I grew up in places with names like “Winnetka” and “Sewickley,” spellings no doubt based on mangled transliterations
of old, even ancient Native American words. I vaguely recall that Sewickley meant “sweet water,” but no one seemed sure.
How many cities, mountains and rivers in China, I wondered, hide their non-Han origins?
According to China’s Ministry of Education (数据库), several minority language projects underway during the current 12th Five-year Plan (2011-15) have been appraised and approved by experts. They are:
Undertaken by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (中国社会科学院民族学与人类学研究所), applications for these databases include promotion of minority language education, language engineering research, and in the case of the Tibetan database, text annotation and machine translation.
