American Indian / Native American language fonts

[charles_e]

Greetings, all: This is Barbara Williams, spouse of Charles E, who's allowing me a brief post under his log-in. We worked last year with the Museum of the Cherokee Indian on their publication of the first Cherokee translation of contemporary fiction: "Removal: A novel" by Charles Frazier.

http://www.cherokeemuseum.org/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...

We considered using Plantagenet, but in the end chose Laser Cherokee, in part due to some variant forms in Plantagenet that traditionalists were not comfortable with. Feel free to write to me directly about this: As I understand matters, the glyphs in the "official" syllabary are under some review right now, in part due to discovery of some documents dating from the time of Sequoia. I'm not an expert, but could refer you to some folks who are. barbara[at]bwabooks[dot]com.

[hrant]

> I think the Cherokee font is one of the most developed, but the applications
> I’ve seen of it (probably not Zapf’s!) are obv. roman character driven and
> therefore, leave something to be desired.

Indeed.
FYI, Zapf's design is like that. Which is not really surprising,
considering Zapf has lauded Van Krimpen's jingoistic Greek fonts.

hhp

[kholvn]

You may already know this but the original syllabary that Sequoyah developed was totally different than what is used today. The symbols were simplified for the printing press. The original writing system is hardly known today. I, for one, wish we would go back to the original but I'm afraid it's too late. The current writing system is too common for that.

[kholvn]

You may already know this but the original syllabary that Sequoyah developed was totally different than what is used today. The symbols were simplified for the printing press. The original writing system is hardly known today. I, for one, wish we would go back to the original but I'm afraid it's too late. The current writing system is too common for that.

[hrant]

1) How centralized is the current Sequoyah tribal leadership?
2) Does the Sequoyah tribe harbor strong concerns about gradually losing its identity?

hhp

[kholvn]

Let me just say this. There are three Bands of the Cherokee people. (there is not a sequoyah tribe nor was he ever a chief) There is the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees In Oklahoma (of which I am a full blood member) - The Eastern Band of Cherokees (in North Carolina) - and The Cherokee Nation (in Oklahoma). Although there are three bands (three separate nations or governments) we are all the same people of the same blood. Of the three, the Keetoowahs are the more traditional band. More of our people speak, read and write our language. In fact, I'm a teacher of our language among other things. The Eastern Band, those around Cherokee, NC, speak a little differently than those who live in the west but we can still understand one another. In all three Bands, we have instituted programs and cultural camps to teach our youth the traditions, culture and language. We don't use the word preserve when we refer to our customs and traditions. We rather use perpetuate. In the shadow of main stream society, we are fighting hard to keep our traditions in tact and ongoing. Unfortunately, we are very aware of losing our identity which is why we incorporated these programs and other courses of action to teach the youth the various facets of our ways of life.

As I mentioned: I'm a teacher of our language but I am also a member of the Seven Clans of the Fire Camp Committee and a founding member of the Turtle Island Liars Club. As a teacher, I hold classes in the community on speaking, reading and writing our language (using the current version of the syllabary). Other teachers have classes in the public school system while others hold classes at some of the universities in Northeastern Oklahoma. Seven Clans of the Fire holds three camps a year to teach the crafts, traditions and customs of our people to the youth and anyone else who wants to learn the real culture of the Cherokee people. The Turtle Island Liars Club in a loose association of traditional storytellers of the Keetoowah and Cherokee people. We hold storytelling nights every few months to pass on the stories of our people.

So... all in all, we are very active in passing our culture down to our children and grandchildren.

[kholvn]

Let me just say this. There are three Bands of the Cherokee people. (there is not a sequoyah tribe nor was he ever a chief) There is the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees In Oklahoma (of which I am a full blood member) - The Eastern Band of Cherokees (in North Carolina) - and The Cherokee Nation (in Oklahoma). Although there are three bands (three separate nations or governments) we are all the same people of the same blood. Of the three, the Keetoowahs are the more traditional band. More of our people speak, read and write our language. In fact, I'm a teacher of our language among other things. The Eastern Band, those around Cherokee, NC, speak a little differently than those who live in the west but we can still understand one another. In all three Bands, we have instituted programs and cultural camps to teach our youth the traditions, culture and language. We don't use the word preserve when we refer to our customs and traditions. We rather use perpetuate. In the shadow of main stream society, we are fighting hard to keep our traditions in tact and ongoing. Unfortunately, we are very aware of losing our identity which is why we incorporated these programs and other courses of action to teach the youth the various facets of our ways of life.

