Stepped back a while from the trauma, I found that SiaoLin, the village destroyed by mud slides during Typhoon Morakot, is one of the places that have reserved the culture of Siraya, a disappeared aboriginal tribe once populated in southern Taiwan. Most Sirayans had been "Chinalized" for centuries, and their language has lost for about a hundred years.
The only documents left are contracts made by Sirayans and Chinese immigrants for property transactions, and The Gospel of St. Matthew in Formosan (Sinkang Dialect) by a Dutch priest Daniel Gravius. They are all Romanization Phonetics of Sirayan.(see this page) But no one in Taiwan now is able to read them.
About ten years ago, Mr. Edgar Macapili, a Bisayan aboriginal from Philippine, somehow found that he can read the Sirayan Gospel of St. Matthew. His wife Uma Tavalan is a Sirayan. They met each other in the Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music in Philippine.
It took him seven years to identify about 3000 Sirayan words and publish the book "A Preliminary Inquiry to the Vocabulary of Siraya" (English title pending).
Isn't that amazing?
Here is a Sirayan song for rain.
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