Cherokee syllabary

Early history

Around 1809, impressed by the "talking leaves" of European written languages, Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. After attempting to create a character for each word, Sequoyah realized this would be too difficult and eventually created characters to represent syllables. He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created.

After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society.^[4] By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography.^[5]

Some of Sequoyah's most learned contemporaries immediately understood that the syllabary was a great invention. For example, when Albert Gallatin, a politician and trained linguist, saw a copy of Sequoyah's syllabary, he believed it was superior to the English alphabet in that literacy could be easily achieved for Cherokee at a time when only one-third of English-speaking people achieved the same goal.^[6] He recognized that even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26 for English, the Cherokee could read immediately after learning all the symbols. The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve.^[7]

In 1828, the order of the characters in a chart and the shapes of the characters were modified by Cherokee author and editor Elias Boudinot to adapt the syllabary to printing presses.^[8] The 86th character was dropped entirely.^[9] Following these changes, the syllabary was adopted by the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, later Cherokee Advocate, followed by the Cherokee Messenger, a bilingual paper printed in Indian Territory in the mid-19th century.^[10]

In 1834, Worcester made changes to several characters in order to improve the readability of Cherokee text. Most notably, he inverted the do character (Ꮩ) so that it could not be confused with the go character (Ꭺ).^[11] Otherwise, the characters remained remarkably invariant until the advent of new typesetting technologies in the 20th century.^[12]

Later developments

In the 1960s, the Cherokee Phoenix Press began publishing literature in the Cherokee syllabary, including the Cherokee Singing Book.^[13] A Cherokee syllabary typewriter ball was developed for the IBM Selectric in the late 1970s. Computer fonts greatly expanded Cherokee writers' ability to publish in Cherokee. In 2010, a Cherokee keyboard cover was developed by Roy Boney, Jr. and Joseph Erb, facilitating more rapid typing in Cherokee. The keyboard cover is now used by students in the Cherokee Nation Immersion School, where all coursework is written in syllabary.^[8]

In August 2010, the Oconaluftee Institute for Cultural Arts in Cherokee, North Carolina, acquired a letterpress and had the Cherokee syllabary recast to begin printing one-of-a-kind fine art books and prints in syllabary.^[14] Artists Jeff Marley and Frank Brannon completed a collaborative project on October 19, 2013, in which they printed using Cherokee syllabary type from Southwestern Community College in the print shop at New Echota. This was the first time syllabary type has been used at New Echota since 1835.^[15]

The syllabary is finding increasingly diverse usage today, from books, newspapers, and websites to the street signs of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and Cherokee, North Carolina. An increasing corpus of children's literature is printed in Cherokee to meet the needs of students in Cherokee language immersion schools in Oklahoma and North Carolina.^[16]

Possible influence on Liberian Vai syllabary

In the 1960s, evidence emerged suggesting that the Cherokee syllabary of North America provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary in Liberia.^[17] The Vai syllabary emerged about 1832/33. This was at a time when American missionaries were working to use the Cherokee syllabary as a model for writing Liberian languages.^[18] Another link appears to have been Cherokee who emigrated to Liberia after the invention of the Cherokee syllabary (which in its early years spread rapidly among the Cherokee) but before the inventions of the Vai syllabary. One such man, Austin Curtis, married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. It is perhaps not coincidence that the "inscription on a house" that drew the world's attention to the existence of the Vai script was in fact on the home of Curtis, a Cherokee.^[19] There also appears to be a connection between an early form of written Bassa and the earlier Cherokee syllabary.

