Cherokeea

Transcription

CRAIG CORNELIUS: Good afternoon. My name is Craig Cornelius. I work in the internationalization team at Google. And I'm very pleased to present our visitors from the Cherokee Nation-- Roy Boney, who is the manager of translation services at the Cherokee Nation, and Jeff Edwards, who says that he should be called a language technologist. And this is the second visit of the Cherokee Nation to Google. And they're going to tell you about the history of the Cherokee writing system from its origins to today and going forward. Welcome, Roy. Welcome, Jeff. [APPLAUSE] JEFF EDWARDS: My name is Jeff Edwards. And I work with the language technology program. And the Cherokee Nation is doing some really interesting things. We're the first tribe to have our own operating system with Windows 8. We're represented on the iPhone. But the thing of it is Cherokees have always adapted technology-- not just recently. We've always done it. So I'm going to go through a little history lesson with you guys and show you that every latest technology that came out, the Cherokees were quick to adapt. And so this is the guy that made it all possible. He's our hero. He's Sequoyah. He is the guy credited with developing the Cherokee writing system. Cherokee has 84 syllables right now. There's some that have been dropped, some that have been added, and all that stuff. But right now, we have 84 syllables. And Sequoyah is credited with developing those. About two weeks after Sequoyah developed this, 90% of all Cherokees were fluent in reading and writing. So it's really a very important part of our history. And this is a Sequoyah signature. I'd never seen this before until the other day. Roy showed me. And it was really neat to see that this is a treaty that Sequoyah signed in 1828. And so we like to show that just because he did exist. And Sequoyah was given this medal. If you see a lot of pictures of Sequoyah, there's always something around his neck. And you don't really know what it says. Well, this is what it actually says. He was given this medal for basically inventing the Cherokee syllabary. And so that's what's around Sequoyah's neck in all the pictures. And what gave Sequoyah the idea to invent the syllabary was he witnessed soldiers writing letters back and forth. And so he called those "talking leaves." And so that's what this says here in Cherokee. And of course, on the leaf is Sequoyah's original syllabary, which we'll show you a little bit later. But he wanted the Cherokees to be able to communicate just like everyone else. So he developed our syllabary for us. This is Sequoyah's original syllabary. It looks nothing like the syllabary we have today. We'll go into a little bit of detail why that is. But this is what he came up with in 1821. And like I said, it's really a very [? script ?] syllabary. And the ones we'll show you here in little bit looks nothing like that. We always point this out, that there's two characters here-- we'll go ahead and highlight both of them. The first character that was highlighted is actually upside down by today's standards. But at the time, it was right side up. So we'll talk about why that got flipped. And also, the other character-- technology failed us on that character until recently. And so we'll talk about that a little bit later, as well. And so they had to do a handwritten modification once they'd changed Sequoyah's syllabary. And so you'll see again that the "do" character is still upside down or right side up, depending on what year you're in. And then there's that character, as well. And this is the reason why the syllabary had to change. On the far left is Sequoyah's original syllabary. And in the middle is the handwritten equivalent of what they came up with. And of course, on the right is a piece of typeset. They could not make Sequoyah's handwritten syllabary into typeset. And so if we wanted to have a newspaper, we had to be able to comply. So that's why the syllabary changed drastically. It was to be able to come up with the typeset. And so that's the main reason why the Cherokee syllabary looks like it does today, so we were able to do newspapers. And this here is the first thing ever printed. It's the first five verses of Genesis with the typeset. And again, like I said, we always like to highlight that it's kind of a funny joke that depending on where you are and what year it's in if it's upside down or right side up. And this is the first edition of the "Cherokee Phoenix" newspaper. It was printed in 1828. And the really neat thing about it is, if you can see-- it's kind of blurry-- but it's in English and in Cherokee. And the thing about it was, was the English was, of course, in English. But the Cherokee was not the equivalent of the English. This paper was used to fight removal from North Carolina on the Trail of Tears. It was kind of a political-type piece. So we kind of snuck one in there. And so if you could speak Cherokee, you obviously knew what it said. And Cherokees-- we were always printing basically everything. We had our hymn books, which is an example here. And there's that "do" character again. And then here's where it flipped in around 1836. And the reason why they did that is because it looked too much like some of the other characters. And they didn't want people to make a mistake. And so they flipped it over so instead of having an upside-down V, we now had a right-side V. And it's like that today. And here's the character that got taken away. It's the "ma" character. And we recently worked with Unicode and brought this one back to life. And I'll go ahead and read that to you. You might not be able to see it. "That the character 'ma' has been omitted, and, as no type has been cast for it, your printers can only represent it, as I perceive they