As I mentioned: I'm a teacher of our language but I am also a member of the Seven Clans of the Fire Camp Committee and a founding member of the Turtle Island Liars Club. As a teacher, I hold classes in the community on speaking, reading and writing our language (using the current version of the syllabary). Other teachers have classes in the public school system while others hold classes at some of the universities in Northeastern Oklahoma. Seven Clans of the Fire holds three camps a year to teach the crafts, traditions and customs of our people to the youth and anyone else who wants to learn the real culture of the Cherokee people. The Turtle Island Liars Club in a loose association of traditional storytellers of the Keetoowah and Cherokee people. We hold storytelling nights every few months to pass on the stories of our people.

So... all in all, we are very active in passing our culture down to our children and grandchildren.

[hrant]

Thank you for the education.

> We don’t use the word preserve when we refer to our
> customs and traditions. We rather use perpetuate.

Nice.

> we are very aware of losing our identity

It's the same with us Armenians (even though your genocide was even worse than ours) since more than 60% of our population lives outside Armenia. It's a struggle ingrained.

--

As I've stated in lectures and articles, a script can either serve to perpetuate a culture or it can serve to assimilate it, the latter if it slowly becomes transformed* to resemble the dominant mainstream culture. This has been happening to many alphabets (not least Armenian for one) and I call it Latinization. And just like perpetuating spoken language we need to worry about perpetuating written language.

* Or sometimes if it's created to be like that; see Vietnamese, the Carmen Miranda of writing systems.

It seems to me that there's a case to be made for breaking with the Zapf-style Latinized Cherokee, and either reverting to the original form you mention (which I would be very interested to see, especially in a side-by-side comparison with the current form) or making something from scratch, or something in between.

hhp

[cuttlefish]

I wish I could remember the site where I got these; they're from some website relating to the Cherokee language. It feels important to share them here. They're going to be too wide for the column here, but the individual letters are rather small.

The first is a sample of the Cherokee syllabary, showing the handwritten forms followed by an early draft of the more familiar typeset forms. They are written in pairs, divided by a vertical zigzag bar.

It is quite sad that the handwritten script is largely unknown today. It is quite beautiful. It would be nice to see it in a longer text as opposed to this letter-by-letter display.

I also came across this scan of a Cherokee number system.

[guifa]

Damn, I really like that cursive form. It's much prettier than the printed forms.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

[Ross Mills]

re: American Indian / Native American language fonts

I have a couple of pan-American typefaces in production at the moment which aim to support all North American (along with most European) languages: Huronia and Plantagenet Novus. I can not say when either will be publicly released, as development on these is slower then I should like, as they have no specific financial backing. A basic beta specimen for Huronia can be found by following the beta link on tiro.com/fonts. In developing these, I am also working on a character/glyph set specification which will be released in some form at the same time as the font(s).

As far as the Cherokee script is concerned, it is a bit too complicated to jam into a single post all the issues, but it is an interesting typographic challenge. There are many presumptions from within and without regarding reader's expectations. The 'original' cursive form would be interesting to approach as a design issue, but before engaging in that experiment I am unconvinced that it would work as a fully functional script. Not only are there probable issues in how it would work technically, there is also the issue of how easy it would be to learn. These perceived problems are no doubt behind the development of the second model, which more closely resembles European typefaces and the further development by Worcester for it’s adaptation to metal type. There were obviously various technical and cultural motivations that existed in the mid-19th century which determined how Sequoyah's writing system developed and mutated and for the most part the design decisions were fairly sound at the time.

Present-day expectations and presumptions about what is, or is not authentic is quite another matter and has given rise to some odd results. My own preliminary attempts at designing Cherokee fonts has been informed by the original (metal) typefaces, and to some extent the earlier cursive model. I don't pretend that the first version (as comes with OSX) is exactly as I would like it, and I continue to develop it and other Cherokee fonts—however what I, as a type designer see as a rational process and result may not always meet the expectations of the users of the language, as other interpretations that proliferate weren't produced using the same rationale. I am writing an article on this, but like so many things it is not complete yet so I don't want to post a link here yet. If anyone is interested, they can contact me directly: ross {at} tiro {dot} com

[kholvn]

The script shown in the pic is what Sequoyah came up with but was changed, as I mentioned, to accommodate creating typesets for a printing press. I, for one, have noticed trouble from modern students in learning the syllabary the way it is now. It takes extra effort for them to disregard their mind set in seeing some of the symbols as letters of the alphabet. They see D as 'dee' instead of 'aw' and so on. I've always felt it would have been easier to learn the original than what was developed for the press.

