The starting point of this dictionary is a collation of Janshansin's Kratkij dungansko-russkij slovar' (2. ed., Moscow: ИПБ [Институт перевода Библии] 2009.) and the comprehensive wordlist in Hǎi Fēng's 海峰 book Zhōngyà Dōnggān yǔyán yánjiū 中亞東干語言研究 (Ürümqi: 新疆大學出版社 2003), which is extensively referred to and quoted in full in many places. Based on these two sources, I have provided tentative English glosses for each entry. To some extent I have also consulted the systematic lexicon contained in Lín Tāo's 林濤 monumental study Dōnggān yǔyán diàochá yánjiū 東干語言調查研究 (2012), but the laborious process of looking up words in his system means that this has only been possible sporadically. Eventually, this work should be consulted for all entries. A number of articles on Dungan have also been consulted.
I have tried to find an etymologically meaningful rendering of each word in Chinese characters along with an indication of the tones (details below). In this process I have consulted Baxter and Sagart's Middle Chinese reconstructions (available at http://ocbaxtersagart.lsait.lsa.umich.edu), the Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn 漢語大詞典, and the ABC English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary (University of Hawai`i 2010)
Regretably, I have not been able to obtain access to two very important sources: (a) Olli Salmi's lexical database of Dungan (ca. 10000 entries); (b) Moscow State University's materials from expeditions to the Central Asian Dungans in the 1980s, which were led by Boris Jur'evich Gorodeckij. It is my hope that these sources will be published in the foreseeable future, since they are of great importance to the study of the Dungan Language.
1. The entry starts with the headword in Cyrillic, followed by the tones, one for each syllable, separated by a hyphen (see below for details on tone notation). Where there are variants, these are separated by a vertical bar.
2. Then follows a specification (in yellow type) of which variety the entry belongs to:
3. In the entry text itself, major senses are headed by Arabic numerals, sub-senses headed by lower-case latin letter. Indications related to style, register or semantic derivation are given within single angle quotation marks:
4. After the entry text follows a tag list on a separate line. All the tags can be viewed as a list with explanations of each tag by clicking on the button "Browse tags" on the search page. Clicking on a tag will lead you to a listing of all entries with the corresponding tag.
5. Next come clickable cross-references to other entries.
6. Finally, I quote and cross-reference other dictionaries and scholars where relevant, especially Janshansin's dictionary in the 2009 edition ("Krds2") and Hǎi Fēng 2003.
The task of rendering Sinitic topolects in Chinese characters is fraught with difficulty. Since the Chinese script is morphosyllabic rather than phonetic, one has to rely on the identification of shared etyma at the morpheme level rather than phonetic similarity when choosing Chinese characters. It means to prefer etymological spellings over phonetic ones, so that the character chosen gives no definite indication of Dungan pronunciation. This is not the full extent of the problem, however. First of all, the assertion that two forms are etymologically identical is subject to judgment, whether it is that of a linguist or that of an average speaker of the language, so that it does not constitute an objective criterion. Second, there may not even be a Chinese character that standardly represents the morpheme-etymon one has settled on. This is particularly the case for the morphemes of dialect words at the local level. In any case, for many Chinese scholars, finding Chinese character representations often means searching in old texts and dictionaries for the "original character" (běnzì 本字) for the morpheme in question, disregarding current relevance or comprehensibility. Of course, there are also multisyllabic words that cannot be divided into constituent morphemes. For these, there is no obvious etymological spelling, and one has to rely on other conventions, such as quasi-phonetic spellings using characters with the "mouth" radical (口).
Even the solution of adopting phonetic spellings in difficult cases is not unproblematic, since they have to be based on a particular standard of character readings. Even if an explicit, well-defined standard is adopted, it may not have all the syllables found in the topolect. A more viable approach, which is the one most often used, is to rely on phonologically equivalent syllables in those cases where there is no standardized representation at the morpheme level. Thus one may write 朵 (MSC duǒ) for Shaanxi Dungan duò "elder" (дуә II), where the knowledge of how the shǎngshēng tone is realized in Dungan enables one to pronounce the word correctly.
When it comes to sounds and syllables that are not found in any other variety of Sinitic, the effort of exact notation collapses altogether, such as in the case of idiosyncratic phonological developments and loan words, two phenomena that are often closely related. Thus Dungan has a phoneme /r/ which is realized as a trilled [r]. Syllables with this phoneme have no unambiguous and exact representation in the Chinese writing system. One resorts, in such cases, to a conventionalized representation that approximates the foreign syllables, using 拉 (MSC lā for [ra], and so forth.
Why then provide Chinese character equivalents at all, given the imposssibility of finding consistent and exact representations for all words, not to mention all phonemes? I think that one may profitably use Chinese characters as a sort of convenient etymological shorthand, which allows one to see the putative etymological correspondences at a glance. However, this is only possible in cases where a plausible etymon can be found for the morpheme in question, and when there exists a minimally non-obscure character that is used to write it. In the present dictionary, I have given the most obvious equivalent, relegating other candidates to the notes, and abstaining altogether from providing purely phonetic or phonological renderings in Chinese characters where no standard morpheme representation exists. Of course, when faced with the task of publishing Dungan texts in Chinese characters, one is forced to choose some kind of representation for all words. That task is essentially a mixture of translation, transcription and etymological transposition, as can be seen in Hǎi Fēng's Chinese edition of Boris Riftin's collection of Dungan Folk Tales. Such an endeavour has goals that differ from those the present dictionary.
Establishing descriptively correct tones for Dungan is a major challange, and the historical analysis of tonal development is not always easy or obvious either. To some extent the descriptive problem is due to variation within Standard (Gansu) Dungan as well as within local varieties. The main problem for this dictionary, however, is that most Russian publications on Dungan do not indicate tone, and those that do (e.g. Janshansin's 1968 dictionary) do not differentiate between yīnpíng 陰平 and yángpíng 陽平 (MSC tone 1 and 2), which they conflate into "tone I". (The two píng 平 tones have merged in the final syllables of compound words, but not elsewhere). In the present dictionary, they have been differentiated as tone Ia and Ib respectively, using II for shǎngshēng 上聲 (MSC tone 3) and III for qùshēng 去聲 (MSC tone 4). If nothing else is indicated, the tones given are surface tones. Underlying tones are either given as modifiers after the dot, or optionally, as a separate formula after the surface tones, separated by a colon.
Hǎi Fēng 2003 is an important complementary source for Dungan tones, and often variants or specific interpretations are derived from the observations found there. My own field recordings from 2013 are another complementary source.
In addition to expanding the dictionary with more entries, I plan to develop the dictionary as follows:
This is a work in progress. It is hoped that this dictionary will eventually reach a form in which it can be published as a standard reference work for Dungan language. For that to happen, however, much more needs to be done. As the editor I would like to welcome all users to contact me with their questions, comments and corrections. You can get in touch via email: ivo.spira@gmail.com.
I'd like to express my gratitude to the following people (in alphabetic order) for their role in making this dictionary possible: Cháng Wénchāng 常文昌, Redouane Djamouri, Boris Gorodetsky, Hǎi Fēng 海峰, Christoph Harbsmeier, Mukhame Imazov, Taras Ivchenko, Lín Tāo 林濤, Victor H. Mair, Fatima Mashinkhaeva, Elke Rehorn, Heinz Riedlinger, Olli Salmi, Olga Zavyalova, Tatyana Zevakhina. Moreover, I am deeply grateful to all the speakers of Dungan that have provided me with spoken material during my fieldwork.