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Report on the Iu Mien—Chinese—English Dictionary Project
Greg Aumann and Pan Chengqian

Abstract:
This dictionary is a dictionary of Iu Mien as spoken in Laibin County, Guangxi Zhuang
Autonomous Region, China. The intended audience includes Chinese and English
speaking linguists. But the main audience is Iu Mien speakers. Thus the dictionary has
some unusual features designed to make it simpler and more useful for Iu Mien speakers.
The first is that it has definitions in Iu Mien. Hence it is like a combined monolingual
and bilingual dictionary. The second is that the Chinese part of each entry includes a
Chinese gloss, pinyin of the gloss and a Chinese definition. It is hoped that the dictionary
will be useful in helping Iu Mien speakers to learn to read their own language and also to
learn Chinese characters and pinyin.
This dictionary will have reverse Chinese—Iu Mien and English—Iu Mien indexes.
Generating the reverse Chinese—Iu Mien index requires being able to sort Chinese in a
standard order. The order most frequently used in modern dictionaries in China sorts
characters first by pronunciation, then by stroke count and thirdly by stroke categories.
This sort order is easy to use for Chinese speakers but difficult to implement. It requires
disambiguation for characters with multiple pronunciations and the stroke counts and
types for each character in the reverse index. The available databases of character
information were generally not accurate and didn't contain all the necessary data so
character data suitable for sorting Modern Simplified Chinese was developed.

Introduction to Iu Mien

Iu Mien belongs to the Mienic branch of the Hmong-Mien language family. It has more
speakers than any other Mienic language. The bulk of the speakers are found in China and
Vietnam. But there are significant numbers also in Laos, Thailand, the United States and
Europe. In Asia Iu Mien speakers are grouped with speakers of other, mostly related
languages, and called Yao. Thus the term Yao is not a very precise term when discussing
linguistics.
There are three orthographies in use. A Thai based orthography and an Old Roman
orthography are used in Thailand. The New Roman orthography is used outside of Thailand,
especially in the United States and in Europe. The New Roman orthography is the preferred
orthography also in China but its use is not widespread because of the low literacy rate in Iu
Mien. Chinese and American Iu Mien cooperated in the design of the New Roman
orthography (Purnell, 1987). It was designed to have transfer value to both English and
Chinese Pinyin. The New Roman orthography is used slightly differently in China. The
differences are relatively minor and are convertible in either direction, much like the
differences between written British and American English.