| Woleai | |
|---|---|
 Woleaian syllabary as written by Egilimar in 1913 | |
| Script type | Syllabary |
Period | c. 1910 to c. 1950 |
| Direction | Mixed |
| Languages | Woleaian |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Wole(480), Woleai |
| This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
TheWoleai orCaroline Island script, thought to have been asyllabary, was a partially Latin-based script indigenous toWoleai Atoll and nearby islands of Micronesia and used to write theWoleaian language until the mid-20th century. At the time the script was first noticed by Europeans, this part of Micronesia was known as theCaroline Islands, hence the nameCaroline Island script.
The script has 99 known (C)V glyphs, which are not quite enough for a complete representation of the Woleaian language, even given thatconsonant and vowel length are ignored. Approximately a fifth of them derive from the Latin alphabet. The question for historians is whether the Wolaians hadproto-writing which crystallized into full-fledged writing under the influence of the Latin alphabet, or if they were exposed to the Latin alphabet without completely understanding it (seetrans-cultural diffusion), and supplemented it either with existing signs frompetroglyphs,tattoos, and the like, or by creating newrebus orad hoc symbols, until it was sufficient to fully express Woleaian.
The script was written from left to right. Since length was ignored, one glyph stood for bothga andka ([xa] and[kːa]), and another for bothla andna ([la],[na], and[nːa]). Some glyphs stood for longer syllables than just consonant-plus-vowel, such asbag, warr, tüt, moi, shrö, chroa, andgkaa. Not enough glyphs were recorded to write all Woleaian syllables this way, and it is not known if the script was fully standardized.[1]
In 1905 a lost missionary named Alfred Snelling and hisChuukese crew landed onEauripik, a Woleaian-speaking atoll 100 km to the southwest of Woleai proper. There they taught the islanders the Latin orthography ofChuukese. 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".)[2] 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.)
Snelling died on Woleai on his way back to Chuuk. His crew continued, and atFaraulep the syllabary was augmented with glyphs that Riesenberg & Kaneshiro call "Type 1". At least some of these may have been rebuses.[3] This extended syllabary spread back to the other islands.
When the next missionary,John Macmillan Brown, 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,CV, CVV, CCV, and CVC syllables.
Preliminary proposals have been made to add Woleai script to Unicode.[2]They propose 97 characters. These constituted an incomplete set of the V and CV syllables of the script.[citation needed] No CCV or CVC syllables are included.
Riesenberg, Saul H., and Shigeru Kaneshiro. 1960. "A Caroline Islands Script", inBureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 173, 269-333. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution.