Revisions to the Siraya lexicon based on the original Utrecht Manuscript: A case study in source data

Christopher Joby
Adam Mickiewicz University | Academia Sinica
Summary

Linguistic historiography analyzes how linguistic knowledge has been acquired, stored, used and diffused. This article examines what can happen if linguists rely on copies of source data rather than the source data itself. It takes as a case study linguistic data from Siraya, a now-extinct Formosan language. Documents compiled in the seventeenth century by Dutch missionaries in Taiwan form a significant source of data for Siraya. One such document, a wordlist known as the Utrecht Manuscript (UM), is the principal source for the lexicon of one variety of Siraya, “Siraya Proper”. It has been published three times. Each edition, however, contains many errors. These editions, rather than the manuscript, have been used by scholars investigating Siraya. This article aims to correct errors in the editions and secondary literature on the UM with my readings of the manuscript itself. It therefore presents a more accurate record of the lexicon of “Siraya Proper” as well as illustrating the importance of using primary rather than secondary sources of linguistic data. Finally, it introduces an online edition of the UM, which will provide scholars and language revivalists with a useful resource for this lexicon.

Publication history

Date received: 4 June 2021

Date accepted: 19 July 2021

Published online: 30 November 2021

Table of contents

During the Dutch colonization of Taiwan (1624–1662), Dutch missionaries produced several texts in dialectal varieties of Siraya, a Formosan language and therefore a member of the Austronesian language family. One of these texts was a manuscript consisting of a lexicon of more than one thousand lemmas and four short dialogues in Siraya and Dutch. It has been in the collection of Utrecht University Library in the Netherlands since the early eighteenth century and is thus referred to as the Utrecht Manuscript (UM). Currently, we do not know who compiled this manuscript. It was first published in 1842 by Christianus Jacobus (C.J.) Van der Vlis (Van der Vlis 1842). Other texts compiled by Dutch missionaries in Siraya have also been identified, including the Lord’s Prayer, translations of two Gospels and a catechism or Formulary (Junius 1645; Gravius 1661, 1662). Linguists such as Paul Li and Alexander Adelaar argue that the UM and Lord’s Prayer are written in one dialectal variety of Siraya, and the Gospels and Formulary in another variety (Li 2009: 399; Adelaar 2014). Several scholars have subsequently copied words and phrases from the UM for analysis. They typically refer, however, to Van der Vlis’s edition of the manuscript or a later version compiled by the Japanese scholar Naojirō Murakami (1933), which was based on Van der Vlis’s edition, rather than the manuscript itself. This is problematic, for Van der Vlis’s edition contains many errors, which were subsequently copied by Murakami (1933). Other scholars, too, such as Shigeru Tsuchida and Yukihiro Yamada (1991) and Adelaar (2006) have based their analysis of the UM on the Van der Vlis or Murakami editions. So, we need to return to the original manuscript to identify, as far as possible, what was in fact written there and correct these errors.

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