Cherokee syllabary

The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah to write the Cherokee language. It is based aesthetically, but not functionally, off the Latin alphabet.

Usage
The syllabary has 85 characters (previously 86), with each character representing one syllable. Six of the character represent isolated vowels, the rest represent a consonant followed by a vowel. Not all phonemic distinctions of the language are represented. Aspirated and plain consonants are generally not distinguished. The system does not distinguish between syllables ending in vowels, h, or glottal stop. Vowel length and tone are also not marked, though in more recent technical literature, vowel length can be indicated using a colon. Other disambiguation methods for consonants have been suggested.

There is no regular rule for representing consonant clusters. When some consonant clusters arise, a silent vowel must be inserted, chosen either arbitrarily or for etymological reasons.

There is a print and cursive form, with the cursive form bearing little resemblance to the printed forms. Both upper case and lower case forms exist, but often only upper case is used.

Other Symbols
Several years after the adoption of the syllabary, Sequoyah proposed a set of number signs for Cherokee, however these were never adopted. Cherokee generally uses Hindu-Arabic numerals identical to the Latin alphabet. In 2012, the Cherokee Language Consortium agreed to begin using Sequoyah's numerals in some instances. Cherokee numerals have not been encoded within Unicode.

Sequoyah's proposed numerals had unique characters for 1 through 19, and then characters for the "tens" of 20 through 100. The glyphs for 1 through 20 can be grouped into subgroups of five. Additional symbols were used to note thousands and millions. There was also used a final symbol to mark the end of a number. The Cherokee Language Consortium has created an additional symbol for zero along with symbols for billions and trillions.

To write numbers 1 through 20 unique characters are used. To write larger numbers a combination of the characters for 1 through 9 and the characters for 20 through 100 are used. For example, to write 64, the numerals for 60 and 4 would be written together. For numbers larger than 100, digits are placed before the hundred, thousand, or million sign, for example, to write 504, the numerals for 5, 100, and 4 would be written together.

History
As a silversmith, Sequoyah dealt regularly with European Americans who had settled in the area. He was impressed by their writing, and referred to their correspondence as "talking leaves". Around 1809 Sequoyah began working to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. He first attempting to create logographic, but realized this would be too difficult and eventually created characters to represent syllables.

After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s it quickly became popular and spread throughout Cherokee society. By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in the newly developed orthography. In 1828 the order of the characters and the shapes were modified by Elias Boudinot to be used on printing presses. The 86th character was dropped entirely. In 1834, Samuel 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).

Unicode
The Cherokee syllabary was added into Unicode in 1999. The lower case characters were added on June 17, 2015.

Keyboard
The keyboard is arranged so more common letters are placed on ergonomically easier keys, and the less common glyphs are on shifted keys.

Transliteration issues
Some Cherokee words pose a problem for transliteration software because they contain letter pairs that (without special provisions) would be combined when doing the back-conversion from Latin script to Cherokee. For example, back conversion could combine s-a (ꮝꭰ) into sa (ꮜ) or vice versa. One solution is to use an apostrophe to separate letters.

Similarly, sometimes two words result in the same transliteration. For example, ᏀᎾ and ᎾᎿ both transliterate as nahna. The former is nah-na, the latter is na-hna.