“Talking Leaves”–The Cherokee Alphabet

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The story behind the Cherokee alphabet is one of the most amazing to be found in the history of the written word, one that underscores the importance of writing and the preservation of language in protecting minority cultures.

Let’s begin with a single fact: the Cherokee alphabet is the only instance of an illiterate people creating its own writing system without help or encouragement from an outside culture. The creator of this alphabet (actually, a syllabary) for the Cherokees was himself a Cherokee acting on his own initiative. His name was Sequoyah, and at the time he began his great work, he was illiterate. Wow!!

And before moving on, let’s note another fact: Cherokee is the only Southern Iroquoian language that is still spoken.

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Sequoyah

Here is Sequoyah’s story, which is mostly the story of how he created his syllabary. Born around 1770 near present-day Knoxville, Tennessee, Sequoyah was the son of a Cherokee mother, Wut-teh, and a white father, Nathaniel Gist, who was a commissioned officer in the Continental Army. He had an English name, George Gist, and was a silversmith by trade, which he practiced in Willstown, Alabama. He fought at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend as part of the Cherokee Regiment.

As was common among the Cherokee, Sequoyah had multiple wives.

Up to his middle years, Sequoyah seems to have lived a typical life for a Cherokee of his time and place; in 1809, partly out of frustration that he could not write or read letters, partly out of admiration for the English alphabet (which the Cherokees called “talking leaves”), Sequoyah began the mammoth work of creating a writing system for the Cherokee language.

At first, he tried to create a set of ideograms to represent the language; but after a year, he realized that this was not practicable. He next turned to the creation of a syllabary, and by around 1820 had completed his writing system, which contained 86 characters. During this time, as is not uncommon with the obsessed inventor, he neglected his duties, leaving his fields unplanted, and endured the destruction of his early work by one of his wives.

Initial efforts at persuading the Cherokees to adopt his system were met with suspicion and accusations of sorcery, but Sequoyah persevered (the first person to learn the new writing system was his daughter), and by 1825, the Cherokee Nation had officially adopted the syllabary. The results were impressive: a Cherokee, Atsee, translated the Gospel of John into Cherokee; a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, adopted the script in 1828; and before long, the literacy rate among the Cherokee exceeded that of the surrounding white population. In 1828, Sequoyah himself received a silver medal from the Cherokee Nation in honor of his work.

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Though the the syllabary has clearly been critical to the survival of the Cherokee language through the many adversities that the Cherokees have endured since its invention (most notably, the Trail of Tears), what may be most remarkable about the Cherokee writing system is the detailed information we have about its creator. The talents behind the Native American craft tradition, to my eye, are evident in the beauty of the Cherokee characters; if I had to pick a favorite, it would be the sign for “wo,” an elegant and compact letterform. We should also not overlook the contribution of the English and Greek letters that Sequoyah adopted for his script. Their angular, geometric form creates an interesting tension when juxtaposed against the sinuous forms that Sequoyah seemed to prefer. Here we have something strange and unparalleled: an American alphabet, one that reflects our roots in both European and Native American history. We can only be thankful that Sequoyah’s syllabary is still in use today; we can only hope that his script’s survival portends new fusions and creations as our culture continues to evolve.

RT

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Bottom Image: Author, Kaldari; All images: WikiCommons, Public Domain.

29 Faces in May; A rare elf indeed

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Poetry is a form of magic, as is its close cousin, drawing. And what is magic, if not the gift outright? Here, by way of proof, is a portrait by someone whose work can take us someplace marvelous…  RT

ps. i wish there were an alphabet that had this quality of drawing the viewer in…

29 Faces in May; A rare elf indeed.

Hangul, Literacy, and Culture–What an Alphabet Can Do For You

King Sejong the Great

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I might be skipping ahead a bit folks, but I think it’s time to introduce you to what many people consider to be the world’s most effective alphabet: Hangul.

