Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0012680, Mon, 1 May 2006 22:55:22 -0400

Subject
Re: Cherokee nouns and VN
From
Date
Body
> BTW: the very transliteration "Cherokee" is a Western abomination.
Their
> own
> spelling is nearer to TSA-GA-LI.

Not to get pedantic, but I think it's Tsa-la-gi, which
Wikipedia thinks is a transliteration of "Cherokee" rather
than the other way around.

> BTW^2: The tsa-ga-li syllabary used to be available as an option on a
PC
> text-editor called MultiLingual Scholar. I know because ... self-toot
> ... I
> designed the font. The 92 characters are quite bizarre -- not as
pretty
> as
> Cyrillic but equally phonetic. Chief Sequoyah picked out printers'
> blocks
> from various missionaries' presses -- inverting and rotating them to
> provide
> distinct shapes for each of his syllables.

Not to get pedantic again, especially about such an impressive
achievement of yours, but Sequoyah wasn't a chief.

Jerry Friedman

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