Detailed considerations

The phonetic values of these characters do not equate directly to those represented by the letters of the Latin script. Some characters represent two distinct phonetic values (actually heard as different syllables), while others may represent multiple variations of the same syllable.^[27] Not all phonemic distinctions of the spoken language are represented:

• Voiced consonants are generally not distinguished from their non-voiced counterpart. For example, while /d/ + vowel syllables are mostly differentiated from /t/ + vowel by use of different glyphs, syllables beginning with /ɡw/ are all conflated with those beginning with /kw/.
• Long vowels are not distinguished from short vowels. However, in more recent technical literature, length of vowels can actually be indicated using a colon, and other disambiguation methods for consonants have been suggested.
• Syllables ending in vowels, h, or a glottal stop are not differentiated. For example, the single symbol Ꮡ is used to represent both suú as in suúdáli, meaning "six" (ᏑᏓᎵ), and súh as in súhdi, meaning "fishhook" (ᏑᏗ).
• There is no regular rule for representing consonant clusters. When consonants other than s, h, or glottal stop arise in clusters with other consonants, a vowel must be inserted, chosen either arbitrarily or for etymological reasons (reflecting an underlying etymological vowel, see vowel deletion for instance). For example, ᏧᎾᏍᏗ (tsu-na-s-di) represents the word juunsdi̋, meaning "small (pl.), babies". The consonant cluster ns is broken down by insertion of the vowel a, and is spelled as ᎾᏍ /nas/. The vowel is etymological as juunsdi̋ is composed of the morphemes di-uunii-asdii̋ʔi, where a is part of the root. The vowel is included in the transliteration, but is not pronounced.
• Tones are not marked in the script.

As with some other writing systems, proficient speakers can distinguish words by context.

If a labial plosive appears in a borrowed word or name, it is written using the qu row. This /kw/ ~ /p/ correspondence is a known linguistic phenomenon that exists elsewhere (cf. P-Celtic, Osco-Umbrian). The l and tl rows are similarly used for borrowings containing r or tr/dr, respectively, and s (including within ts) can represent /s/, /ʃ/, /z/, or /ʒ/, as indicated in the above word juunsdi̋.

Transliteration issues

Some Cherokee words pose a problem for transliteration software because they contain adjacent pairs of single letter symbols that (without special provisions) would be combined when doing the back-conversion from Latin script to Cherokee. Here are a few examples:

For these examples, the back conversion is likely to join s-a as sa or s-i as si, as the consonant s can be written either with its own isolated glyph, or combined with a following vowel -- but the vowel itself doesn't require being attached to a consonant. One solution is to use a middle dot to separate the two,^[28] While some use an apostrophe instead, apostrophes are also used to represent a glottal stop in Cherokee.^[29]

Other Cherokee words contain character pairs that entail overlapping transliteration sequences. For example:

• ᏀᎾ transliterates as nahna, yet so does ᎾᎿ. The former is nah-na, the latter is na-hna.
• ᎤᏡᏀᎠ transliterates as utlunaha, yet so does ᎤᏡᎾᎭ. The former is u-tlu-nah-a, the latter is u-tlu-na-ha.

If the Latin script is parsed from left to right, longest match first, then without special provisions, the back conversion would be wrong for the latter. There are several similar examples involving these character combinations: nahe nahi naho nahu nahv.

A further problem encountered in transliterating Cherokee is that there are some pairs of different Cherokee words that transliterate to the same word in the Latin script. For example:

• ᎠᏍᎡᏃ and ᎠᏎᏃ both transliterate to aseno
• ᎨᏍᎥᎢ and ᎨᏒᎢ both transliterate to gesvi

Without special provision, a round trip conversion may change ᎠᏍᎡᏃ to ᎠᏎᏃ and change ᎨᏍᎥᎢ to ᎨᏒᎢ.

Blocks

The first Unicode block for Cherokee is U+13A0–U+13FF. It contains all 86 uppercase letters, together with six lowercase letters:

The Cherokee Supplement block is U+AB70–U+ABBF. It contains the remaining 80 lowercase letters.

Fonts

A single Cherokee Unicode font, Plantagenet Cherokee, is supplied with macOS, version 10.3 (Panther) and later. Windows Vista also includes a Cherokee font. Windows 10 replaced Plantagenet Cherokee with Gadugi after the Cherokee language term for "working together".^[37]

Several free Cherokee fonts are available including Digohweli, Donisiladv, and Noto Sans Cherokee. Some pan-Unicode fonts, such as Code2000, Everson Mono, and GNU FreeFont, include Cherokee characters. A commercial font, Phoreus Cherokee, published by TypeCulture, includes multiple weights and styles.^[38]