have done, by breaking the English capital--" I think that's a G. And so we actually lost a character there in history. And this is the syllabary chart everyone is used to seeing today. This was printed up in 1836. And of course, there's that "do" character. And now, that character there-- what happened with him-- I don't know if it's actually proven. We can't prove it, but it's a big speculation is when it was typed, since it has that little second bar on it, it has a little square-looking area right here. And that was an ink blot. Well, it's not supposed to look like that. Well, unfortunately, it carried over from 1836 until about two years ago, I guess. And it always looked that way. So an ink blot failed us in the technology. And it stayed that way for a very long time. And we recently got that fixed, though. This is a print of Exodus. And so all materials back in the day were all printed in Cherokee. And here's just some more examples of printings in Cherokee. And they had song books. That's an arithmetic book. I don't know the date on it exactly. Do you know that for sure? 1850s, somewhere around in there. And so we had math books. We had almanacs printed entirely in Cherokee. The "Cherokee Rose Buds" was a newspaper printed at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah. It actually had a female seminary. And they taught Cherokees as well as whites. They taught women and men at the school, at the college. And so that was really cutting-edge for the time. And here's a letter from Abraham Lincoln to the Cherokees. And of course, it is in the Cherokee syllabary. So we always thought that was really neat, from 1863. So even back then, they were communicating with high levels of government because we're a sovereign nation. There's the Cherokee constitution printed up entirely in Cherokee in 1875. And this one always was really neat. It's a Cherokee shorthand used by the court reporters in 1890. And it was a way of documenting court cases that went on in the Cherokee Nation with the Cherokee shorthand. And then, of course, along came the telephone. The Cherokees were first have a telephone west of the Mississippi. And it's always a really neat story behind that. They had a line ran from Tahlequah to Fort Gibson, which is just a neighboring town. And they called one another up. And the guy instantly said, it speaks Cherokee. So they adopted it. They were able to talk to each other in Cherokee. So we always thought that was a real funny story. And so we adopted the telephone. And of course, we have several spinoff newspapers. The "Cherokee Phoenix," which I showed you earlier, is still actually printed today. This is the "Cherokee Advocate." And this is the Fort Gibson "New Era" paper. They actually bought the printing press out but still continue to print from the Cherokees. ROY BONEY: The text here-- when you see Cherokee, that's a Google font, called Noto Sans Cherokee. Which we're really happy that Google developed for us. But as Jeff was pointing out, you can see that all through history, we always adapted whatever technology came around. So you saw the previous slide was a typewriter. After statehood happened in 1906 for Oklahoma, that basically dissolved the tribal governments. And it caused a lot of disarray. But the language still continued, the writing still continued. And through all the decades of the 20th century, we adopted various typewriters and different things. This picture here is actually from a typewriter at Sequoyah's home museum, which is in a small town near Sallisaw, Oklahoma. It's the cabin in which he lived when he came to Indian Territory. And this typewriter-- it's the Hermes 3000 typewriter. And if you're a typewriter enthusiast, you know the Hermes typewriter was pretty popular. But if you can imagine typing all 84 characters on this typewriter. So this is developed. And what was cool about it is if you go to this museum today, the typewriter's under a glass case, but they'll let you actually open it up and type on it. So it still works, and it's neat to see. But inside-- this is a picture of that typewriter on the inside. You can see all the type heads and how intricate it is with the Cherokee syllables on it. I just think that's really neat to see. So in the middle of the 20th century, the Cherokee language became an endangered language. And part of the reason that happened was because of technologies like your radio and TV and that types of things that people didn't go out to the communities so much. They were more in home and all this. And there's also this concept of relocation, in which the federal government took a bunch of native families all across the country and relocated them to big cities. And the idea was to get them jobs and get them assimilated to the mass culture. And so a lot of Cherokees were sent all over the place. This particular gentleman named Brian White was sent to Chicago. And while he was there, he wanted to keep in touch with the Cherokee people and his language. So he developed this newsletter called "The Cherokee Speaker." And the reason why I bring this up is because, like I mentioned, when statehood happened, it devastated the tribes. And so we didn't have a formal organization kind of running anymore. But he wanted to continue printing Cherokee materials. Because all the printing press and all that you saw earlier was actually from the Cherokee Nation itself. The government was publishing these things. So without that structure anymore, we needed more independent people putting out content. So with this newsletter, he solicited people to raise funds to develop a new set of type. So in 1962, here it says that he got $1,000 to actually make this type. So when he got it, he started making new Cherokee material again. This is a sample of that