Paiwan Worterbuch: Paiwan-Deutsch, Deutsch-Paiwan (review)

Paiwan is a Formosan (aboriginal Austronesian) language of Taiwan. With this Paiwan–German dictionary it becomes perhaps the best documented Formosan language, as this work is a companion to the author’s 1990 grammar (Paiwangrammatik, Harrassowitz). The dictionary itself has 496 pages with minimum white space. There is also a German–Paiwan finder list of 104 pages, an eight-page introduction, and a page of abbreviations.

This documentation of a highly endangered language will be welcomed by Austronesianists. The user, however, will need independent knowledge of the language in order to use the dictionary to advantage, as there are various infelicities reflecting the fact that it was not compiled by a professional linguist. There is no explanation of the orthography, nor a list of references. Hence the reader remains ignorant of Raleigh Ferrell’s 1982 Paiwan dictionary (Canberra: Australian National University).

The introduction is concerned almost entirely with the Paiwan verbs that form a Philippine-type ‘focus’ system. Hans Egli displays real insight into the semantics of the various verb forms, but struggles in his description of the system. He recognizes at a pretheoretical level that the system is derivational rather than inflectional, but the reader must infer this. He uses the Philippinist terms ‘agent focus’, ‘patient focus’, ‘locative focus’, and ‘instrument focus’ but doesn’t mention that these are devices for allowing referents with various semantic roles to be expressed as the subject (the Philippinist’s ‘topic’). He labels another verb form ‘passive’, leaving this reader puzzled as to how it fits in with ‘focus’. E does not explain that there is a primary contrast between the agent focus and the other focus forms, nor that in independent clauses the agent-focus form occurs only in intransitive verbs and verbs with an indefinite patient.

These infelicities carry over into the dictionary itself. Each nonverb entry begins with a headword and a gloss; there is no indication of its morpheme- or word-class. The verb entry is more complex. Here the headword is the verb without focus affixes. It is followed by the agent-focus form and one of the abbreviations PAT (patient), LOK (locative), or AG (agent), but their use is not explained. As they occur after the agent-focus form, they do not mark the ‘focus’ of the verb form. I take them to indicate which focus forms may occur with the verb root in question, but I am uncertain that this inference is correct. This is a pity, as it is important in a Formosan or Philippine language to know what forms are possible with each verb root and how each is used. Most entries end with one or more glossed examples: indeed, examples abound, an important virtue of the dictionary.

The various focus forms of a verb are not listed separately. This means that if one finds a verb form in a Paiwan text, one must know what its headword form is (and it is not always easy to determine this) before one can find it in the dictionary. Confusingly, in the finder list, verbs are not given in their headword form but in their agent-focus form.