David Solnit Southern Hunan Province, China Anita Huang 1982-05-22 The Biao Min data housed on the E-MELD site includes over 3,000 lexical items. The data includes both root and compound words, complete with morphological breakdown and tone variation. The information for each item also includes grammatical relations, feature values, semantic fields, tone, and example sentences. The glosses (which are in both English and Chinese) include extensive information about any language borrowings. The data originated from notecards collected by David Solnit, and was then interpreted and put into a database structure by Anita Huang. Biao Min is a Mienic language of southern China from the Hmong-Mien family. It is spoken by a rapidly shrinking population of approximately 21,000 speakers, most of whom are bilingual with the dominant language. It is an isolating language, and the morphology is minimal, consisting only of a dual/plural distinction in personal pronouns, complex serial verb constructions, and a set of numeral classifiers. Its phonology, however, is very complex: there are 6 distinctive tones, which show contrasts with both pitch and phonation types. The data consist of lexical lists and texts, as well as extensive annotations on cognates in other Hmong-Mien languages, and even on the Proto-Hmongic forms to which they correspond. Where a word is a loanword from Chinese, the Chinese character is also provided, thus allowing us to test the database's multinational character display. Apart from passing mentions in Chinese, there is only 1 extant descriptive article about Biao Min, written by our data-provider, Prof. David Solnit of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project at the University of California at Berkeley. text/xml http://www.emeld.org/BM/BMProject.xml Biao Min English The LINGUIST List http://www.linguistlist.org Biao Min Lexicon http://www.emeld.org/BM/LexiconMD.xml http://www.emeld.org/BM/BMProject.xml Biao Min Biao Min Data