The Lexical Influence of the Bible Translation on Taiwanese Novel Writing, 1916-1998: A Computer-Assisted Corpus Analysis

Abstract

In 1916, Rev. Thomas Barclay(1874-1935)published the New Testament Taiwanese Romanization (Peh-oe-ji) and then the Old Testament in 1933.This version of the Bible has been used in Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in Taiwan as well as overseas. The so-called ”Taiwanese Han-ji edition” of the Bible was published late to 1996 with replacement of the Romanization only. The lexis and syntax remain the same. Many lexical items in the Bible translation are the Amoy dialect or liturgical register which are not familiar to the present-day Taiwanese. Using computer-aided segmentation supplemented by manual segmentation, I found 112,964 word tokens with 12,941 word types in this corpus. I also collected a second corpus with 92,539 word tokens and 12,969 word types consisting of the short stories of Tan5 Lui5 and Tan5 Beng5-jin5 written in the 1990's.Comparing these two corpora, I found that the lexical influence of the Bible translation on Taiwanese novel writing is reducing. The loanwords of the non-local lexical layer including the Amoy dialect and the liturgical register in the lexicon are decreasing. This implies that the religious impact from the Prebysterian Church on language in Taiwan is rather little. This also implies that Taiwanese identity of the language and culture has been emerging by making distinction from the Amoy in China.