The Caroline Island Script is a syllabary used in the Caroline Islands until the mid-20th century. The Caroline Islands is the old name for the Woleai group of islands in Central Micronesia in the Pacific.
In 1905 Alfred Snelling, an American missionary, landed on Eauripik, an atoll where Woleaian was spoken about 100km from Woleai. He taught the local people the Latin alphabet used fro Chuukese. They appear to have misunderstood how the alphabet worked and saw it as a syllabary in which each letter represented its name, e.g. T = ti, K = ki, S = si and so on. In 1913 another missionary, John Macmillam Brown visted Woleai, and was show a script based losely on the Latin alphabet by Egilimar, a local chief. Brown published a list of 51 symbols.
The script symbols and transliteration comes from Michael Everson's proposal to encode the Caroline Island Script in Unicode: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11362-n4146-woleai.pdf (PDF, 123K)
Information about the Caroline Island Script
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woleai_script
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2011/11362-n4146-woleai.pdf
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/21095/1/deVoogt_1993_r.pdf
Information about the Caroline Islands
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Islands
Afaka, Bamum, Caroline Island Script, Celtiberian, Cherokee, Cypriot, Dunging (Iban), Eskayan, Hiragana, Iberian, Katakana, Kpelle, Loma, Mende (Kikakui), Mwangwego, Nüshu, Nwagụ Aneke, Vai, Yi, Yugtun
Page last modified: 15.03.23
[top]
You can support this site by Buying Me A Coffee, and if you like what you see on this page, you can use the buttons below to share it with people you know.
If you like this site and find it useful, you can support it by making a donation via PayPal or Patreon, or by contributing in other ways. Omniglot is how I make my living.
Note: all links on this site to Amazon.com
[top]
