Created Sun 21 Feb 2016 • tags cherokee, scriptnotes
This page provides information about the characteristics of the Cherokee script. It is not intended to be exhaustively scientific – merely to give a basic idea of the essential features of the script.
ᏂᎦᏓ ᎠᏂᏴᏫ ᏂᎨᎫᏓᎸᎾ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏂᏠᏱ ᎤᎾᏕᎿ ᏚᏳᎧᏛ ᎨᏒᎢ. ᎨᏥᏁᎳ ᎤᎾᏓᏅᏖᏗ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏃᏟᏍᏗ ᎠᎴ ᏌᏊ ᎨᎡ ᏧᏂᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗ ᎠᎾᏟᏅᏢ ᎠᏓᏅᏙ ᎬᏗ.
Ꮒꭶꮣ ꭰꮒᏼꮻ ꮒꭸꭻꮣꮈꮎ ꭰꮄ ꭴꮒꮰᏹ ꭴꮎꮥꮏ ꮪᏻꭷꮫ ꭸꮢꭲ. Ꭸꮵꮑꮃ ꭴꮎꮣꮕꮦꮧ ꭰꮄ ꭴꮓꮯꮝꮧ ꭰꮄ ꮜꮚ ꭸꭱ ꮷꮒꮈꮻꮝꮣꮑꮧ ꭰꮎꮯꮕꮲ ꭰꮣꮕꮩ ꭼꮧ.
| Script name | Cherokee |
|---|---|
| Script type | syllabary |
| Number of characters (not including phonetic or combining blocks) | 172 |
| Case distinction? | yes |
| Combining characters | 0 |
| Multiple combining characters | no |
| Context-based positioning | no |
| Contextual shaping | no |
| Cursive script | no |
| Many more glyphs than characters? | no |
| Text direction | ltr |
| Baseline | mid |
| Space is word separator | yes |
| Wraps at | word |
| Justification | word |
| Native digits? | no |
| Other | tones |
Click on the orange text in the features list (right column) to see examples and notes. Click on highlighted text in the Sample section to see the characters. Click on the vertical blue bar, bottom right, to change font settings.
Cherokee is a syllabary. Letters typically represent a combination of consonants and vowels.
Text is normally written horizontally, left to right, and the visual forms of letters don't usually interact.
For more information see ScriptSource, Wikipedia or Omniglot.
Lowercase characters were introduced in Unicode 8.0, to cover growing use of bicameral content in modern typesetting, as well as some older texts such as the Cherokee New Testament. The lowercase text above is likely to be displayed as tofu (boxes), since it is currently difficult to find a font that includes lowercase forms.
It is unusual for the majority of content to be in uppercase, and for lowercase to come in later, and implementers may need to take care in introducing the new characters. For example, Cherokee case-folds to uppercase, rather than lower. For more details see the Unicode Standard.
The sample text above is repeated. The first paragraph is all uppercase, the second is mixed. The highlighted words are the same in upper- and mixed-case.
Sequoyah, the inventor of the script, created a set of Cherokee numbers, but they were not adopted and are not encoded in Unicode.UCS The shapes of the numbers can be seen on the Omniglot page.OG
Spoken Cherokee has tones, but they are not shown in the text.UCS
Justification is done, principally, by adjusting the space between words. (I have no information about whether high-end systems also adjust inter-character spacing slightly if inter-word doesn't resolve the issue, or to improve aesthetics.)
You can see how this browser justifies the text in the Sample section using this control.
The Cherokee script characters in Unicode 8.0 are spread across 2 blocks (not counting shared characters, such as punctuation):
Cherokee uses standard Latin punctuation.
The following is an incomplete list of languages and the number of characters they use, per version 28 of CLDR's lists of characters (exemplarCharacters).