Tsalagí

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

	(Cherokee, that is.)  A bit off topic, but we've
discussed Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary before.

   During a trip to Topeka, Kansas USA for the
holidays, I decided
to return through the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and
try to
find out more about the Cherokee language and the
Sequoyah
script.

     *Beginning Cherokee* by Ruth Bradley Holmes, Betty
Sharp Smith 
Paperback 2nd edition (September 1992) Univ of Oklahoma
Pr (Trd); 
ISBN: 0806114630 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.79 x 11.02
x 8.53 
Available on Amazon. 

    I found this book at the Topeka, Kansas, public
library.  One 
immediately learns about contrasting distinctions and
other 
distinctions not shown in Sequoyah's syllabary.
    
    1)  There are long/tense vowels and short/lax
vowels in Cherokee.  
Holmes and Smith indicate long vowels with a colon. 
Thus: 
    
    a:  as a in father             a  as a in rival
    e:  as a in hate               e  as e in met
    i:  as i in pique              i  as i in pit
    o:  as o in note               o  as aw in law
    u:  as oo in fool              u  as u in pull
    v:  nasalized schwa,           v  like v: but
shorter duration 
           like French un 

    Here both the length of time one holds the vowel
and the lax/tense 
distinction apply.
    
    2) Stress accent, indicated by ' after a Cherokee
syllable:  Tsa-
la-gi' ("Cherokee")
    
    3) Sometimes the vowel is left out of the Sequoyah
Cherokee 
syllable.  One indicates this by following the
consonant with '  : hi' 
-s-g' (five).  There is a Cherokee character for a bare
"s", but 
sometimes the vowel is omitted in other characters.  
    
    4)  A glottal stop, which is indicated with a
question mark.  go?-
i (grease).  
    
    5) Cherokee does not have tone phonemes, but it
does have a pitch 
accent which occasionally makes a difference in
meaning.  There are 
five pitches: 1) Low, 2) Normal, 3) Raised, 4) High,
and 5) sliding.  
The authors simply give a few examples and otherwise do
not indicate 
pitch.  
    
    There are other things, of lesser importance. 
There is an "intrusive
h" inserted in various places, and k/g and d/t often
vary in voicing.
    
    I cannot think of a language for which the
long/short distinction 
is not a contrasting distinction, if it is present. 
However, stress 
and pitch accents often make no distinction at all.  I
suspect there 
are rules for where the stress and pitch accents go,
although it's not 
obvious to me.  
    
    The library at Muskogee actually had more material
on the Cherokee 
language than the one at Tahlequah.  Most of the
dictionaries simply 
listed the English word, the Cherokee syllabic
characters, and a 
transliteration into Latin characters without any of
the distinctions 
above noted.  One dictionary did have marks for the
vowel lengths.  
    
    One dictionary had further useful information:
    
    "Cherokee English Language Reference" by Agnes
Spade Cower et al. 
c1995 Cross-Cultural Consultants, Heritage Printing,
Tahlequah, OK.
    
    This had a syllabary table showing which of the
otherwise 
unwritten distinctions could be contained in a Cherokee
syllabic 
character.  For instance, the character [gwu] has none
of the extra 
distinctions; the character [jo] can have the glottal
stop [jo?].  
Unfortunately, the words shown in this table usually
are not to 
be found in Holmes and Smith; it must be a different
dialect.

   You can find other materials for learning Cherokee
at:

Cherokee Messenger -Cherokee Language and Culture
http://www.powersource.com/cherokee/lang.html

   At
The Society for the Study of the Indigenous
Languages of the Americas

http://206.245.174.70/default.asp

under "Book Announcements" I found:


#434Munro, Pamela (editor). Cherokee Papers from UCLA.
UCLA Occasional
Papers in Linguistics 16, 1996. $8.
Abstract: Contains: Richard Wright, "Tone and Accent in
Oklahoma Cherokee"; Edward S.
Flemming, "Laryngeal Metathesis and Vowel Deletion in
Cherokee"; Pamela Munro, "The
Cherokee Laryngeal Alternation Rule"; Barbara
Blankenship, "Classificatory Verbs in
Cherokee"; Michael Dukes, "Animacy and Agreement in
Cherokee"; Robert S. Williams,
"Cherokee Possession and the Status of -jeeli ";
Filippo Beghelli, "Cherokee Clause
Structure"; and Brian Potter, "Cherokee Agentive
Nominalizations."


Dennis