Foreword

This dictionary is dedicated to my ex-girlfriend, ie Utung, from Kampung Radtak, Kudat. We've broke up for quite a while now, and she's got another boyfriend, but my feelings for her is still as strong as it used to be. She's my motivation for learning the Rungus language (one of the languages used in Sabah), and I feel closer to her by speaking Rungus (okay, it's pretty broken, but I'm still learning lol).

Anyway, before you start, here is a little something and some important pointers about the language and the dictionary:

1. The language
Momogun (or commonly known as Rungus) is a language of the Rungus people, who reside in the North-most point of Sabah. In terms of words, it is close to Malay and Tagalog, with the existence of a root word, and you add a suffix or prefix or both to the root word to describe a situation. Examples of commonly used prefixes are no~ (past tense) and ko~ (past tense, but just passed), while the most common suffix is ~on (I don't know how to explain this though).

In terms of grammar, it varies a lot from other languages. It's grammar is like that of to Dusun and Kadazan (other tribal languages in Sabah). I don't really know how to explain it, but if you want to pick up Rungus, you cannot achieve that by memorizing words. You'll have to learn how to apply it in a sentence. That's why in this dictionary, I've included some example sentences.


2. How to use the dictionary
Ok, so I don't have a fancy search function like the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary website, and neither do I have a search function in this site, so it's pretty straightforward (okay, maybe it's not that user friendly). You just look for the letter of the word you want to kook up, and click on it, and use the search function (Ctrl+F). Do note that the letters are all for Rungus words. So if you want to look up an English word, you can't do that without knowing what it is called in Rungus (I'll try to come up with something to overcome this).

The explanations in this dictionary comes in 3 languages: English, Malay and Chinese (Mandarin). When you look up a word, you'll come across something like this:

Aso This is the Rungus word
Pronoun This is where you see what type of word it is: noun, verb etc.
Eng: None / Do not have (something)
Mal: Tiada
Chi: 没有 (mei2 you3) The letters in the brackets are the pinyin, see below.
Usage: This is where see how the word is applied
Run: Aso nunu-nunu.
Eng: Nothing at all.
Mal: Tiada apa-apa.
Chi: 没什么

Note: The words in red are explanation notes. For some words which I am not sure how to use, I will omit the usage part.

3. Pronunciation
Let's move on to the next pointer: Pronouncing Rungus words.
Basically, there are some phoenetics which don't exist in Momogun. One of the few I can think of right not is the letter "L". A guy who started a website called the Momogunology Research Centre says that words should be spelled as "LZ". For instance, the word house is commonly spelled as "valai", so people would usually pronounce it as "ˈvæˈlaɪ" (va - lai), but the actual pronunciation should be "va-lzai" (Don't know the phonetics for this, pronunciation in Rungus is a bit complicated). So words with the letter "L" are pronounced like there is a letter "Z" after the "L" (unless the letter "L" is at the end of the word). But I'll be omitting the letter "Z", because beginners might end up reading the word like this: "Val-Zai" instead of "Va-Lzai".
Another non-existent phonetic is "ˈw", which is the sound of the letter "W". It is instead replaced by the sound of the letter "V". I think there are still others, but I'll add in when I come across them.

Next up is the Chinese pronunciation. I've used the standard pinyin, so don't pronounce the romanizations with English pronunciation. The numbers at the side of the letters are an indication of the tone of the words. In Chinese, there are 5 tones (1st to 4th tone, and a light tone). I'll label the 1st tone as 1, 2nd tone as 2, and it goes on til the 5th tone, which is the "light tone". For light tones, I would omit the number (since there is no symbol for light tones in pinyin) so there's no number 5.


4. Note: I'm just a beginner, and there are a lot of things I don't quite really understand, so there might be mistakes or somethings might not be that accurate. Do inform me if you see any inaccurate information. Thanks :)