The Montgomery Texts
The Montgomery Texts
This corpus contains three Amis texts with word-level segmentation, English word glosses and English sentence translations, digitized from this publication:
Tamih and Montgomery, Robert L. (1962) Amis text. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session: Vol. 6, Article 6. 10.31356/silwp.vol06.06
The article uses a 1962 SIL field transcription that it never names; it was identified afterwards (see Notes). Each file's first sentence is the text's printed title, which the article sets over its own word-aligned English gloss line, so the titles are published as sentences like any other.
The texts are segmented into words but not into morphemes: the hyphens in the forms mark morpheme boundaries, but the article gives no morpheme-by-morpheme gloss line, so no morpheme tier is invented.
The standard tier is a real transliteration of the original through Akiw's letter correspondences below, not a copy of it: 185 of the 391 sentence- and word-level forms differ, including every sentence-level form.
The
PHON(IPA) tier was regenerated in September 2026, and 568 of its 788 values changed. If you took a copy before then, refresh it. Three things moved: the retired bare-tilde variant notation (o~u) became the current[o|u]form; segmentation hyphens were stripped, as a PHON should not carry them; and a wrong cell in the orthography profile was corrected — it had given the letterlthe sound /d/, where Akiw's own example (tamlaw→tamdaw"people", /tamɬaw/) shows it writes /ɬ~ɮ/. Before the fix, the same word was transcribed /dafak/ from the original tier and /ɬafak/ from the standard. They now agree on every element, and no value carries an uncertainty marker.
Corpus Statistics
Amis unknown
Word count
358
Total audio
0
Transcribed
0
Untranscribed
0
Translated words
English
358
Mandarin
0
Japanese
0
Dutch
0
Morphologically segmented
0
Glossed words
0
Notes
Many thanks are owed to Hsu Cheng-Wen "Akiw", who helped identify the orthography. Her notes follow.
Letter Correspondences
These are some identified differences between the original orthography and the current standard.
|Original | Ortho113 | | | ts | c | | | ? | ' | glottal stop | | ř | r | | | r | l | | | l | d | e.g., tamlaw → tamdaw (“people”) |
The status of the diacritic on f (which is rare — one word, ma-sasi?af̆a?ařaw) is uncertain, and remains so. The published XML writes it as f with a combining breve. A high-resolution reading of the scan suggests the mark is a caron, matching the ř elsewhere on the same line, but a single glyph on a 1962 mimeograph is not enough evidence to change a published letter, so it stands. The reasoning is recorded in the corpus's CodeAndDocs/source_discrepancies.md.
The import of hyphens, which are used sporadically, has not been ascertained. In the published data they are treated as morpheme boundaries: kept on the word tier, and removed from sentence-level standard forms so that tier reads as running text.
The correspondence table audits cleanly through IPA — all five rows confirmed, no information loss. The dialect attribute is left as unknown: the article does not say, and nothing in the orthography narrows it. (Southern Amis in particular is ruled out rather than suggested — Ortho113 marks f and o as unused in Southern, and these texts are full of both.)
Two English equivalents for one word
The article's gloss line sometimes gives two English readings separated by a slash — good/holy, noon/lunch, trip/walk, whole/all, and/with. The Amis word does not vary, only its English rendering, so these are not published as separate sentences. Each is a primary translation plus a second one marked ver="alt" on the same word. No published translation keeps a slash.
Omission of the central vowel “e”
It appears that the central vowel is missing in many places:
mahřek -> maherek ("finish") tstsay -> cecay ("one") pafri -> pafeli ("give")
Glides are used inconsistently.
soar → sowal (“words”) tsiwro → ciwlo(“elders” / 長老— loanword )
Copyright
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The individual authors cannot be located. The publisher — the Summer Institute of Linguistics / University of North Dakota — released the article as CC-BY-ND, and FormosanBank has interpreted that licence liberally in order to publish the texts with their glosses and translations. Publication rights were confirmed by the FormosanBank maintainer on 23 August 2026. If you are a copyright owner, please reach out to us.
Citation
In accordance with our Terms of Use, if you use this corpus or any product derived from this corpus in any publication, you must cite both FormosanBank and:
Tamih and Montgomery, Robert L. (1962) Amis text. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session: Vol. 6, Article 6. 10.31356/silwp.vol06.06
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