Friday, July 07, 2017

Notating Ordinals

Siyo!

Have you wondered about making abbreviations in Cherokee?

What?  No one told you that Cherokee HAS abbreviations?

Well, it DOES.
Very many in fact.

To get us started in thinking of abbreviated Cherokee, lets look at the simplest form of these:

Ordinal numbers.

I don't know about you, but learning ordinals in English took a minute or two to wrap my head around.

Remember, we learned these in Kindergarten/ First grade, which means they are so easy for us now we may have forgotten that struggle, but believe me, it was a "thing" for most young scholars.

English bounces around a bit in ordinals, and those learning it find the

 "-st", "-rd", and "-th" a tough concept to navigate.  But they are not so important in English that you couldn't just leave them off and be understood.

Cherokee is NOT that way.  You must NOT leave these out.

In Cherokee, Ordinals are more important than they are in English.

More on that later.

What I want to stress today is how to notate the ordinal in Cherokee.

I find that the system of switching from writing it out is much easier in Cherokee than it is in English.

In Cherokee, most writers/speakers use the Arabic number followed by either "-" or "-".

That's it!

Just learn to say the Cherokee Ordinal number correctly in your dialect of Cherokee and add either  "-" or "-".

Here's a hint:  only 1st (or 1) uses the "-Ᏹ " !


Here is the full image:



To see the larger picture, click on this image below:

























Ok

now that you know HOW to use them, how about from now on, replacing all your English ordinal notations with Cherokee ordinal notation?

Save the language.

use it!

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