[Multilingual Monday] Yes, I'm aware it isn't Monday, but ...
So I apparently screwed up the timing of my Cherokee class, and went to an empty building this past Tuesday. I knew we had a week without class, and as I understood it, that was last week, but who knows now. It's a shame, as I've very much embraced the fact that I can STUDY the language finally, even if it's a beginner's course.
Let me tell you, trying to get the syllabary straight is a pain because of the lookalike characters. Ꮆ, Ꮐ, Ꮯ, Ꮳ, Ꮸ, Ꮹ, and Ᏻ are all separate letters (lo, nah, tli, tsa, tsv, wa and yu, respectively), and it's so easy to screw them up. Then again, even though I'm a bit of a script fanatic, even I will have lapses where I forget phonetic values of letters -- Cherokee has Ꭶ, Ꮥ, and Ꮪ (ga, de, du), but there's also Armenian Տ (pronounced /t/), and Macedonian Ѕ (pronounced /dz/). I'm amazed I can ever get half of this straight, to be honest.
A while back I bitched that those who learned Cherokee had no place to use their skills (outside of occasional news articles in the Cherokee Phoenix, but now that seems to be changing. First was the iPhone input keyboards, and now Google is available in Cherokee. I'm amazed that this has happened, and it makes me smile to see one more place that the language is featured -- even if it's just a search engine interface.
Let me tell you, trying to get the syllabary straight is a pain because of the lookalike characters. Ꮆ, Ꮐ, Ꮯ, Ꮳ, Ꮸ, Ꮹ, and Ᏻ are all separate letters (lo, nah, tli, tsa, tsv, wa and yu, respectively), and it's so easy to screw them up. Then again, even though I'm a bit of a script fanatic, even I will have lapses where I forget phonetic values of letters -- Cherokee has Ꭶ, Ꮥ, and Ꮪ (ga, de, du), but there's also Armenian Տ (pronounced /t/), and Macedonian Ѕ (pronounced /dz/). I'm amazed I can ever get half of this straight, to be honest.
A while back I bitched that those who learned Cherokee had no place to use their skills (outside of occasional news articles in the Cherokee Phoenix, but now that seems to be changing. First was the iPhone input keyboards, and now Google is available in Cherokee. I'm amazed that this has happened, and it makes me smile to see one more place that the language is featured -- even if it's just a search engine interface.