The plainspeople from China brought the legal notion of land title. Well, my father often jokes, “It used to be that if a Paiwan person had walked through a place leaving footprints with his own two feet enough times, that place belonged to him.” Precious little literature from Taiwan’s Indigenous [...]
At some point back in the mists of time (2009ish), when I was actively learning Taiwanese, my most frequently repeated complaint was the lack of a decent Taiwanese reference grammar (in any language). This lack has now been comprehensively remedied by the release of Philip T. Lin's Taiwanese Grammar: A [...]
At the dawn of the seventeenth century Taiwan was an Austronesian island, inhabited by the ancestors of today’s Aborigines and largely removed from the wider currents of East Asian history. In modern Taiwan the Aboriginal peoples make up just 3 percent of the population, with most of the rest being [...]