type. This is about a squirrel here. But you can see that he still had this desire to create Cherokee content. The type became very popular. And more people started making more and more content with it. This is a page from a Cherokee primer that was made in 1965 using that type. And if you look very closely at it, you'll see how this particular set of type influenced how fonts and stuff would look now. In the '70s, the IBM Selectric typewriter came out. And that was very popular. The Cherokee Nation wanted to work with IBM to create a Cherokee typewriter element so they could switch out the language with it. But it proved to be very expensive. There is a gentleman named Scott Gregory at Cherokee Nation who was the CFO at the time of the tribe. And he told me that when they did this, IBM said they want $30,000 to manufacture these. And at the time, that was quite a lot of money for the tribe. So the tribe worked out a deal with a group in Hawaii to actually manufacture these for $5,000. So several of these were made. And they were distributed to the communities. And the communities took them and started making Cherokee language materials that helped combat the language erosion that was happening. And one of the big things that occurred from this particular development is the 1975 Cherokee dictionary by Durbin Feeling. Durbin is considered the foremost expert on Cherokee language now. He's been working in the Cherokee language for about 40 years, longer than that. He's devoted his whole career and life to preserving the Cherokee language. And this dictionary is the standard dictionary which we still use for the language now. I spoke with-- her name's Adaline Smith. She was the lady that actually typeset the dictionary at the time. And she talked about using that typewriter element and having to switch it out. And you can see it has the numbers in it. And that's representing the tone lengths and all this. She said you had to switch out that for the numbers, and then the Cherokee, and then the English, back and forth. And it was quite a task to typeset this book. And it's several hundred pages long. So you can imagine doing this in the '70s at a typewriter, doing this back and forth. But they did it. And we still have it, and we still use it. Like I said, it's very important to us. This is a really important document. Around this time, too, in the 1970s-- this is dated 1976-- Hermann Zapf, who's a very prominent typographer, was developing a Cherokee font. From what I've heard about this-- I'm not sure this is exactly true-- what was happening at this time was when Apple was a fledgling company. And they commissioned him to develop a font, but it never got produced. But you can see there was interest in the Cherokee language even at that point. It's called Sequoia. In his book here, the "Alphabet Stories" book, if you have that, you can actually see-- he talks more about in that book. But about, I guess, 10 years ago, the University of Wisconsin took this and actually cast some of the type in metal. The project kind of fizzled. I think they're still trying to get it completed, but it's interesting this still has some interest for people. In the 1980s, here's a picture of Durbin as a younger man. He worked with a group out in-- I think it was Louisiana to develop the very first Cherokee word processing software. And again, the idea was-- the group was a law firm. And Durbin says that they were working on a project about Cherokee forensics for a case. And they wanted to record the testimony of the person. So they developed this software to do it. Here's the first page of print that they made with that particular piece, that word processor. They presented it to Chief Wilma Mankiller in 1987. And it's just a really cool document. Durbin was kind enough to share this page with me from his personal papers. So moving forward a bit more, in the early '90s, that's when the PC became more popular. And it was cheaper and more affordable. So more people had it in their homes than ever before. So people started making Cherokee fonts. This is considered probably the very first Cherokee font that was designed by an actual Cherokee, by Franklin McLain. He collaborated with a gentleman named Al Webster who was a computer scientist. He came down to Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, and they met up. And he helped design this font. It proved to be very popular. There were several independent newspapers that were published using this font. And just like any society, we have different political factions. So they were fighting. And it was kind of neat to see that this was creating more literacy in the modern era for people to discuss and debate. Around the same time, there was a student at Yale. He was interested in Cherokee language and different writing systems. So he got a grant to make a Cherokee font. And Jeff kept pointing out those two characters, the upside-down one and that one. It's got that little ink blot on the back of it. That font here, this design, that little mistake came through since 1836 to now. And then what happened is he autotraced that chart that Jeff showed you earlier. And that came through with the autotrace. So he donated his word to the Cherokee Nation and the United Kituwa band of Cherokees, which is another political faction of Cherokees. It's another federally recognized tribal government, but we have the same language. And both governments developed their own fonts out of it. They took his work and modified it slightly. But the Cherokee Nation font here is the one that really solidified its status as the standard font for a long time after that. And you can see that little blot came through again. And we had this font since about the year 2000. And until maybe-- I don't know-- like four years