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.