But before I launch into a description of this alphabet’s extraordinary history and many virtues, a word of warning is in order for English speakers. Hangul was designed for speakers of Korean, a tonal language situated pretty much at the opposite end of the language spectrum from English. What makes Hangul important for the English-speaking world is 1) the story of its creation; 2) its approach to representing the sounds of language; and 3) the hope that its logical design and gradual success might serve as a model in creating an alphabet that can be used to write the major world languages, in particular, English, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Russian.

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1) History. Let’s start with the story of Hangul’s creation. King Sejong (r. 1418-1450) faced a not-unfamiliar situation in East Asia: an extremely low literacy rate resulting from the use of the Hanja, the Chinese character set, which arrived with Buddhism in Korea in the 7th century A.D. Sejong decided to create an alphabet for writing Korean that anyone could learn, with the goals of making literacy universal and strengthening Korea’s cultural identity. Overcoming opposition from court officials who did not want to lose the power their literacy gave them, the king summoned his Hall of Worthies–the eminent scholars of his time–and together the king and Hall devised the twenty-eight letters of the new alphabet, publishing the definitive text on Hangul in 1446.

The alphabet was an immediate success, allowing the poorly educated and women to read and write for the first time. But, needless to say, this social revolution prompted a backlash after Sejong’s death in 1450. Confucian scholars fought fiercely to retain the privileges their monopoly on writing had given them, and in 1504, the use of Hangul was forbidden by royal decree. The Hanja were reinstated as the sole legitimate writing system.

But at this point something remarkable happened: in defiance of the official ban, the use of Hangul among the educated class flourished. Starting in the late 1500′s, two entirely new genres of poetry, gasa and sijo, developed, and the novel written in Hangul became a major literary form. Although the use of Hangul among ordinary people disappeared, the literacy rate may nonetheless have increased, since Hangul is extremely easy to learn.

Finally, in the late 19th century, Hangul was reinstated for official use, and during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), the use of Hangul was encouraged as a means of separating Korea from Chinese influence. Although Japanese became the official language, a mixed Hangul-Hanja script was taught in the colonial school system; education, moreover, was mandatory, and for the first time the use of Hangul letters became universal in Korea.

Soon after independence in 1945, an official Hangul orthography was adopted, and today in both Koreas Hangul has replaced the Hanja as the common writing system.

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2) The Hangul Alphabet. Hold onto your hats, folks: the alphabet that King Sejong and his Hall of Worthies created is remarkable by any standard. In its current form, Hangul has 24 letters, of which 14 are consonants and 10 vowels.

a) Hangul is a partially featural alphabet; that is, the shapes of its letters (or letterforms) reflect the sounds they represent. It is the only featural script in widespread use.

b) Consonants are classified by the vocal organ that produces them: molar (velar), tongue (coronal), lip (bilabial), incisor (sibilant), throat (guttural), and light lip (labiodental). The letterform of each of these classes is based on a shape that is meant to resemble the vocal organ involved, with additional strokes being added to indicate the particular letter’s modification(s) from the model/basic shape.

Other consonant’ featural characteristics include a vertical top stroke over a letter to indicate a plain stop; the nonstops lack the stroke.

c) Sejong and his scholars designed the letterforms of Hangul vowels themselves; they are based on just three symbols: a dot (representing the sun), a horizontal stroke (representing the earth), and a vertical stroke (representing man). Vowel harmony was an important consideration in the design of the vowels, though VH is not as important in spoken Korean as it was during Sejong’s period.

d) Letters in Hangul that are pronounced as a syllable are not written consecutively, but are rather grouped together in blocks. The syllable blocks have three advantages: the letters within them are arranged in the block in an order reflecting the sequence of sounds in the syllable;  the blocks save space in writing and printing; and the blocks are beautiful.