ago, this is the standard font that everyone used to make Cherokee documents. So if you would get all these documents, you'd have that little printer error in there. I think it's interesting to see how technology can have such a profound impact on something like that. This just shows how one would type using that font, the uppercase and the lowercase keys to access all the different syllables. So Unicode is very important to us because without it, we wouldn't have access to the technology we have now. Back in the mid '90s, again, Durbin Feeling worked with Michael [? Eberson ?] to make the application of Unicode to get the Cherokee syllabary encoded. It took about five years. But then, around the year 2000, Unicode 3.0 came out. And that's when the syllabary was formally adopted into the system. Like a lot of things, this was new technology. And it took a while for people, at least in the Cherokee community, to pick it up. So in the year 2003, Apple added the Cherokee language support to OS X. When that occurred, a couple of years after this, that's when we discovered what Unicode was. Like I mentioned, we were using that other font before for everything. And we had all the problems. We couldn't email. We couldn't make websites within those. We did an image, all those kind of thing. So when we were using Apples at the Cherokee language immersion school, which was established to teach children the Cherokee language. So they study everything in Cherokee, from pre-K to sixth grade. So it's math, history-- all the subjects in school's in Cherokee. And you were using the Macs basically to work as graphic designers to make content for the school. And one day when I was playing around in the settings, I saw this Cherokee setting. I'm like, what is doing here? And that's when we figured out what Unicode was and how it worked and what it really meant to us. So that was a really major thing for us to understand what that was. So after we introduced the laptops to the schools, and the students started using the Apple laptops so they could do their homework in the Cherokee language. So that got us a really good relationship with Apple. And Apple got us in contact with some people at Facebook. So in 2009, Facebook opened up their platform to crowd-sourced localization. So if you go to Facebook and you go through the language settings and you change it Cherokee, it'll switch your interface to Cherokee. And you can actually input your own translations in it. And the most popular translations are the ones that go live. So that's the processes that this is going through. We're about-- I think it's about 50% through with this at the moment. We have different people on Facebook that are doing this. But it's taking a while. And it changes quite a lot, just like a lot of this stuff does. So the numbers fluctuate. But it's about 50% now. So our partnership with Apple continued. They helped us get things in the schools. And I said they had the support for the language on their OS X system. So when the iPhone was released, we were still working with them to get this technology in the schools with the assumption that the mobile system was like a smaller version of the desktop system. We said, well, why can't we have Cherokee on here? So in 2010, it was version 4.2, I think-- well, it's got iOS now. But whatever it was at the time-- I forget what they called it. But they released the update. And it put Cherokee language support on the system. So that immediately put our language on millions of devices in the world. That was the largest explosion of Cherokee language we've ever had. A major thing that happened with this, too, is that-- at least for me, personally. I know other people had the same response. For the first time ever-- I had been active in trying to learn Cherokee and to get the language going again. But when this happened, this actually gave me the opportunity to use the language every day, because I have it in my pocket. I can text. It can email. I can surf the web. I can do all this. And I did it every day since. And it's really helped me quite a lot for my language. Because I come from a family of fluent Cherokee speakers. But most people in my generation-- we didn't learn it like we should have for various reasons. And this actually was a major influence on me to learn it and keep using it all the time. This is just some screenshots from the iPad. Since the iPad runs on the same system, it's on there, too. And this was, again, a remarkable development. In a lot of communities, the older generation don't use a lot of technology. And when they saw this, a lot of them had this look of surprise, like what's our language doing on something this high tech? And they saw their kids and grandkids using this. And they're like, I got to go get this. So we have these elderly ladies that have iPads and iPods and iPhones so they could communicate with their grandchildren. So I said that was really quite neat to see. And then we had to do the little [INAUDIBLE]. So we had the calendar and the times and all that in Cherokee format. So that leads us here to Google. In 2011, we worked with Craig here to get the Google search engine interface in Cherokee. Our translators worked on that. And I think what's really neat about it, too, is the virtual keyboard that was developed for that. In 2012, the Gmail system was localized in Cherokee, as well. And again, at Northeastern State University there in Tahlequah, we have a Cherokee language degree program. And the students there-- a lot of universities use Gmail as their email system. So they have access to that there. And there is the Noto Sans Cherokee Google font, which I think is really great. That was in 2013. And it's a really nice font. That's one thing that we-- we showed how that one font that we