Limbu-English Dictionary of the Mewa Khola Dialect with
Author: Boyd Michailovsky
Category: Dictionary   
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The Book

The dictionary covers the colloquial, spoken language. It is certainly
not complete, but it is comparable in scope to existing bilingual Limbu-
English dictionaries apart from the completed but still unpublished work
of Bairagi Kainla et al., which is in a class by itself. Most of the material,
insofar as it is accurate, probably applies to most Limbu dialects. The
English-Limbu section is an index, not an English-Limbu dictionary.
Two aspects of the dictionary may interest specialized readers in
particular. First, it provides data on the peculiarities of the Maiwa-Mewa
dialect of Limbu. The material is restricted to this dialect in the interest of
coherence. Second, it illustrates a relatively “strong” or restrictive
approach to Limbu phonology, which I will describe in more detail
elsewhere, and which seeks to define precisely the contexts in which
various traits such as voicing, gemination, vowel length, and
glottalization need to be taken into account. It is hoped that students of
Limbu will evaluate this analysis against their own data (and vice-versa).
Certain areas which a dictionary might reasonably be expected to
cover lie outside the scope of the present work. These include learned or
literary vocabulary and Limbu orthography, which were unknown in the
Maiwa-Mewa area at the time of the study, and most ritual formulas.