A Recently Discovered Copy of a Translation of the Gospel of St. John in Siraya

Abstract:In Amsterdam in 1661, the Dutch missionary Daniël Gravius published a volume comprising his translations of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John in a Formosan language, Siraya. Until recently, it was thought that only the translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew had survived. However, a copy of the 1661 publication has now been identified, which contains both Gospel translations. This article aims to provide details of how this discovery was made, to assess its significance, to offer some preliminary comments concerning the language of the translation, and to suggest what future research should be undertaken on the translation. The article makes a start by providing a brief history of the Dutch presence in Taiwan in the seventeenth century and the work of missionaries in translating Christian texts into Siraya and another Formosan language, Favorlang, in order to provide the necessary historical context. The article then analyzes the reception of texts in Siraya since the nineteenth century to assess the value to scholarship of the identification of the translation of the Gospel of St. John by Gravius. Next, it makes some preliminary remarks on the language of the translation, above all the lexis and the lexical category of numerals, using Adelaar's monograph on the translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew into Siraya as a reference point. Several lexical items including 'water jar', 'mud', 'cave', and 'to spit' are identified and analyzed. Where possible, reconstructed Proto-Austronesian forms of which the Siraya words are reflexes are provided, as are cognates in other Formosan languages. Furthermore, the article analyzes Siraya noun phrases that occur only in the Gospel of St. John. In short, this contribution is the first attempt to analyze how this recently discovered text contributes to our knowledge of Siraya.