There's nothing small about Cherokee -- yet....

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/01/26 14:59 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/01/26/8770668856267196274.aspx


For as long as I've known about it, I've found the Cherokee syllabary fascinating, both personally and professionally. The work of Sequoyah aka ᏍᏏᏉᏯ aka Ssiquoya is fascinating on so many levels that it never really manages to get boring (if you know what I mean, or even if you don't!) and has been a real "topic of interest" since I first seriously described the Cherokee Phonetic keyboard here on the Blog at http://www.siao2.com/2011/11/09/10235391.aspx in case you were curious.

One of the aspects that I found more frustrating was that although I could see Cherokee on my phone (currently a Nokia Lumia 1520 running Windows Phone 8.1) that I lacked a keyboard even though I had a font (see http://www.siao2.com/2013/03/07/10398041.aspx if you want to see more on that, even as this and subsequent blogs discussed how the Cherokee Phonetic keyboard layout could be (for lack of a better word) "translated" from Windows to Windows Phone now that I knew how they were defined (though nobody really showed a lot of interest then and me being on disability leave now makes me even more out of touch on both their plans and my ability to contribute to them).

Now that the proposal is somewhere between stage 7 and stage 8 for the small Cherokee letters per the Unicode pipeline (http://unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html) with my only significant contribution being my late, passive/aggressive plea to keep it all in Unicode BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane (Cherokee small in the BMP http://www.siao2.com/2013/11/05/10463141.aspx) which was ultimately successful, I feel kinda unclean, kinda unworthy of the work of Sequoyah aka ᏍᏏᏉᏯ aka Ssiquoya.

I mean yes, it will all be on/in the BMP, which will make the Cherokee Nation keyboard layout easier and the Cherokee Phonetic keyboard layout possible with the lowercase Cherokee letters. But what syllabary needs them anyway? Has the anal retentive need of a few to over-bicameralize everything hurt the efforts of Sequoyah aka ᏍᏏᏉᏯ aka Ssiquoya,, if you know what I mean?

And what would Sequoyah aka ᏍᏏᏉᏯ aka Ssiquoya do with the keyboard layouts, if he were given the choice, the opportunity to choose? Would he change the CAPS LOCK behavior of the Cherokee Phonetic keyboard layout? Would the lowercase Cherokee letters be widespread enoughin fonts to make the effort safe in the next versions of Windows and/or Windows Phone?

What will happen next?


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