Doug Kerr
Well-known member
I have mentioned in other threads Carla's Cherokee name.
Carla was in fact not given a Cherokee name at birth. She was not born into a "Cherokee community", but in a small (white) town in northern Oklahoma. And, as she and her family moved about the western United States, her Cherokee heritage was "not to be mentioned", over concern with the prejudice often encountered by American Indians.
As an adult she discarded that concern, and slowly began to take an interest in her Cherokee heritage. Shortly after we were married (in 1999), she finished the administrative work needed for her to be recognized as a enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation.
I decided that, as a "card-carrying Cherokee" (actually), Carla should have a Cherokee name, so I gave her one. The name I chose was "Red Fox", in part because she at the time had red hair and she certainly was (and still is) a "fox" in the "slang" use of the word.
As with many Cherokee, she uses her Cherokee Name as a surname, and prefixes it with her given name, "Carla".
Now, to the linguistic and typographical details. Here is her Cherokee business card (less the address, etc.):
I'll start with the second line. This is her full name in Tsalagi (the Cherokee language), but rendered in the Latin alphabet. I use the common, but deprecated, convention of joining the syllables of each word with hyphens. "Ka-la" is of course a rendering of "Carla"; Tsalagi does not include the "r" sound of English. "Tsu-la" is the word for fox, and "a-gi-ga-ge" is the word for red.
In the top line we see this rendered in the Cherokee Syllabary. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the syllabic characters and the syllables in the Latinized form on the second line.
The Cherokee Syllabary was developed to allow the writing of Tsalagi, one of the first (if not the first) American Indian languages to be given that ability. It was developed by a Cherokee-German named (in English) George Guess, whose Cherokee name was "Sequoyah". The Cherokee Syllabary is often called the "Sequoyah Syllabary".
The syllabary is amazingly similar in structure to the katakana syllabary used with the Japanese language (especially to represent words brought from other languages). Yet there is no evidence that Sequoya knew of katakana.
Best regards,
Doug
Carla was in fact not given a Cherokee name at birth. She was not born into a "Cherokee community", but in a small (white) town in northern Oklahoma. And, as she and her family moved about the western United States, her Cherokee heritage was "not to be mentioned", over concern with the prejudice often encountered by American Indians.
As an adult she discarded that concern, and slowly began to take an interest in her Cherokee heritage. Shortly after we were married (in 1999), she finished the administrative work needed for her to be recognized as a enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation.
The requirement for membership is that the person must be a lineal descendant of someone listed on the "Dawes Rolls", a census of the Cherokee that relocated from the southeastern United States to the "Indian Territory" (which later became part of the state of Oklahoma). There is no minimum "blood quantum" of descent; a person who is a "1/128 descendant" of someone on the Dawes Rolls is eligible. (Carla is, at a minimum, a 1/16 descendant.)
I decided that, as a "card-carrying Cherokee" (actually), Carla should have a Cherokee name, so I gave her one. The name I chose was "Red Fox", in part because she at the time had red hair and she certainly was (and still is) a "fox" in the "slang" use of the word.
As with many Cherokee, she uses her Cherokee Name as a surname, and prefixes it with her given name, "Carla".
Now, to the linguistic and typographical details. Here is her Cherokee business card (less the address, etc.):
I'll start with the second line. This is her full name in Tsalagi (the Cherokee language), but rendered in the Latin alphabet. I use the common, but deprecated, convention of joining the syllables of each word with hyphens. "Ka-la" is of course a rendering of "Carla"; Tsalagi does not include the "r" sound of English. "Tsu-la" is the word for fox, and "a-gi-ga-ge" is the word for red.
Incidentally, the animal we call "fox" in English is called by Tsalagi speakers in the Cherokee Nation (in Oklahoma) by a phrase that literally means "gray fox". But speakers of the eastern form of Tsalagi (spoken by the Cherokee Band in the southwestern United States) use the phrase that we adopted, again meaning literally "red fox".
In the top line we see this rendered in the Cherokee Syllabary. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the syllabic characters and the syllables in the Latinized form on the second line.
The typeface here is Aboriginal Serif Regular, with the Syllabary characters at their assigned Unicode code points.
The Cherokee Syllabary was developed to allow the writing of Tsalagi, one of the first (if not the first) American Indian languages to be given that ability. It was developed by a Cherokee-German named (in English) George Guess, whose Cherokee name was "Sequoyah". The Cherokee Syllabary is often called the "Sequoyah Syllabary".
The syllabary is amazingly similar in structure to the katakana syllabary used with the Japanese language (especially to represent words brought from other languages). Yet there is no evidence that Sequoya knew of katakana.
Best regards,
Doug
