The Wa Language Corpus

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List of texts which currently comprise the searched corpus

Background

The project has sought to build a significant collection of Wa-language materials in digital form. A roman-alphabet orthography developed in China in the 1950s has been used to produce school readers, a few dozen books on topics such as cultural traditions and customs, agriculture, Wa herbal medicine, folk tales, history and Chinese politics, and some lexicographical resources: Yan Qixiang et al. eds., Pug lāi cix ding yīie si ndong lāi vax mai lāi hox / Wa-Han jianming cidian 佤汉简明词典 [Concise Wa-Chinese Dictionary] (1981); Qiu Efeng et al. eds., Ci dian xue sheng lāi vax mai lāi hox / Wa-Han xuesheng cidian 佤汉学生词典 [Student's Dictionary of Chinese] (1987); Wang Jingliu et al. eds, Loux Gāb Vax / Wayu shuyu huishi 佤语熟语汇释 [Compendium of Wa Idioms] (1992). The collection amounts to some 7,000 book pages.

A second body of texts, totaling 1000-2000 book pages, consisting mostly of Biblical or other Christian texts, has been produced using M. Vincent Young's original Bible orthography and its subsequent revisions.

In addition, some speech recordings have already been made, and more are being commissioned during the life of this project.

The printed material is generally no longer available, and very little of it has existed in digital form. (One exception is the Wa translation of the Old Testament, published in 2005 by the Divine Inheritance Foundation, founded by Marcus Young.) The small body of linguistic literature on Wa, including the dictionaries, is in Chinese, with the exception of a very few articles and monographs on phonetics and comparative philology. Data on Wa are so scarce that Gérard Diffloth's published comparative work (The Wa Languages, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 5.2, 1980) had to turn to sketchy colonial descriptions a century old for data in some dialects.

The works referred to above and more are cited in full in the list of published material in or about Wa and some closely-related Palaungic languages.

Text samples encoded using XML

The following texts are encoded in XML using the text-critical subset of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative's DTD (Document Type Definition). They can be displayed in two different styles, using two different XSLT stylesheets. One experimentally uses the "Versioning Engine" v2.0 from MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities). In this style, parallel texts in different Wa orthographies, and additionally in Burmese, Chinese, English, or IPA, are displayed in side-by-side columns, with extensive formatting and other features, based on the information in the XML file. Visit the general index page for our Versioning Machine server for further information and the complete selection of available texts.

In the other style, parallel texts are displayed in interlinear fashion, with minimal formatting.

• Wa textbook from Yunnan Minzu Daxue (Yunnan Nationalities University), Kunming, China, consisting of dialogues in Wa with Chinese translations. To the original Wa text in PRC Chinese orthography have been added parallel versions with (a) a rough mechanical conversion into Myanmar (Revised Bible) orthography (with the beginnings of a more sensitive conversion into actual Myanmar usage, using XML markup); (b) the Chinese translations of the original textbook; (c) an English translation; and (d) a Burmese translation. Part (d) is incomplete work in progress. Versioning Machine Style (In order to view the XML text as intended, Internet Explorer 6.0 or newer or Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape 7.1 is required. Mozilla/Firefox executes faster and exhibits some Versioning Machine functionality missing in Internet Explorer, but there are glitches in both major browsers.) | Interlinear style, rendered with XSL | Interlinear style, rendered with cascading stylesheet (XML, 245KB)



• "Npaeng Si guad giex Si ngaix" (Wa version of Aesop's fable "The North Wind and the Sun") Versioning Machine style | Interlinear style | Interlinear style using SIL Doulos IPA font (XML, 11KB)



• Parable of the Sower (from the New Testament of The Bible, Matthew 13.iii-ix) Versioning Machine style | Interlinear style | Interlinear style using SIL Doulos IPA font | Variation on interlinear style, using DL,DT,DD tags (XML, 12KB)

Other sample texts (XHTML-encoded or PDF)

• Section from a monograph about Wa society and culture, Nbēen oud mgrong goui gon Ba Rāog (Chinese title Wazu Fengqing 佤族风情), with parallel text in Wa and Chinese, in the PRC Chinese orthography. (22KB)



• Short chapter from a literacy text in the Myanmar (Revised Bible) orthography. (3KB) This chapter is entitled "About the Wind." The textbook is issued under the auspices of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) authorities in Pang Kham (Pang Hsang), Wa Special Region 2, Myanmar.



• The Book of Matthew, ch. 1-7, from the New Testament of the Bible, in the Myanmar (Revised Bible) orthography. (73KB) For comparison, here is the English King James Version for Matthew 1-7 (right-click in Windows to open in a new window).



• Sample page from Vincent Young's 1933 Christian Hymnal (GIF image, 71KB) Uses the pioneering "Bible orthography" which Young and his colleagues devised. This is the oldest printed document in the Wa language known to us. Complete hymnal image here (PDF 4070KB)



• "Pet La Pa Ang Kwe Rhawm Keut" ("The Mindless Rabbit", from Lai Vax, Wa Reader, Glawg 4, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2000) (4KB), with accompanying audio (MP3, 3756KB)



• The new bilingual Chinese-Wa language text Lāi Loux, intended for use in primary education in the Wa-speaking areas of Yunnan, China.



• First paragraph of the first text above, Nbēen oud mgrong goui gon Ba Rāog (Wazu Fengqing 佤族风情) in Chinese orthography and Unified Wa orthography. (4KB)



• Book of Jonah from the Old Testament of the Bible, with parallel text in Myanmar [Revised Bible] orthography, Chinese orthography, and Unified Wa orthography

The evolving corpus of Wa language texts

List of texts which currently comprise the searched corpus

Search current Wa corpus