Nyaggin'

There's been a delay from the moment I wanted to write this blog to the time it's published, but a few weeks earlier, Dr. Cushman has led a meeting in the linguistics club, introducing to us the Cherokee language.

The Cherokee language is the native language used by a tribe of American people (the Cherokee people) in the Southeastern area of the modern-day US, polysynthetic and endangered. It adopts a syllabaric writing system, which means that the "letters" represent syllables in this system, rather than phonemes like in common alphabetical systems. This gives me a strong urge to transcribe them into Japanese kanas and see what happens, because, well, I'm more familar with the writing system of the Japanese language.

I am not the first one who came up with this idea, here is a previous try by a dude in Toukyou, Japan. Nasalised A-row (ア行, /a.gjoː/) kanas are used to represent the <v> sounds. I personally find this is a dirty approach.

So, below is my transcription solution.

A few things to notice:

• Although their Latinization being using voiced letters like <d> and <g>, it is not hard to see that the actual pronunciation of these phonemes are actually unaspirated unvoiced explosives. So here we omit the voicing marks (濁点, /daku.ten/, "dirty dot") in normal cases, and only add them when there are necessary contrasts (e.g. Ꭶ→が Ꭷ→か).

• The distinction in vowels are usually represented by different columns (段, /tan/, "segments") in kana, but there are only 5 columns in modern Japanese. In order to faithfully transribe Cherokee, we need 6 columns. So we bring back some deprecated historical kanas to life to represent the <v> vowel (Ancient Japanese used to have 7 columns anyway).

• Theoretically, the <l> /l/ sound should be transcibed into the RA-row (ラ行, /ra.gjoː/) kanas with half voicing marks (半濁点, /han.daku.ten/, "half dirty dot") to show that they're not just /r/, but /l/, which doesn't exist in Japanese language. But here for the sake of simplicity, we'll just omit the marks, as there is no /r/ in Cherokee so there would be no confusion.

Let's try to write a sentense with this system:

All example sentences are taken from here.

• ᎠaᎨgeᏳhyuᏣtsa ᎬgvᎾnaᎨgeᎢi ᎩgiᎵli ᎠaᏉgoᏩw(a)ᏘtiᎭha.

  あaけgeゆyuつぁtsa 𛀸gvなnaけgeいi きgiりli あaこgoわwaてぃtiはha。

  A girl sees a black dog.

It might seem confusing compared to the original writing system, because the word boundaries become more subtle now. What we can do here is to go further on the road by introducing Chinese characters (no we're not introducing the Chinese language here, it's still Japanese). This is how written Japanese works: They represent the meaning with more distinguishable Chinese characters to avoid confusion.

• 娘あけゆつぁ 黒𛀸なけい 犬きり あ見こわてぃは。

You could see that "ᎠᏉᏩᏘᎭ" isn't merged into just a single character. This is also how written Japanese works: They will leave some important grammatical marks unreflexed, so that the reader would know the underlying grammatical properties of the words they are attached to. In this case, the "Ꭰ" in "ᎠᏉᏩᏘᎭ" is a distinguishable prefix, so we leave it unreflexed. (Although in Japanese there is almost no prefixes, just postfixes.)

Compare it to real Japanese:

• 娘こは黒くろい犬いぬを見みる。

And some more sentenses:

• ᎠaᏍsᎦgaᏯya ᎤuᏗdiᎴleᎯgi ᎪkoᏫhwi ᎤuᏚduᎵliᎭha.

  彼あすっかや 熱うでぃれき 珈琲こゐ う欲とぅりは。

  They (singular) want hot coffee.

• ᏗdiᎦgaᎵlᏦtsoᏕde ᏧtsuᏔtaᏂni!

  でぃ宅かりつぉで 大つたに！

  The house is so big!

Hmm I dunno, I might have gone too far.