An Uyghur-English Dictionary

An Uyghur-English Dictionaryby Henry G. Schwarz: As the initial foundation of my dictionary I chose the Uyg̃urçä-xänzuçä lug̃ät which, in its manuscript form and after 1982 in published form, had been my steady companion in Xinjiang. If I ever considered doing nothing more than translating it into English, I rejected this option almost from the start. For one thing, I often found the dictionary to be inaccurate in many respects, both large and small. More importantly, a direct translation from Uyghur to English reduces the number and the degree of infelicities that smudge the interface between two languages. My course of action thus lay before me: after an initial translation of the Uyg̃urçä-xänzuçä lug̃ät into English, a task completed by the time my Tokyo apartment had turned pleasantly warm in the spring of 1985, I went to work to hunt down every Uyghur word, phrase, sentence, and saying in a large number of Uyghur sources published between 1954 and 1985. If I could not find it, I dropped it. If I could not verify a usage contained in the Chinese dictionary, I dropped it. On the other hand, if I could verify a usage but not in identical language, I kept the language used in the Chinese dictionary. If I discovered a new word, phrase, or saying, I added it to my collection. This stage of my labors took most of my spare time between March 1985 and the summer of 1991.