Woleai script

<h2 id="history">History</h2>
<p>In 1905 a lost missionary named Alfred Snelling and his <a href="/facts/Chuuk_State/YEnL1yt2">Chuukese</a> crew landed on <a href="/facts/Eauripik/L3pWpbKx">Eauripik</a>, a Woleaian-speaking atoll 100 km to the southwest of Woleai proper. There they taught the islanders the Latin orthography of <a href="/facts/Chuukese_language/HLke7kKl">Chuukese</a>. The Woleaians, perhaps not given enough time to grasp the concept of an alphabet where each syllable is written as consonant plus vowel, understood each letter to represent its name, and thus interpreted the Latin alphabet as a defective syllabary that could only represent simple vowels and consonants plus the vowel [i]. (Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960) call the glyphs at this stage of development "Type 2".)<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:2" href="#fn:2"><sup>2</sup></a> The glyphs were also mixed up somewhat: Although the letters resembling T, K, S, R, H, O, E, for example, stood for [ti, ki, si, ri, i, wo, ø] (there is no [h] sound in Woleaian), and W, И stood for [mi, ni] (that is, the letters M and N were inverted), letters resembling L, B, D stood for [fi, tʃi, pi]. (Note that these Latin letters are not necessary for Woleaian, since short [l] and long [nː] are not distinguished.)
</p><p>Snelling died on Woleai on his way back to Chuuk. His crew continued, and at <a href="/facts/Faraulep/tofTxmg0">Faraulep</a> the syllabary was augmented with glyphs that Riesenberg & Kaneshiro call "Type 1". At least some of these may have been rebuses.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:3" href="#fn:3"><sup>3</sup></a> This extended syllabary spread back to the other islands. 
</p><p>When the next missionary, <a href="/facts/John_Macmillan_Brown/YM9P1Mve">John Macmillan Brown</a>, reached Woleai in 1913, he found an indigenous writing system, albeit one known to only a few people. A chief named Egilimar showed it to him, and Brown published a list of 51 glyphs in 1914 that included V, <a href="/facts/Consonant/81X2SGS6">C</a><a href="/facts/Vowel/BNhCeFtH">V</a>, CVV, CCV, and CVC syllables.
</p>
<h2 id="unicode">Unicode</h2>

<p>Preliminary proposals have been made to add Woleai script to Unicode.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:4" href="#fn:4"><sup>4</sup></a>
They propose 97 characters. These constituted an incomplete set of the V and CV syllables of the script. No CCV or CVC syllables are included.
</p>
<h2 id="notes">Notes</h2>

<h2 id="further-reading">Further reading</h2>
<p>Riesenberg, Saul H., and Shigeru Kaneshiro. 1960. "A Caroline Islands Script", in <i>Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin</i> 173, 269-333. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution.
</p>
<h2 id="see-also">See also</h2>
<ul><li><a href="/facts/Rongorongo/tRkjwgwE">Rongorongo</a></li>
<li><a href="/facts/Avoiuli/JUxyarHo">Avoiuli</a></li>
<li><a href="/facts/Caroline_Islands/7kIzyxFW">Caroline Islands</a></li></ul>
<h2 id="external-links">External links</h2>
<ul><li><a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/woleai.htm">Omniglot</a> (An image of the syllabary with glyphs taken from the Unicode proposal.</li>
<li><a href="http://camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog/index.php/2005/07/01/caroline-islands-script/">Phonoblog</a> (discussion of Riesenberg & Kaneshiro)</li></ul>

<h2 id="references">References</h2>

<ol>
<li id="fn:1"><p>It may have been expanded through the rebus principle when a writer found that convenient, or some of the extra syllables may have been logograms. <a href="/wiki/Logogram" target="_blank">/wiki/Logogram</a> <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn:2"><p>Everson, Michael (2011-10-21). "N4146: Proposal for encoding the Woleai script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Working Group Document, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC. Retrieved 2015-08-11. <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11362-n4146-woleai.pdf" target="_blank">https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11362-n4146-woleai.pdf</a> <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn:3"><p>According to an unreferenced site on the web ([1]), pu was a sketch of a fish, from the Woleaian word pu "fish"; likewise shrü "spine", lö "bottle", ngä "bamboo", warr "canoe". Of these, ngä seems to correspond to ngae [ŋe], pu to bu [ɸʷu]~[pːʷu], and lö to noe [lø]~[nːø], whereas no CCV or CVC syllables like shrü or warr are included. <a href="http://www.proel.org/alfabetos/woleai.html" target="_blank">http://www.proel.org/alfabetos/woleai.html</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn:4"><p>Everson, Michael (2011-10-21). "N4146: Proposal for encoding the Woleai script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF). Working Group Document, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC. Retrieved 2015-08-11. <a href="https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11362-n4146-woleai.pdf" target="_blank">https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11362-n4146-woleai.pdf</a> <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li>
</ol>

Woleai script open-in-new

Woleai script