had for the longest time-- we used it forever. And then we had the printer error in it, and all this. So it's nice to see that our language is getting out there. And there are more typographers out there that are designing Cherokee fonts now. Even more Cherokees are designing fonts, too, but it's nice to see this explosion of font design for us. Just this year, the Cherokee Nation put out a Cherokee speakers playlist on YouTube. So we created a lot of digital content. We record a lot of Cherokee speakers and cultural activities. And we put it on this playlist here. So you can go there to the Cherokee Nation's YouTube channel and watch the various videos that we have about Cherokee language. All this also led to partnerships with Microsoft. So in 2012, we released the Windows 8 localization in Cherokee, which is just the language interface pack. So if you go to your settings in Windows 8 and download the interface pack, it'll turn your interface in the syllabary. As part of this project, too, Microsoft developed the UI font for the Cherokee language called Cadugi. In Cherokee, the word "cadugi" talks about-- it's meaning working together or the idea of community. The word "skadugi" in Cherokee actually means community. So you can see how that word is actually part of that. And the reason why it was named that is the idea here with this particular font is if there are any other native languages that are wanting to do this process with Microsoft. And if they have any special glyphs in their writing system, it'll be housed in this particular font. So in the future, other native languages will be using this font if they do this same localization process. Microsoft also took all the translations and put it on their website here at their language portal. So for a lot of our people that are learning Cherokee and they're using this product, they can actually go here and search for what all those translations say. And it kind tells them what it is. So part of this process, as you may know, is localizing content is an interesting process. You get to see how the people see the world and their language and how they translate things. Here are just a few samples. Email is [CHEROKEE], which means lighting paper. And the idea is it's paper, and it's really fast. So I think that's kind of a neat idea of how people see the technology. Junk mail is [CHEROKEE]. And it just means something bad or something unpleasant. So a lot of times, if you stub your toe, you say, [CHEROKEE], like, ow, that hurt. That's kind of what that's coming from. So it shows you how people see junk mail. No one likes it. The word to follow, like to follow someone on Facebook or whatever-- [CHEROKEE] is talking about you're actually shadowing somebody, rather than following them. You're actually more attached to them. So again, these are just a few samples so you can see how the Cherokee language sees the world a bit differently. And every language is this way. When you're localizing content, you're actually making content for that user base. And you can see how they approach the world. An interesting aspect of Cherokee is how the language talks about these concepts of-- other languages, too, but-- you, me, his, her, their, our. We have to change the prefix of the word that denotes the pronoun. Like file-- "your file" is [CHEROKEE], versus "her file" is [CHEROKEE]. It's a slight difference, but you're denoting who you're talking about. And all these concepts come into play as part of this localization process. Just this year, we released Office Online in the Cherokee syllabary. So if you go to onedrive.com, with your Microsoft account, you can login and have access to Word, PowerPoint, and Excel in the Cherokee language. This is one of the most popular piece of software in the world. So it's neat to see the Cherokee language in this setting. So that brings me to new developments and what we're working on right now. We currently have a Unicode proposal in the pipeline to add casing to Cherokee. We're going to have uppercase and lowercase. And historically, we've always had it. It's just when the initial application to Unicode was put in in the mid '90s, that, for whatever reason, was not part of the application. So the language itself was encoded as just it wasn't uppercase or lowercase. But you can see here-- this is from the Gospel of John in 1860, with the capital letters highlighted. In the math book we showed you earlier, you can see there's some capital letters in Cherokee there. In the handwriting, too, we've always had uppercase and lowercase in it. This here is actually a modern test, playing with fonts in uppercase and lowercase and keyboard layouts. And so this is a very early test of Cherokee bicameral text. So like I said, the current Cherokee text is actually considered caseless. I don't know how Unicode's going to eventually decide how this will be. But the latest update I had, this is how they explained it. And I'm not a Unicode encoder or whatever. So this is kind of new to me. But the basic suggestion is to make the existing Cherokee characters as uppercase. So when they add this new lowercase, that'll be the new range. But I don't know if that's how it's going to pan out or not. We'll see. Like I said, it's still in process. This here is interesting to me to see-- Cherokee Braille. This is actually a really, really recent new thing here. Just this morning I got a phone call about it. But what happened is this group called the Commonwealth Braille and Talking Book Cooperative in British Columbia contacted the Cherokee Nation. And they said that what they do is they go through Unicode. And all the languages that are encoded that don't have a Braille version, they make it. So they got to Cherokee. And they said, well, we want to do a Cherokee version