[Suppress-Script] Initial list of 300 languages

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Sat Mar 11 22:45:48 CET 2006


At 06:55 -0600 2006-03-11, David Starner wrote:

>You can check "Walk in your soul; love incantations of the Oklahoma
>Cherokees", by Jack Kilpatrick.

I'm NOT going to accept a pronouncement that Cherokee is 
conventionally written in Latin on the basis of just one book by one 
author.

>A Google search reveals that the word ??? appears once in running 
>Cherokee text, which seems unlikely if there's any serious amount of 
>Cherokee text in Cher online.

That's not correct. The problem is that most Cherokee-script text 
uses 8-bit fonts and won't turn up on Google.

>A websearch reveals a lot of pictures of text in Cher followed by Latin
>transliteration. From my searching, I'd expect that tagging a random
>block of Cherokee computer text as Latn is more likely to be correct
>than tagging it as Cher.

Well, from my experience, your expectation would be wrong. There is a 
large corpus of 19th-century  Cherokee text in Cherokee script held 
by the University in Oklahoma. There are bibles and hymnbooks and 
newspapers in Cherokee. The overwhelming bulk of Cherokee-language 
text is in Cherokee script.

Latin transliteration is used by and for people who are not literate 
in Cherokee. Extended texts are not written or read in Latin 
transliteration. The real problem is that many people who speak 
Cherokee don't write it at all. It's not the case that bibles and 
hymnbooks and newspapers are written in Cherokee in Latin script (and 
the burden must be on you to prove that they are if you think that 
Cherokee text is conventionally written in Latin).

John: there is no controversy. David hasn't made a case. Charokee's 
default is Cher.

I *have* seen books in Yiddish written in Latin. I've not seen a book 
in Cherokee written in Latin. And books which have transliterations 
typically give the words in the Syllabary alongside.

May I suggest http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807853763/evertype-21 
which is a good book by Margaret Bender on the use of Cherokee script 
among the Eastern Cherokee.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com


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