Long vs Short speech

[michael-conrad]

Just as an FYI:

My goal is to get to the point that general spoken Cherokee in various materials is at least partially comprehensible.

One big challenge to comprehensibility is the long vs short forms for general speech. With the TTS system, it is feasible to include various shortened forms into the exercise materials to help with learning to hear the long forms mentally when hearing or seeing the short forms physically.

If it matters to your approach, I’m in the camp of people who believe that it’s important for learners to learn the full language first, before proceeding to shortened forms. I think knowing the full forms makes it easier to see the structure and logic of the language and constructions, and knowing the full form seems necessary to be able to most skillfully manipulate the language. A very simplistic example to illustrate this point would be, like… say I want to ask if a thingamabob is big. If I had only every heard the word “big” as “utan”, how could I add a question clitic without knowing the end vowel I need to re-attach before adding the yes/no question clitic? Well, I guess maybe I could say “jigo utan”, but nobody talks like that anymore. 😆 But hopefully you see what I mean. It seems exponentially easier, in my mind, to change over to the shortened form after first learning the long form, than vice versa. But that’s just me, and there’s more than one way to peel a banana.

Originally posted by @FeralMina in #4 (comment)

[michael-conrad]

@FeralMina

Sounds like our two approaches are similar in alignment and application. The written material generally favors the long form of speech with some shorter speech in the exercises (where the Syllabary shows the change).

The audio is a mixture, using the long form when introducing new vocabulary while also practicing with short form speech.