Also, the numbers system wasn't adopted by the Cherokee Nation. They felt the roman numbers were good enough. Again, I wish we would use the numbering system.

The current writing system has been used over the years. I'm often asked to translate letters and note books written in the syllabary. Mostly it was used to write down arcane medicine used by our medicine people. But, of course, we have the New Testament and some of the Old written in the syllabary. Hymns are written down too. So the writing system is used to this day.

One last thing for now.

What Sequoyah came up with still isn't the original writing system. There was a priest clan that was killed off that had a writing system. We have an old legend that mentions we had a writing system thousands of years ago.

[hrant]

> It takes extra effort for them to disregard their mind set
> in seeing some of the symbols as letters of the alphabet.

This is exactly the problem even in major scripts like Cyrillic.
Cyrillic for example was formally Latinized three centuries
ago by Peter the Great; now, especially if a Cyrillic snippet is
interjected in English text (or vice versa), the reader will get
thrown off. The attenuating factor there is that the Russians
are not an endagered culture, so it's not a huge deal.

hhp

[cuttlefish]

A short piece from Hermann Zapf's Alphabet Stories regarding his development of a Cherokee syllabary font.

Also I have posted a comparison image of the Cherokee part of Agamemnon along side Plantagenet and the "official" font in the Agamemnon Critique thread, if anyone wants to have a look at it.

[kholvn]

Although I could read each example of the Cherokee Syllabary easily, I kind of liked the Agamemnon type a little bit better because of its unique designs of some of the symbols.

In the early ninties, I worked with a man who developed a font for use by the Mac and, as I mentioned in an earlier post, it was very easy to use. One could type in the sounds and it would come up in the syllabary. It was easy to use and quick but it kept some folks from learning to read and write it. It was too easy to use. A person didn't really need to know how to write in Cherokee to type it up on the computer.

I used this font until a few months ago when the program just quit! I do miss it but am now searching for a font that I can use for my classes. Which is how I found this great site and board. (lucky me)

[cuttlefish]

I posted an update to Agamemnon Cherokee a couple days ago. Does it show any improvement?

[Ross Mills]

Jason:
>It would be nice to see it in a longer text as opposed to this letter-by-letter display.

I was revisiting this thread and noticed I had overlooked this wish, realizing I could oblige.

Below is a snippit of text which shows the cursive version of the syllabary underneath the same text in "regular" syllabics (the upper being Huronia).

This is pretty rough, and is just the first step in my analysis of the cursive form for adoption as either an "italic" or perhaps an italic stylistic variant which I am considering working into Huronia. In any case, what is shown is unrefined and quite close to Sequoyah's original, although I've adjusted the nominal baseline a little as well as inter-character fit (neither to any large extent). Needless to say, a typographic interpretation would smooth things out, but this gives a rough idea as to how hand-written manuscript might look using these forms of the syllables.

[buey okyan]

this is a typeface i designed for cherokee, inspired by the soviet constructivist style. as i am not very computer literate, i hand drew this entire set old school with a mayline, compass, and triangle. if anyone would like to make it into a fully functional computer font i would be indescribably happy. just throwing that out there. this is the first time i've seen discussion of indian typefaces on the internet outside of an indian forum so i'm interested in the response from the design world.

[Pablo R]

Further South, but still native Americans Tzeltal and Tzotzil Mayan languages use Latin based systems as there was no actual written form until mid 20 century.

A long time ago while helping with a educational project in the mountains of southern Mexico I did this as an experiment, maybe the interesting thing is the idea use of a modified ' to indicate inspired vocals very common in Tzeltal, and the use of a K instead of a Q which is not used in Tzeltal but usually appear in texts.

The dingbats are based in children drawings. It was very usual to have soldiers, helicopters and bombs drawn at art class.

