ᏣᎳᎩ :: cherokee syllabary charts i created :: sound :: shape :: abc song
i made a cherokee language version of the ABC song with the corresponding cherokee syllable phonetic sounds for the phoenician characters + look-a-likes shared in the english language. ABC is pronounced go, yv, dli... there are 60 more cherokee characters. cherokee has 86 characters that are syllables, rather than letters.
each syllable has a meaning, so putting syllables together conveys a lot of information. it's a descriptive language + 1 multi-syllable word can contain as much information as a long english sentence. cherokee also has no capitals like english does. so each syllable sound has only 1 character to represent it + there's no punctuation.
the cherokee language has been spoken for many thousands of years.
cherokee syllable characters were created almost 200 years ago: 1820.
there were originally over 100 syllable characters in an ink + quill cursive style.
a few years later the cherokee nation got a printing press + had to modify the complicated shapes + edit down the amount of characters. a syllabary chart was published in the cherokee nation newspaper + has been used ever since.
even though cherokee was the 1st native american language included on apple macs + iphones, microsoft windows, + google chrome browsers,+ keyboards, cherokee is a dying language. older speakers are literally dying + not being replaced fast enough. this is considered a hard language to learn, so i split the old cherokee syllabary chart into 2 new charts: 1 organized by sound + the other organized by shape.
to make the "by Shape" chart, i took my new "by Sound" chart + rearranged the syllables by similar shapes. since each syllable character now has their consonant + vowel with them, you can memorize them in visual order too. i also put each character into it's own space, so i added a column to make room. it was like solving a puzzle.
fluent native speakers even have trouble distinguishing some syllable characters.
i think that's because some of the shapes should be changed to be more distinct;
there are too many similar shapes with tiny variations, rotations or mirror images.
the written language could be the cause of losing (or saving) the spoken language.
until we get new characters, i hope my new charts help cherokee language learners.
if you want to learn cherokee language, there are free online classes at cherokee.org