of Braille. And this is what they came up with. And we were actually just the other day looking for someone that's familiar with Braille and Cherokee to be able to actually test it and see if it makes sense. And just this morning, I got a phone call from one of my bosses saying, we found somebody. So this is still in process. But you can see that our language is still evolving. We're still trying to get in every format that we can. This is something that's very important to us. There's quite a lot of people that are starting to tweet in Cherokee. It's still a very small group. But there's a website called indigenoustweets.com that tracks indigenous languages and how much of they're being tweeted. As I mentioned to Craig earlier, when we started collaborating with Google, it was about 2010. If you were to do a search for [CHEROKEE]-- that's the word for Cherokee there-- there were only like a couple thousand results when you would search for it. This is from this morning. There's over 3 million results now. So in that four-year time span, the presence of the Cherokee language online has exploded. And the idea is to keep it going because we want our language to continue. We want it to thrive. And using technology has been one of the major tools in which this is happening for us. This is the point where I might rib you a bit. As part of this process, the Cherokee language is on most every major piece of technology you want to use now except the Android system. But what's interesting about that is if you go to the store, there are developers out there that are actually making Cherokee language keyboards already. The problem with it is while you're inside the keyboard or the app itself, you will see the language. But once you go outside of it, you'll see the [INAUDIBLE] or the blocks. So you can see that in this screenshot here from the Google Play Store for this plug-in here. This is how the keyboard looks currently. Because I took this this morning off my Droid tablet. I installed that. And you can see there's no Cherokee showing up on the device. And then once you actually enable it, it shows up on the keyboard there. But once you get outside the app again, you can see it's not showing up correctly on the device itself. So that something that we would like to see someday, maybe Cherokee support on the Droid. So we want to go from this to this. And I have a rooted Droid that I did and installed it in that. I've done several people in the community's phones this way that want Cherokee on it. But the average person isn't going to sit there and root their device and install this font and all this. So it's kind of something that we'd really like to see happen for the Cherokee language, that Cherokee support on the Droid. But this brings it all back around to kind of where we started. This is a screenshot of the "Cherokee Phoenix" now. It's still being published. It's online. And there's also a paper version. That's still in English and in Cherokee. So you can see that, as a people, we still have it. We still use it. And it's very important to us to keep it going. We're a small group of-- it's a small community. We don't have millions of people. We don't have millions of speakers. But still, it's a very important part of who we are as people. With that, I'll wrap up here and open it to any questions you may have. AUDIENCE: It was really interesting to see the various technological words like junk mail and all these things that show up in the Cherokee version of Gmail. Did those words exist organically in the community before this localization took place? Or were they invented specifically for this? ROY BONEY: Not really. Email was something that was kind of existing already. But stuff like junk mail-- no, that had to be invented for all these projects. AUDIENCE: I noticed in several different slides, it looked like the syllabary was organized in different ways throughout its history. I was curious-- how is it organized today? I understand that each grapheme represents a morpheme itself, one syllable. So are they organized with a semantic theme in one line? Or are they organized by sound? ROY BONEY: They're organized by sound-- let me pull up that chart here. They call it Sequoyah's original arrangement. And no one knows exactly what the thinking was behind it, because he didn't document his process. But as Jeff mentioned, when the syllabary was formally adopted by the Cherokee Nation in 1821 and the community started learning it, within a really short amount of time, people became literate using this language, this writing system. So this was his layout. And however he did it, for whatever reason, people that were in that time that spoke Cherokee picked it up really fast. And the way it goes, the sounds are "ay," "ah," "lah," "gee," "nah," "wah," "way," "wee." But it doesn't follow any-- it's not the English format, I guess. Because the modern version of how arranged now, it actually follows kind of an English alphabetical setting. So the top row is the vowels. You have the "ah," "ay," "ee," "oh," "ooh," "uh." But down the side, it goes-- you can see a G. So it goes "gah," "hah," "lah." It's kind of following that English alphabetical way. And the reason this happened is actually a missionary that did this arrangement. And that's the one that kind of stuck. AUDIENCE: Looks like Japanese. AUDIENCE: Yeah, exactly. It does. ROY BONEY: One back there or-- AUDIENCE: Did syllable for said, the one that looks very much like the Latin four, the digit 4. As we go forward-- in your slides, I saw the kind of serif at the end, that it even disappears. It almost looks like a normal 4 in your later text. How do you typically distinguish it? Just assume that the reader would know from the context? ROY BONEY: Yeah, a lot of it is context