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Of course, there’s more to the alphabet than the brief description above covers; to get an better idea of the script, study this chart of jamo, or Hangul letters:

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3) Modeling a Future Universal Alphabet on Hangul. A writing reform based on the development of Hangul would go far towards  increasing literacy and bringing cultures across the globe closer together. Here are some of the Hangul principles that one might use to create this alphabet:

a) A strict adherence to phonetic letters;

b) A letterform design that reflects that vocal organs used in producing the sound;

c) A uniform method of marking the same kind of modification to a class’s basic letterform;

d) A logical arrangement of the letters by class; and

e) The continued use of current alphabets until their use become burdensome.

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Photos: Top: Public Statue of King Sejong in Seoul, Korea. Author: David Hepworth. WikiCmns. CC 2.0 Generic. Bottom: Papers printed with Hangul letters. Author: jared. WikiCmns. CC 2.0 Generic.

Shorthand–Fluency and Legibility

Sample of Pitman Shorthand

Although shorthand can refer to any writing system intended to reduce the time and effort involved in writing, in modern times, the term has applied to two specific systems: Pitman Shorthand, introduced in 1837 by Sir Issac Pitman, and Gregg Shorthand, published in 1888 by John Robert Gregg. A more recent system, Teeline Shorthand, introduced in 1970, has become popular in the United Kingdom.

Readers should beware: shorthand has suffered from association with 20th-Century secretarial work. These aids to writing are neither simple nor easy to master. Some writing systems, such as the Chinese characters, practically cry out for an abbreviated and relatively straightforward version–and in fact such a shorthand has been used in China for centuries. In Europe, the first shorthand was created in the 16th Century, and both Sir Issac Newton and Samuel Pepys used shorthand when composing.

Perhaps nowhere else can we see as clearly as in shorthand the attempt to create writing that is both practical and beautiful. Specifically: twenty words per minute is the average speed for writing; when using shorthand, speeds in excess of 280 wpm have been recorded. And Gregg Shorthand, for instance, has a graceful, appealing visual quality often missing from alphabet-based writing.

How, we might wonder, does shorthand achieve such improvements in speed and visual quality? Simplified spelling, dropped vowels, distinctions between stroke-length and thickness, and phonemic orthography are some of the techniques employed. And individual stenographers (people whose use shorthand) often introduce specific improvements and accommodations into their writing method.

In other words, shorthand allows personalized writing–which can lead to problems in reading. Some shorthands address this problem by using the standard alphabet for the language they record, a solution that also makes the system easier to learn. But alphabet and abjad-based shorthands are inevitably more difficult to write, reducing compositional speed. That is the nub of the problem with shorthand (or any writing system): the trade-offs between speed, fluency, and legibility. Letterforms that are more difficult to write are usually easier to read.

The final point to make when talking about alternative or simplified writing systems: improvements in composition, whether in writing or in ease of reading, result from better instruction. Having both the traditional writing system and an alternative, phonetic shorthand or alphabet at our disposal will increase the intelligence and ease with which we transcribe information, argument, and feeling.

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Image: Pitman-2000 Example; WikiCommons; Public Domain

Is Cursive Obsolete?

 

Some worthwhile thoughts from a teacher in Seattle. Enjoy!   RT

Is Cursive Obsolete?.

Mighty Mice Redux–the IPA for English Speakers

 

Council of Mice, Hokusai, 18th century

The most amazing thing about language may not be its diversity of sound; it may be its precision. The multiplicity of sounds and meanings that we produce are made possible by a skill that we start learning the day we are born and that continues to mature thoughout life.

I enjoy poking fun at linguistics, its practitioners, and the terms they invent, but, to be fair, the subject is vast and not without its political ramifications. For the most part, it is not lack of knowledge or ideas that holds back the improvement of language skills, but the widespread misconception that language skills are not important (and that anyone can master them easily).

And here, at least, is one way to make the task of mastering the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) easier: an IPA chart for English speakers. (the Dragons of Grammar strike again!) Enjoy learning more about the various critters and crawlies that make up human speech!

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IPA Chart for English Speakers

(Words in small capitals are the standard lexical sets. Words in the lexical sets bath and cloth are given two transcriptions, respectively one with /ɑː/ and one with /æ/, and with /ɒ/ and /ɔː/).

