Output details

Dictionary of Wa

Watkins' 1200-page Dictionary of Wa is the culmination of a decade-long effort to document and record the Wa lexicon from a corpus comprising very nearly all printed materials extant in the Wa language. The dictionary translates some 12,000 headwords and 7,000 example sentences in two Wa orthographies into Chinese, Burmese and English. It is the only major Wa dictionary to appear since a basic and limited Wa-Chinese dictionary in 1981, and the first ever to include English and Burmese. Because of the complex, multi-script database, the dictionary was compiled using bespoke software created within the project.