based. Anyone that's fluent in the language will be writing. And they'll know what that's supposed to be saying. The Cadugi font from Microsoft-- let's see if I can find it here-- is actually, at least in the modern era here. This is actually the first font that was actually designed and vetted in conjunction with the Cherokee Nation itself. All those other ones were-- the fonts, they were created independently. But this one, actually the designers from Microsoft-- we'd have conference calls with the translation department and other members of the Cherokee language community. And they would actually go through this process. And this is what they came up with. This is considered the base shapes of what the syllables would be. So if you follow this format here, you'd get pretty close of what most Cherokees would understand, the bare minimum, without the serifs. AUDIENCE: In the beginning of the first slides, it was one handwritten. And I think it had some vertical squiggle lines between words. So what's the status today with punctuation? Use just Latin punctuation or no punctuation at all? ROY BONEY: Yeah, it's just the Latin punctuation. This here actually shows the original and then how the modern one kind of came out. So if you see the ones that look like a G-- AUDIENCE: And so the vertical squiggly line have any meaning? Is that a space between words? ROY BONEY: That's just separating each of the syllables. So there's one, and there's one. That's all that is. You're just separating. But as far as punctuation goes, we don't have any special punctuation at all. AUDIENCE: So use Latin one, or you don't use anything? ROY BONEY: Yeah, we use Latin. There are some people that don't use punctuation. They just go. But most people use the English punctuation. JEFF EDWARDS: Most recently, we brought back the Cherokee number system. ROY BONEY: Oh, yeah. Sequoyah developed a Cherokee number system, which never really took off. But we have an individual named John Ross. He's a translation specialist at Cherokee Nation. And he sat down and studied the Cherokee number system. And he deciphered how it actually works. And he has this whole system. When Sequoyah made it, he didn't have a zero. So when John took it and [? invented ?] the zero. And it just all works. So now it's kind of coming back. JEFF EDWARDS: I think he's up to a trillion now, I think is what he's up to. He's really far into it. ROY BONEY: He just keeps adding numbers and writing it. So it's kind of neat to see. AUDIENCE: So with the focus to get the language into modern technology-- is it solely to just get the language there? Or is it to use the other features such as proofreading and spell checking and keyboard swipes and stuff along those lines? ROY BONEY: I'd love to have all that. Part of the stuff with Microsoft-- we actually have a spell check dictionary now. And all that's kind of developing. It's not as robust as other languages, but that part of the technology is starting to happen now. Like on iOS, there's a spell check dictionary in there and all that. And so it's slowly happening, but we'd like to see of it. And it has the same problems, too, when you get autocorrected. You're like, I didn't mean to say that. AUDIENCE: There are significantly more symbols in Cherokee that in Latin. If I remember right, you said 84, something like that? ROY BONEY: 84, yeah. AUDIENCE: So it was very interesting to see in the different formats through history that you went through how those are accommodated on the keyboards that existed. It looked like a lot of times it was using the Shift or adding rows or something like that. So I was just curious what the best system is. Or if that seems to be a significant impediment for people in the past, and if it slows down typing to have to use shifting all the time. Or if there's something that's being done in these more current layouts where they're less constrained by the physical device. What's the best way that you've found that's most convenient for people who are trying to write fluently? JEFF EDWARDS: The way it started out was there's 84 characters. And so all punctuation is gone from this typewriter. We didn't have room for it. And so you did the Shift key. There's a few on there, commas and stuff like that. But most of the numbers and stuff are gone. And you use that Shift key to toggle it. And that basically carried over into the modern times. And that's actually how I learned how to start typing, with this keyboard layout. And I'm not going to lie to you-- at first, remembering where 84 keys are when you have to shift is really hard. But if you use it every day, like I did, for about 10 hours a day, you get really fast at it. But once we started doing Unicode, we got our phonetic keyboard, which allowed us to type the "tsa" instead of having to hold the Shift key, so that shifting stuff no longer mattered. We were just able to type our phonetic sounds-- which I don't know if we have any of those there. But you could type that way. And so I can go faster in Cherokee than I can in English now, just because of that phonetic keyboard. So that helped tremendously. ROY BONEY: On the iPhone or iOS keyboard, it has a sort of phonetic typing system. So if you're familiar with that big chart that we keep showing, here's the vowels, the "ah," "ay," "ee," "oh," "ooh," and "uh." If you want to type the sound "gee," you would type "ga" plus "ee," and it switches to "gee." And also, if you hold down the key, the whole row pops up. But it's based on that phonetic idea of typing. And it works really well for the touchscreen devices. Microsoft followed a similar format. Slightly different, but if you have Windows 8 and you have a touchscreen device, when you enable the phonetic keyboard, it goes to this touchscreen. And it's still a little