“Misaharan ini na punapunan” — indigenous languages in Taitung, Taiwan
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[This is a guest post by AntC]
This T-shirt I had to buy *immediately*:
In a tiny coffee shop on the road across the mountains / along the East coast from Pingtung into Taitung.
Great to see indigenous languages featured in ordinary contexts!
This is near Beinan township — a centre for Puyuma peoples, which I guess is the language. The interwebs are of course almost completely silent, apart from other promotional images of the T-shirt; this seems to be a general clearing site for Taiwan indigenous languages.
The translation I got at the cafe (via Mandarin) was ‘Indigenous peoples love the country’. If I bumped into the sentiment in New Zealand’s indigenous (Pacifica) language, it would go more like ‘respect the land’ (and the sea).
(‘Punapunan’ looks like a reduplicative plural/mass noun: most Pacifica languages do that.)
Jhiben Hot Springs area and indigenous names previously on LLog here.
I went back to that coffee shop the next day and found the Chinese characters for the artwork :
That says "ài zhè shìjiè 愛這世界" ("love the world").
Selected readings
- "Katratripulr" (5/6/22)
- "The geo-, socio-, ethno-, and politicolinguistics of Taiwan" (7/24/18)
- Dutch Formosa (1624-1662)
- Standard Chinese / Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) / Standard Mandarin / Mandarin (I prefer to refer to it as MSM)
- "Precious Isle Taiwan" (2/23/18)
- "A museum for the languages of Taiwan" (1/5/20)
- "Taiwan's gold medalist with an unusual name" (7/29/21) — especially comments 2, 3, 5, and following.
- "Writing indigenous names in Taiwan" (12/10/23)
- "Indigenous languages of Taiwan" (6/14/23)
- "Austronesian languages of Taiwan" (6/2/23)
- "Diversification of Proto-Austronesian" (2/26/23)
- "An Austronesian word for 'betel'" (5/23/21)
- "Taiwan's vanishing indigenous languages" (6/9/21)
- "Documenting and Revitalizing Austronesian Languages: free online book", Pinyin News (4/30/08)
- "The linguistic plenitude of Papua New Guinea" (12/29/23)