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There are various approaches to building a picture of the 'spiritual' entities in which indigenous Formosans believed in 'Aboriginal Taiwan'. This article does so by studying what sources written in the seventeenth century tell us about them. One source was written by a Chinese observer, and others by two groups of Europeans: Dutch East India Company employees and Spanish missionaries. Thus, one methodological issue is that these authors looked at Formosan belief systems through the different lenses of their own religious experience and tried to fit the Formosan belief systems into their own 'existing knowledge grids'. A related problem is that the authors' usage of terms may differ and indeed does differ from modern usage in the anthropology of religion. Despite these methodological issues, the article argues that these sources indicate that different Formosan tribes believed in different spiritual entities and were therefore marked by their heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first hundred years of the Dutch presence in Japan, the Dutch language was used by Dutch, other Europeans and Japanese in a range of social domains. This article considers how Dutch functioned in Japan in the following hundred years, i.e. c. 1700–1800. After discussing who knew Dutch in Japan, it examines the use of the language not by social domain, but rather by the linguistic processes that resulted from contact between Dutch and other languages in Japan. These include the learning of Dutch by non-native speakers, bilingualism, language competition, code switching and loanword integration. Particular attention is paid to the subject of translation, for it was during this period that Japanese interpreters and scholars began to translate Dutch texts to a significant degree and the discipline known as rangaku (lit. 'Dutch studies') emerged. This article therefore aims to increase our knowledge of Dutch as an emigrant language and of the linguistic diversity and resultant language processes in early modern Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been increased academic interest in missionary linguistics. However, whereas much has been written on Spanish missionary linguistics, above all in the Americas, relatively little has been published on Dutch missionary linguistics. This article aims to address this situation by analyzing the texts written in Malay by Dutch missionary linguists in the seventeenth century in the East Indies, now Indonesia. It begins by providing an account of the history of the Malay language, focusing above all on the influence of other languages including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Portuguese on the Malay lexicon. It then describes the activities of the Dutch East India Company in the Indonesian archipelago. After providing a comprehensive account of the texts that the Dutch missionary linguists wrote in Malay, the article analyzes the linguistic strategies that they employed as they attempted to overcome the gap between their language and culture and the Malay language and the culture in which it was embedded. It does so using a fourfold typology: loanwords, loan translations or calques; periphrasis and conceptual transfer. The picture that emerges is that authors made extensive use of all four strategies to communicate the Christian Gospel in Malay. One interesting result is that Dutch missionary linguistics used very few Dutch loanwords in their Malay texts. The article analyzes possible reasons for this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1624 and 1662, the Dutch East India Company operated a trading post in Taiwan. It employed missionaries who attempted to convert indigenous Formosans to Reformed Christianity by compiling texts in the Formosan language, Siraya. This article analyzes texts compiled in this language to establish how the Dutch missionaries used them to communicate the Gospel. This analysis shows that they adopted two distinct approaches to compiling texts in Siraya. Early missionaries, above all Robertus Junius, modified biblical texts such as the Ten Commandments and Lord's Prayer, changing words and phrases to "speak to" the Formosan culture. His approach constituted a form of accommodation and was subsequently criticized by missionary colleagues in Taiwan. Later missionaries translated the biblical texts more literally. Nevertheless, they used a Formulary as a discursive textual space in which to explain and, to some extent, make the text relevant to the Formosans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medieval theories of vision that have contributed to a rise in practicing idolatry are debated. It is suggested that the understanding that seeing is equal to knowing led worshippers to believe that seeing an image of God meant in some sense of knowing him.