bit tricky. I think this is probably the best touchscreen keyboard that we've seen so far. But Microsoft's just try to do something different, I guess, because the competition, or whatever. But it still works. It is based off of that phonetic idea of how you would type a language. AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you managed-- I guess you have a lot of historical documents, since the press has been using this language for a long time. Have you been able to collaborate with anybody to get any OCR technology so you can scan these documents and import them into a Unicode searchable index? ROY BONEY: There's been a little bit of work here at Google with the [? tesseract ?] group that does the OCR. Not a lot has been done with it. Part of the issue that we've had with it is it's not really user friendly. For us, our community to take it, running commands and all that stuff is not something most people know how to do. So we haven't been able to feed a lot of data into it. But that's the only one I know of that's been actually done so far, AUDIENCE: So it's more just managing the process of running the software and getting the data into it. CRAIG CORNELIUS: To answer that a little bit more, there is a group in the research building that is doing multilingual OCR. And they've worked with the Cherokee a bit, but we haven't done a lot of testing yet. We'd like to do it, but getting the scanning-- there are books in the Cherokee libraries, for example, that we'd like to scan. But unfortunately, the number of books that have been suggested is in the hundreds. And Google scanning works well 10,000 books and above. So getting organizational and logistics is the harder part than the actual OCR, I believe. But we'd love to work on some of those projects, too. AUDIENCE: So I guess I'm interested in the political shift that took place in the Cherokee Nation. Because it almost seems like when Sequoyah developed the syllabary, it was pointedly very different from Latin script and sort of flew in the face of the perceived dominant culture of the time. But now Cherokee survival depends, it seems from what you two are saying, on the integration with this mobile technology. And all of these working together to keep it alive. So at what point-- was there an event or was there a series of events or splits in Cherokee history over the question of whether to isolate or to adapt and integrate? ROY BONEY: There's a long history there. Actually, when Sequoyah was developing the writing system itself, he had a lot of resistance. There were Cherokees that said, we don't need that. That's the invader technology. Or not technology, but that's their way. We don't need that. He actually worked on it over the course of about 10 years. And then halfway through it, his work was destroyed. Some Cherokees actually burned down his cabin with his work inside, said, we don't need this. But he started again. They say that he had even more characters, like 100 or something in it. And when that happened, he modified it again and came up with what we have now. But after it was adopted in the 1820s, in this era in 1820s is when the removal policy was being debated in Washington, DC. And in the 1830s, when the policy was passed-- and when that was passed, there were factions. There were Cherokees that said, we just need to give in and just adapt and adopt into the mainstream society. And some said, no, we don't. And they kept fighting. And they kept resisting. And they kept the writing system as part of it. Because a big part of the content that exists from that era still is a lot of it was traditional knowledge and traditional medicine that was written in the Cherokee language. And over the years, as the language itself diminished in the number of fluent speakers, the writing system became almost sacred. And so some people would say, you don't need to learn that because that's sacred knowledge only reserved for certain people that are supposed to know this. And so as technology changed, and in the 20th century, when people started seeing that more people are losing the language, the idea changed, like, well, we need to stop thinking this way and adapt new ways of communicating and using it still. And so that tension is still around. There are people that don't like this still, what we're doing with technology. But for the most part, it's positive. We say this quite a lot when we do these presentations. There was a person that said, talking about putting the language out there online and stuff. They thought, well, what if someone out there tries to became a Cherokee medicine man, and they're not Cherokee? And they don't know this. They weren't raised this way. And then, well, the answer is, you don't become a doctor by googling stuff. You have to actually go be trained formally to do this. So as I said, there is a tension there. And we're still dealing with that change. But using technology has been a big step forward for us. AUDIENCE: Since this is going to go on YouTube, I just actually want to make an announcement regarding Unicode. Actually, just last month around this time, Unicode technical committee met. I actually represent Google to that committee, as some others. So we actually approved the Cherokee lowercase letters, basically. So they will be in Unicode 8, which will be released next year around this time. And the characters are also safe to use. So we've also frozen the code points. So you can basically-- if you figure out with the technology partners you have, you can sort it into characters today. So they are approved, and they should work. And [INAUDIBLE]. ROY BONEY: That's good news. All right, that's great to hear. CRAIG CORNELIUS: Well, all good things must end. I would like us all to thank them for the presentation. [APPLAUSE]