Elihu Doty (20 September 1809 – 30 November 1864) was an American

missionary A missionary is a member of a Religious denomination, religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thoma ...

to China. He was responsible for the first textbook of

Southern Min Southern Min (), Minnan ( Mandarin pronunciation: ) or Banlam (), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related Chinese languages that form a branch of Min Chinese spoken in Fujian (especially the Minnan region), most of Taiwa ...

in English. Along with John Van Nest Talmage he is credited with the invention of

Pe̍h-ōe-jī ( ; , , ; POJ), also known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, particularly Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese and Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien, and it is widely employed as one of the writing syst ...

, the most common orthography used to write Southern Min, although some doubt remains as to the exact origins of this system.

Early mission

Doty arrived in Batavia (now

Jakarta Jakarta (; , Betawi language, Betawi: ''Jakartè''), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta (; ''DKI Jakarta'') and formerly known as Batavia, Dutch East Indies, Batavia until 1949, is the capital and largest city of Indonesia and ...

) in the

Dutch East Indies The Dutch East Indies, also known as the Netherlands East Indies (; ), was a Dutch Empire, Dutch colony with territory mostly comprising the modern state of Indonesia, which Proclamation of Indonesian Independence, declared independence on 17 Au ...

in 1836 and spent his first three years as a missionary there; Azubah Caroline Condit was among those who accompanied him on his journey there. His next station was

Borneo Borneo () is the List of islands by area, third-largest island in the world, with an area of , and population of 23,053,723 (2020 national censuses). Situated at the geographic centre of Maritime Southeast Asia, it is one of the Greater Sunda ...

, from 1839 to 1844, at which point he relocated to

Amoy Xiamen,), also known as Amoy ( ; from the Zhangzhou Hokkien pronunciation, zh, c=, s=, t=, p=, poj=Ē͘-mûi, historically romanized as Amoy, is a sub-provincial city in southeastern Fujian, People's Republic of China, beside the Taiwan Stra ...

(now Xiamen) in

Fujian Fujian is a provinces of China, province in East China, southeastern China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capital is Fuzhou and its largest prefe ...

, China.

Mission in Amoy

It was while stationed in Amoy that Doty produced the ''Anglo Chinese Manual of the Amoy Dialect'' (1853), which was "the earliest existing textbook for a Southern Min dialect".

Publications

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Notes

References

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External links

Complete version of his Anglo-Chinese Manual
{{DEFAULTSORT:Doty, Elihu Protestant missionaries in China 1809 births 1864 deaths American Protestant missionaries American missionaries in China People from Berne, New York Protestant missionaries in Indonesia American missionary linguists American expatriates in Indonesia