本論文的研究主題是要嘗試解讀新近才發現的十五件新港文書。除了一件是用漢字書寫的以外，其餘的十五件都是用西拉雅語以羅馬字母拼寫的契約文書，而且都只是單語的。我們所要進行的工作有這幾項：(一)轉寫（transcribe）這些手寫的書寫體為印刷體字母，因為有些字母不容易辨認；(二)嘗試逐字翻譯，包括實詞與虛詞；(三)決定詞界，有些語詞的書寫方式是幾乎每個音節都分開來寫，得要連起來才能成為有意義的個別語詞，也才能解讀；(四)嘗試解讀各件文書的內容。最大的困難是今日已沒有人會說西拉雅語了。我們一方面要藉助於村上直次郎(1)一書中所錄的那些新港文書的文字和內容，另一方面也要藉助於小川(2)當年對該書中的各種契約文書所做的整理工作。此外，我們也要參考最近幾年Adelaar(3)跟Tsuchida（土田滋）(4)對西拉雅語法結構的研究報告。根據以上這些基礎的而又重要的工作，希望能夠進一步解讀新發現的這一批新港文書。本研究有一些新的成果：第一，最後一件新港文書寫於一八一八年，而Steere在一八七三年所找到的八十多歲老人只記得一些單字，因此我們可以推斷西拉雅語大約在一八三○年左右就已消失；第二，西拉雅的姓名制有如跟它血緣接近的噶瑪蘭一樣，男女有別，有名也有姓，似為母女（或父子）連名制。

Professor Joseph Beal Steere (1842-1940) was among the first scholars to acquire some Sinkang manuscripts. These deeds and contracts written in romanized Siraya come from southern Taiwan mostly of the eighteenth century, but they were only recently rediscovered in the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Michigan, where they had lain since Steere's retirement or death. In February 1999, Professor Henry Wright, curator of archaeology and professor of anthropology at the univer- sity, forwarded to me some 20 photocopied pages of the Sinkang manuscripts to deter- mine whether the originals were of any value and therefore worth conserving. My assistant, Miss Chin-wen Chien, and I found that two of them were already contained in Murakami (1933:52, 67), that two were simply lists of personal or place names, that another was written in Chinese, but that the rest were of some interest and had never appeared in print before. These latter are in the Siraya language. They are hand- written documents on heavy hand-made paper, dating somewhere between 1730 and 1810. We have been studying these to see if there is anything new to be learned from them. Fortunately we do have a few resources to aid our interpretation of these newly- uncovered Siraya texts: (1) The 21 bilingual Siraya-Chinese documents contained in Murakami's 1933 collection of 101 Sinkang manuscripts; (2) a wordlist and glosses for some of Murakami's texts prepared by the late Professor Naoyoshi Ogawa; (3) recent linguistic studies of Siraya by Adelaar (1997, 1999, 2000) and Tsuchida (1996, 1999) that provide a good basis for understanding Siraya grammar. Unfortunately, many prob- lems still remain with the texts under consideration. Interpreting the texts was made particularly difficult by the following points: (1) Siraya is an extinct language, and there are no native speakers to consult; (2) many words have never been encountered before and their meanings are unknown; (3) word boundaries are not always evident; (4) spelling is inconsistent; (5) it is difficult to dis tinguish the letter from , from , from , from , or from ; or (6) some of the handwriting is simply illegible. The system of personal names comes out clearly in these documents. The nam- ing system of Siraya is similar to that of Kavalan, a closely related language. As is true for other Formosan languages, Siraya distinguishes between male and female names. Each person has both a given name and surname. The latest Sinkang manuscript was written in 1818; the 80 year-old Siraya woman whom Steere consulted in 1873 could only remember a few dozen words, but no sen- tences. We surmise that the Siraya language became extinct around 1830.