Consonants IPA Examples b buy, cab d die, cad ð thy, breathe, father dʒ giant, badge, jam f phi, caff, fan ɡ (ɡ)[1] guy, bag h high, ahead j yes, yacht k sky, crack l lie, sly, gal m my, smile, cam n nigh, snide, can ŋ sang, sink, singer ŋɡ finger, anger θ thigh, math p pie, spy, cap r rye, try, very[2] s sigh, mass ʃ shy, cash, emotion t tie, sty, cat, atom tʃ China, catch v vie, have w wye, swine hw why[3] z xi, zoo, has ʒ pleasure, vision, beige[4] Marginal consonants x ugh, loch, Chanukah[5] ʔ uh-oh /ˈʌʔoʊ/

Vowels IPA Full vowels … followed by R[6][7] ɑː palm, baht, father, bra ɑr start, bard, barn, snarl, star (also /ɑːr./) ɒ lot, pod, song, doll[8] ɒr moral, forage æ trap, pad, shall, ban ær barrow, marry aɪ price, ride, file, fine, pie[9] aɪər fire (/aɪr./)[7] aʊ mouth, loud, foul, down, how aʊər hour (/aʊr./)[7] ɛ dress, bed, fell, men[10] ɛr error, merry[11] eɪ face, made, fail, vein, pay ɛər square, scared, scarce, cairn, Mary (/eɪr./)[12][7] ɪ kit, lid, fill, bin ɪr mirror, Sirius iː fleece, seed, feel, mean, sea ɪər near, beard, fierce, serious (/iːr./) ɔː thought, Maud, dawn, fall, straw[13] ɔr north, born, for, aural (/ɔːr./) ɔɪ choice, void, foil, coin, boy ɔɪər loir, coir (/ɔɪr./)[7] oʊ goat, code, foal, bone, go[14] ɔər force, boar, more, oral (/oʊr./)[15] ʊ foot, good, full, woman ʊr courier uː goose, food, fool, soon, chew ʊər boor, moor, tourist (/uːr./)[16] juː cued, cute, mule, tune, queue[17] jʊər cure ʌ strut, mud, dull, gun[18] ʌr borough, hurry ɜr nurse, word, girl, fern, furry (/ɝː/)[19] Reduced vowels ə Rosa’s, a mission, comma ər letter, perform (also /ɚ/)[19] ɨ roses, emission[20] (either ɪ or ə) ən button ɵ omission[21] (either oʊ or ə) əm rhythm ʉ beautiful, curriculum ([jʉ])[22] (either ʊ or ə) əl bottle i happy, serious[23] (either ɪ or iː) ᵊ, ⁱ (vowel is frequently dropped: nasturtium)   Stress Syllabification IPA Examples IPA Examples ˈ intonation /ˌɪntɵˈneɪʃən/,[24] battleship /ˈbætəlʃɪp/[25] . shellfish /ˈʃɛl.fɪʃ/, selfish /ˈsɛlf.ɨʃ/ nitrate /ˈnaɪ.treɪt/, night-rate /ˈnaɪt.reɪt/ hire /ˈhaɪər/, higher /ˈhaɪ.ər/ moai /ˈmoʊ.aɪ/, Windhoek /ˈvɪnt.hʊk/ Vancouveria /væn.kuːˈvɪəriə/[26] ˌ

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Mice Bury the Cat, Russian, 18th century

Both images: WikiCmns, Public Domain;

Chart: WikiP, CC3.0, Author: Wikipedia: IPA for English

Varmints! What to Do With Squigglies and Squeakies

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The other night, while working on one of my midnight-inspired posts, I heard mice squeaking and eeaking away in the kitchen (we feed our cat too well to get rid of them). I wondered what they were saying, and I suddenly was reminded of the dilemma presented by pronunciation marks–accents, grave or acute; carons; umlauts; hooks; horns; and rings. And, even worse, what about all those weird letters, turned upside down, with lines through them, superscripted (and turned upside down!), the capital “A” that’s missing its middle stroke, and that “n” with a hang nail! Varmints! Every single one–we’re just going to have to hire a literary cat and chase them all back to whatever hidey hole they came from…

So, it’s a beautiful morning, and I’m being silly…

1) The formal name for pronunciation marks in English is diacritics. You will be happy to recall from your reading that English has followed our good friend’s advice and chased out nearly all the diacritics from its orthography. The single exception of any note is the accent breve (as in è): cafè, resumè, soufflè (and note that these examples are loan-words from French).

