Cherokee language
The Cherokee speak an Iroquoian language. It is the only known Southern Iroquoian language.
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2 Grammar 3 Syllabary 4 See also 5 External links |
Cherokee only has one labial consanant, being /m/, which is relatively new to the language, unless you count Cherokee w as labial instead of velar. The following representations are in SAMPA.
Cherokee, (or Tsalagi, its name in its own language) like most Native American languages, is polysynthetic. As in the case of German or Latin, units of meaning, called morphemes, are linked together and occasionally form very long words. Cherokee verbs, constituting the most important word type, must contain as a minimum a pronominal prefix, a verb root, an aspect suffix, and a modal suffix. For example, the verb form ke:ka, "I am going," has each of these elements. The pronominal prefix is k-, which indicates first person singular. The verb root is -e, "to go." The aspect suffix that this verb employs for the present-tense stem is -k-. The present-tense modal suffix for regular verbs in Cherokee is -a. Verbs can also have prepronominal prefixes, reflexive prefixes, and derivative suffixes. Given all possible combinations of affixes, each regular verb can have 21,262 inflected forms.
Cherokee is written in a syllabary invented by Sequoyah (a.k.a. George Guess). In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme. While the number of syllables in English (tens of thousands) defy the use of a syllabary, the 85 characters in the Cherokee syllabary provide a suitable method to write Cherokee. Some symbols do resemble Latin alphabet letters, but the sounds are completely different (the form of the letter for "a" resembles Latin D, for example). Sequoyah had seen English writing, but didn't know how to write it; there is no other person in history known to have invented a writing script without previously knowing how to write.
(Note that v is a nasalized vowel in the following chart.)
Phonology
Consanants
Vowels
Grammar
Syllabary