In 1624, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) arrived on the island of Taiwan and established a trading post there, which would continue to function until 1662. During this period, Dutch missionaries came to the island with the intention of proselytizing the indigenous Formosan peoples. They built churches and schools and translated Gospels and catechisms into Formosan languages. Over time, language policy changed and there was a concerted effort to teach the indigenous people Dutch. Many Chinese, including traders, fishermen and farmers, also went to Taiwan in this period. To support its investment on the island, the VOC implemented a system of tax-farming among the Chinese, who eventually numbered some 50,000. In this article, an attempt is made to analyse the linguistic consequences of contact between the Dutch on the one hand and the Formosans and Chinese on the other hand. The first of these is that the Dutch taught Formosans to write using a modified Roman script. The Formosans continued to use this script long after the Dutch had been expelled in 1662. Second, Dutch missionaries translated texts into two Formosan languages, Siraya and Favorlang. Since 1662, both languages have died out and so the Dutch texts are among the few sources which allow scholars to study these languages. Third, because of contact with Chinese tax-farmers, at least two Dutch loanwords have been adopted by local Sinitic varieties, both of which function as productive morphemes. Furthermore, one of these words has its own Chinese character. In short, this article aims to illustrate how contact with Dutch influenced other languages in Taiwan and thus to contribute to our understanding of the consequences of contact between Dutch and other languages in East Asia. Samenvatting In 1624 arriveerde de Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) op het eiland Taiwan en vestigde daar een handelspost, Fort Zeelandia, die tot 1662 zou blijven functioneren. Het hoofddoel van de VOC was het drijven van handel met China en eveneens het oprichten van een stophaven voor schepen onderweg tussen Batavia en de VOC-handelsposten in Japan (Hirado 1609-41; Decima vanaf 1641). In hun kielzog kwamen Nederlandse missionarissen in deze periode naar het eiland met de bedoeling, de inheemse Formosanen te bekeren tot het protestantisme. De VOC bouwde kerken en scholen en de missionarissen vertaalden Bijbelteksten en catechismussen in Formosaanse talen, die behoren tot de Austronesische taalfamilie, waartoe o.a. het Maleis en het Tagalog eveneens behoren. In de loop van de tijd veranderde het taalbeleid van de VOC en werd er een gezamenlijke inspanning geleverd om de inheemse bevolking Nederlands te leren. In 1649 stonden er 315 dorpen onder het gezag van de VOC, die 68.675 inwoners telden. Vóór de Nederlandse periode woonden er zo'n 10.000 Chinezen op Taiwan, waarvan de meerderheid handelaren, vissers, piraten en smokkelaars was. In die periode gingen veel andere Chinezen, waaronder veel landarbeiders, naar het eiland. Zij kwamen vooral uit de zuidelijke Chinese provincies Fujian en Guangdong. Om haar investeringen op het eiland te ondersteunen, voerde de VOC een pachtsysteem onder de Chinezen in. In dit artikel wordt een poging gedaan om de gevolgen betreffende de taal te analyseren van het contact tussen de Nederlandse taal enerzijds en de Formosaanse talen en regionale Sinitische talen anderzijds. Drie gevolgen zullen specifiek onder de loep worden genomen. Ten eerste hebben de Nederlandse missionarissen Formosanen geleerd met Latijnse letters te schrijven. Na 1662 bleven de Formosanen dit schriftsysteem om praktische redenen gebruiken tot in de negentiende eeuw. Ten tweede vertaalden de Nederlandse missionarissen christelijke teksten in twee Formosaanse talen, het Siraya en het Favorlangs, die inmiddels zijn uitgestorven. Daarom vormen deze teksten een belangrijke bron voor de hedendaagse studie van die talen, en ook voor de nakomelingen van deze Formosanen die nu proberen het gebruik van het Siraya nieuw leven in te blazen. Ten derde bestaat er als gevolg van het contact tussen de Nederlanders en Chinese pachters een klein aantal toponiemen en leenwoorden, en een nieuw 'dialectkarakter' in twee Sinitische talen opgenomen: het Mandarijn en het Taiwanees Zuidelijk Min ofwel het Taiwanees Hokkien. Kortom, dit artikel doet een poging om een aantal van de gevolgen betreffende de taal van de Nederlandse kolonisatie van Taiwan in de zeventiende eeuw aan te tonen en daarmee iets bij te dragen aan onze kennis van de invloed van het Nederlands buiten de Lage Landen, vooral in Oost-Azië. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]