But, alas and alack, other languages have not been so frugal in their use of diacritics, and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) makes use of them all the time–this may have something to do with the fact that people are capable of producing a virtually unlimited variety of sounds. Even the range of sounds included in the world’s 250 or so languages is enormous. By abandoning diacritics, English speakers (and Americans in particular) have made it very difficult to decipher our speech sounds from written text.

2) From an entirely sober perspective, diacritics may not be the only way to remedy the semi-phonetic difficulties of the Roman Alphabet. We could adopt the Shaw Script (or any of the other English alphabets designed to be fully phonetic), which adopts the one-sound-one-letter principle. Whether a diacritic- or letterform-based phonetic reform of our current alphabet would be easier to read and learn is unclear. And which would be easier to implement on keyboards, signs, and so forth?

3) Since the IPA is one of the Rag Tree’s themes, and to help in the project of getting people from different countries to understand one another, I’m going to include a list of writing’s squiggles and squeaks. (Reader, beware: diacritics really do act like mice; they are tricky, having different uses in different languages–or within a language. I give a simplified explanation of a common usage in a language familiar to English speakers.)

DIACRITICS

• accent marks (thus called because the acute, the grave and the circumflex accent were originally used to indicate different types of pitch accents, in the polytonic orthography of Greek)
  • ( ´ ) acute accent; Spn, vwl is to be stressed
  • ( ˋ ) grave accent; Eng, indicates vwl is to be spoken
  • ( ˆ ) circumflex accent (Slovak vokáň)
  • ( ˇ ) caron, inverted circumflex, (Czech háček, Slovak mäkčeň, Slovene strešica, Lakota ičášleče)
  • ( ˝ ) double acute accent
  • (  ̏ ) double grave accent
• dots
  • ( ˙ ), ( . ) dot (Indic anusvara)
  • (  ̣ ) a dot below is used in Rheinische Dokumenta
  • ( · ) Interpunct
  • tittle, the dot used by default in the modern lowercase form of the Latin letters “i” and “j”
  • ( ¨ ) trema, diaeresis; Frn, vwl is to be spoken
  • ( ː ) colon, used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to mark long vowels.
• ring
  • ( ˚ ) ring (Swed kål); ovr “a”, lengthens the vwl

  

• vertical line
  • (  ̩ ) a vertical line below is used in Rheinische Dokumenta as a schwa mark
• macron or horizontal line
  • ( ¯ ) macron (Hawaiian kahakō, Māori tohutō)
  • ( ˍ ) macron below
• overlays
  • ( | ) bar through the basic letter
  • ( / ) slash through the basic letter
  • ( – ) stroke through the basic letter
• curves
  • ( ˘ ) breve
  • sicilicus, a palaeographic diacritic similar to a caron or breve
  • ( ˜ ) tilde; Spn, indicates an omitted “n” follows
  • (  ҃ ) titlo
• curls above
  • ( ’ ) apostrophe
  • (  ̉ ) hook (Vietnamese dấu hỏi)
  • (  ̛ ) horn (Vietnamese dấu móc)
• curls below
  • ( , ) comma
  • ( ¸ ) cedilla
  • ( ˛ ) ogonek
• double marks (over or under two base characters)
  • (  ͝  ) double breve
  • (  ͡  ) ligature tie
  • (  ᷍  ) double circumflex
  • (  ͞  ) double macron
  • (  ͠  ) double tilde
  • (  ͢  ) double rightward arrow

Please note: The tilde, dot, comma, titlo, apostrophe, bar, and colon are sometimes diacritics, but also have other uses.