The font was called Tzeltal Kop or True Word

[Karl Stange]

In light of the discussion started in the TypeCon New Orleans? thread, I thought it would be good to revive this thread and add some discussion of what would be involved in adding support for Cherokee to new and existing fonts as well as some discussion about how best to deal with additional styles. I would very much like to get a better understanding of all the design and language considerations involved in supporting Cherokee.

[matt_yow]

cthulhufishing, thanks for bumping this thread. The TypeCon New Orleans thread really sparked my interest in Cherokee.
I'd like to do more research and learn more on this.

I see some really basic skeletal letterforms from what Ross Mills post (thanks!) but can anyone point me to sort of extremely basic and fundamental construction? I mean like a subtraction of style and character. All the samples and specimens I can find have a high contrast style, distinct style, kind of all looking very similar.

[John Hudson]

The Cherokee speakers at TypeCon mentioned that they had developed a kind of skeleton font to indicate the necessary elements of Cherokee syllabics. I didn't make a note of their contact information, but perhaps someone who did can direct their attention to this thread? It would be great to have them contribute to the discussion.

[hrant]

I'll alert Joseph.
BTW, another impressive thing is how they apparently carried
out what was essentially field-testing to figure out which parts
of the syllables were important, both in terms of reading and
satisfying their Elders.

hhp

[JosephErb]

ᎣᏏᏲ ᏂᎦᏓ, (hello everyone) Thanks for all the interest.... a lot being said in this line of discussion. As Font makers you have noticed that much of what we use today, as a designed font, is pretty bad when it comes to some of the very rough looking uneven font designs. It is a very complex issue when it comes to the Cherokee orthography in the community. Cherokees take great pride in our writing system. It is true that many in the eastern band of Cherokees do not read and write cherokee but some do. And it is also true that at one time some people at the museum over there proposed the idea of changing our syllabary writing system in to a alphabet. This was quickly dismissed and did not go over very well and we should just leave it at that. Many more people here in Oklahoma Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band read and write in Cherokee. Roy Boney and I were very honored to speak to so many font designers that work on so many languages. Roy and I worked with many advanced speakers from our community and that work at CHerokee Nation to find out what advanced speakers look for in a writing system for each character. We developed a very thin font that was made in fontlab. It is not really that professionally made but it has many needed things in it. Most languages around the world have font styles for many different needs, printed type, signs, web, fun, ads and so on as you all know. but we do not have this for our own language at this time, when we need it the most. Many in the community do not question why we dont have more fonts. In fact many get defensive when we first talk about new fonts a few years ago thinking we where trying to change the language or proposing something like what the museum over and eastern band wanted. Roy and I believe that if we are going to continue to have a language for our community it must have all the power and strength that different fonts can offer.. We started realizing we needed to be on the computers and cell phones then after we got on that we realized that we needed more fonts. This idea is starting to be understood by some of our elders when we start to show them why we want to do this or have it done. It is always important to work with the community that reads and writes the language that you are designing for. Most languages have enough material out there so that that is not needed but in smaller language groups it is important to talk to people before starting your design work. Much of the problems with the present fonts is that people did not at least have the community it was made for, have look at it, before the release. The Cherokee Type face was made for a printing press and all of our fonts still look like they are for that same purpose. Sequoyah in his time wrote with print from the style influenced from the printing press also, even after he made the cursive style too. His main reason was to create a writing system that would allow his people to communicate in written form. If he was round today, I believe he would be designing fonts and having others to design some for all these technologies that are constantly coming out (and have different requirements) for Cherokee people to use and communicate with each other. So if anyone needs more information about cherokee handwriting for fonts feel free to email me. We have collected handwriting samples and old documents that might help a font designer with the information they are looking for. [email protected]
ᏩᏙ ᏂᎦᏓ
ᏙᎾᏓᎪᎲᎢ
joseph

[John Hudson]

Joseph, is it possible for you to post a link to the 'very thin font' that you have made, or at least to a PDF of it, so that this can serve as a guide to type designers thinking about new styles? One of the things that is frequently a problem for designers encountering a new script is discerning which features are essential to the identity of a sign and which are particular to individual styles.

With regard to feedback from the community, I think my own approach -- if I ever find time to work on my ideas for a Cherokee type -- would be to make a set of representative glyphs covering, say, ten syllables, demonstrating the principal characteristics of the style, then seek feedback on these. I presume you would be able to facilitate this sort of review by members of the community (elders, of course, but also those who are most likely to use the new styles of type).