09 Jun 2006

The Wa Language Dictionary, with Burmese (Myanmar), Chinese, and English Glosses
The School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK
Self-description: "A Dictionary of the Wa Language with Burmese (Myanmar), Chinese, and English Glosses and Internet Database for Minority Languages of Burma (Myanmar).
Wa is a member of the Northern Mon-Khmer language family. More specifically, it is the major language of the Palaungic branch of Mon-Khmer. (See map and chart of Austroasiatic languages, which includes, primarily, the Mon-Khmer family.) Wa is spoken by about one million people in an area on the border between China's Yunnan Province and the Shan State of the Union of Myanmar (Burma). [...] The only Wa dictionaries which exist are a few Wa-Chinese dictionaries which are either limited or out-dated.
The SOAS Wa Dictionary Project is a three-year effort (2003-2006), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to produce a high-quality dictionary, translating Wa into Chinese, Burmese/Myanmar and English. The project uses advanced techniques in corpus-based lexicography, centred on a database and Internet resource, which will also be suitable for other languages spoken in Burma/Myanmar besides Wa after the life of the project."
Site contents: * Dictionary Database; * Corpus of Wa Texts; * Myanmar Minority Language Database; * Resources (including draft documents on: The Wa System for Personal Names, Numbers in Wa, Wa Weights and Measures, and Wa Area Placenames [i.e. http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/wadict/wa_placenames.html, a gazetteer of places and their long/lat coordinates. I commend the document to all serious students of trade routes in the Thai-Yunnan area - ed.])
URL http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/wadict/
Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/wadict/
Link reported by: T. Matthew Ciolek (tmciolek--at--coombs.anu.edu.au)
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Study
* Publisher [academic - business - government - library - NGO - other]: Academic
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Essential
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 100