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Photo: A house mouse, NIH, WikiCmns, Public Domain

Chart: Wikipedia, Public Domain

The petroglyph remains

From fellow-blogger cross-ties:

The petroglyph remains

The Mystery of Vowels

Tibetan Vowels

Vowels may be the most mysterious creatures on the planet. Their complements, the consonents, are fairly straightforward: consonents are created when we obstruct the flow of air through our mouths (either partially or completely) at points called places of articulation. These places of articulation are easily grouped by their relative position in the mouth, from front to back: at the lips, with the front of the tongue, with the back of the tongue, through narrow channels (fricatives), and using the nose (nasals). The chart I’m looking at on Wikipedia shows 18 places of articulation.

But vowels are trickier. They are formed without obstructing the flow air; instead, we shape the flow to create resonances (known as formants) in certain areas of the mouth. Linguists have identified three characteristics of each vowel:

1) Height. The height of a vowel is determined by how open the mouth (or jaw) is when the vowel is being spoken. Another way of thinking of this is how high the tongue is when the vowel is formed. This vertical shaping of the airflow produces a first formant, known as F1. F1 is acoustic; that is, it does not contain enough information by itself to convey meaning. (and not so coincidentally, height is also known as openess).

2) Backness. Backness is defined by the tongue’s position in relation to the back of the mouth when the vowel is spoken: vowels thus can be front, near-front, central, near-back, or back. This horizontal shaping of the vowel produces a second resonance, F2.

For many vowels, the combination of F1 and F2 define the vowel’s articulation or meaning. But we must also consider the position of the lips.

3) Roundness. Because the degree to which the lips are rounded (or puckered) when we pronounce a vowel is usually correlated to the backness of the vowel, roundness is often thought of as a feature of backness. Certain languages, such as French and German, nonetheless classify roundness separately from backness.

What all of this boils down to is that there is no way to correctly pronounce a vowel–instead of a single point in the mouth (as with consonents), we have two cooperating frequencies establishing the meaning of a vowel, allowing the speaker a degree of individual expression impossible with consonents.

Here is another way to think of the difference between vowels and consonents: the beginning (or onset) and the ending (or coda) of a syllable are usually consonents. Vowels form the center (syllabic peak or nucleus) of the syllable.

And here is the way that I usually understand the difference: the meaning is in the consonents, the music is in the vowels (and thus, with a bow, my WP handle: Music&Meaning).

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The stage has now been set for the magnum opus of this article: the vowel chart from the IPA (along with, as it turns out, suprasegmentals and tones). Happy deciphering (and of course there will be more explanation):

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Second installment in my series on the International Phonetic Alphabet.

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Images: Tibetan vowels, WikiCmns, Public Domain; IPA vowel chart: Omniglot, attribution.

The IPA

As far as I know, there is only one alphabet that can represent in writing any sound spoken in any language: the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The origins of the IPA go all the way back to 1886, when a group of French linguists formed the International Phonetic Association. Working originally with an alphabet designed to represent any sound spoken in a European language, the Association redesigned its alphabet in 1888 so that it could be used to write any language.

Since its inception, the IPA has undergone several revisions, the most recent of which took place in 2005. But the core of the alphabet has remained unchanged for some time.

Hold onto your hats, folks. This alphabet does not look like anything you’ve ever seen before. Rather than providing  a lengthy explanation, I’m just going to upload a chart containing the alphabet, so that people can get used to the look of it:

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Ok, folks, take your time getting used to this: the IPA is the scientific approach to creating an alphabet, and was created instead of evolving over thousands of years, like the English Alphabet. There is certainly no need to master all of it; it does, however, indicate the range of sounds that people make. And I might as well say now that this is not the complete alphabet; I’ll post the other charts in one of my next few posts.    RT

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Chart source: Omniglot.com