirayan, and Bisayan word by word and phrase by phrase. The main difficulty is that when the Dutch wrote down the Sirayan language in the 17th century, their own spelling system had not yet been standardized, so they were unable to accurately record the Sirayan pronunciation. It took Macapili more than seven years, burning the midnight oil on countless occasions, to complete his Siraya Glossary: Based on the Gospel of St. Matthew in Formosan (Sinkan Dialect), a Preliminary Survey, which contains more than 3000 Sirayan vocabulary items. Only later, with this as a starting point, could there be textbooks, illustrated books, pocket books, audiobooks, the training of teachers, and finally the introduction of Sirayan language classes into the formal educational curriculum in 2016.
Partners in a transnational marriage, Uma Talavan and Edgar L. Macapili have become important promoters of the revival of the Sirayan language.