Language Documentation

 The Tsuchida Texts

The written text corpus of the Kanakanavu language is rather small. The first texts we present here are a courtesy of Shigeru Tsuchida, a researcher who has been working on the Taiwanese aboriginal languages for decades. He collected these Kanakanavu stories in the 1960s and published them, together with an introduction in 2003. 

Tsuchida, Shigeru 2003, Kanakanavu texts (Austronesian Formosan). Osaka: Osaka Gakuin University (Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim Publication Series, A3-014).

Apart from the published text, the author generously made available to our project the original sound files which underlie the publication. With the author's permission, the texts and sound files are here published for the first time online.

The Kanakanavu research team is currently revising these texts. During fieldwork in March 2013 and March 2014, the team discussed the first three stories with native Kanakanavu speakers in order to clarify the text. Furthermore, the research team uses the texts to find out more about the Kanakanavu language structure. Since the phonology is as yet insufficiently described, the team decided to transcribe the underlying sound files again and to write the texts down in the orthography of the Council of Indiginous Peoples of Taiwan.

We added three new lines to the original text edition: an interlinear morphological gloss where the reader finds a word-by-word equivalent, a free Chinese translation, elaborated in collaboration with the native speakers from 2013 and 2014, and a new English translation. 

New Texts

Beyond the Tsuchida 2003 texts, the team collected new texts produced by the last speakers of the Kanakanavu language during fieldwork in 2013 and 2014. These texts are mostly little narrations on cultural events, every day life or little stories. In addition to the written version of these speech situations, we present the video tapes taken during fieldwork. 

State of analysis

The Kanakanavu project is an ongoing project, hence all texts and all language documents presented here are still under revision and in the process of linguistic analysis and will be changed and corrected frequently. Users are advised to consider that fact and consult the website's newest version whenever needed. We try to update all texts by the end of every month during the project time.

Due to the fact that many phenomena are not very clear to us yet, the reader will find a lot of question marks in the glosses. These question marks represent items currently under revision or having no apropriate explaination given by the speaker. This is especially true for expressions of motion, expressions of perception and expressions of quotes or reports.

Beyond that, we are still observing the voice system, therefore the given glosses for these items are rather tentative.

For a better understanding of the glossed version, there is a gloss index available in the adjacent box.

Copyright: Ilka Wild 2013