Nanwang Puyuma-English Dictionary (平)

This book represents data collected over many years of hearing and speaking the Nanwang Puyuma dialect, spoken in the southeastern part of Taiwan with an emphasis on the sorts of intimate details of everyday (and night) speech not ordinarily accessible to outsiders. The present work is a completely revised and vastly expanded successor to my Dictionnaire puyuma-français (Cauquelin 1991b), which was published in Paris by the École Française d’Extrême-Orient. This version differs from this earlier dictionary in at least three major respects: It is in Puyuma-English (rather than Puyuma-French), (ii) it contains an enormous amount of derived forms—all derivatives are given under the roots—obsolete and ritual terms as well as examples, that were not given earlier and as a consequence (iii) the present is roughly 14 times larger than my 1991 work. Today, fluent speakers of Nanwang Puyuma have fallen to fewer than 100, and no more than five villagers can still use many older terms that in 1983 were in daily use by octogenarians. The younger generation is increasingly switching to Mandarin in all situations, which makes this work critically important for its documentation of the lexical richness of an endangered language. Uniquely, it also conveys the intimate thoughts and emotions of earlier generations of users of that language. Although a few lexicographic studies of Puyuma have appeared in the past, there has been nothing of this importance and scope.