OHAI Creates Cherokee Software (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

OHAI Creates Cherokee Software
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/11/emw308253.htm

It is now easy to type Cherokee thanks to OHAI Technologies and the Rice
University Linguistics Department.

Houston, Texas (PRWEB) November 10, 2005 -- In 1809 Georgia, a Cherokee
silversmith named Sequoyah began creating the “Talking Leaves” – a
writing system for the Cherokee language. In 1821, 12 years from the
original idea, the Cherokee nation adopted Sequoyah's alphabet and
within months thousands of Cherokee were literate.

Fast-forward 184 years to Houston’s Rice University Linguistics
Department where a graduate student and a visiting scholar from a
software company create a way to type the Cherokee writing system
easily.

The graduate student - Chris Koops - has conducted linguistic research
on the Cherokee language for the past 2½ years. In October, Chris
attended a colloquium given by Daniel Mailman, visiting scholar in the
department and CEO of OHAI Technologies – a Houston-based software
company.

The colloquium was about “Software Technologies that Make Typing Foreign
Languages Easier.” After the colloquium, Chris showed Daniel the
difficulties of typing the “Talking Leaves.” That conversation led to
Chris and Daniel collaborating to create oCherokee – software that
actually makes it easy to type the written Cherokee language.

According to Chris: “The basic challenge with typing the Cherokee
syllabary is that the characters represent syllables – and not sounds,
as in the English alphabet. That means that there are a lot more
characters than our 26 letters. Previous input systems were difficult
to use and time-consuming to learn, as they required the user to
memorize the position of over 80 keys. OHAI makes it possible to write
the Cherokee syllabary without any memorization at all.”

Daniel says: “This was an extremely fun project that shows how fast and
easy it is for scholars and software developers to make typing systems
for any language. oCherokee isn’t a commercial language product like
oChinese, oVietnamese, and our other language products. Nevertheless,
we feel that there is social merit to the project, and that it is very
much in keeping our commitment to “21st Century Literacy.”

OHAI plans to make oCherokee freely available to linguists, scholars,
and students of Cherokee.

For information, please contact OHAI’s Communications Manager, Tweed
Courtney.

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