A Note About The Cherokee Language & How It Is Used in Our Music:
The Cherokee Language (Tsalagi) is an Iroquois based language. As with many native languages, the protocol of the sentence structure is not like that of English. In fact, many sentences will not contain the actual words that are a part of the sentence's message. This can be somewhat confusing until one learns more about the language and its structure.
Perhaps it would be best to give an example of what this means. The phrase "wenvdeya" means, "I am of the Holy Spirit," The individual words that this sentence speaks of are:
ayv = I or I am vhnai = of hia = the galvquodiyu = Holy adanvdo = spirit
So you see the phrase or sentence does not actually contain the individual words referenced within the sentence's meaning.
It would be an improper use of the language to say:
ayv vhnai hia galvquodiyu adanvdo for the phrase wenvdeya.
This is mentioned because some of the lyrics in our songs use the improper sentence structure simply for the purposes of timing and sometimes for rhyming. This was an artistic decision and we wish to make clear that one will not learn how to properly speak Tsalagi based solely on our lyrics.
The one song in particular where this artistic license occurs is the song Elohi. We hope this does not upset or insult any of our Cherokee brothers and sisters as this was not our intent at all.
Lastly, the Cherokee language is made up of over 80 syllables. Each syllable contains a consonant and a vowel sound or a vowel sound by itself. The equivalent "alphabetic" symbols for the syllables are not the same as are used with the English alphabet though some Cherokee syllable symbols do look very similar and some exactly the same. An example of this is seen in our group's name - Silverwolf:
adela unegv waya would be how to write Silverwolf using the English phonetic equivalent of the sounds of the words (pronounced: ah-day-la-oo-nay-guh-wah-yaw). The way you see it written in Tsalagi is:
ah day la oo nay guh wa ya
There are no upper v/s lower case letters or symbols in the written form of the language. Each character is always written the same way every time.
For those of you who would like to learn something about the Cherokee language, try the following links:
www.cherokeemadeeasy.com - The web site of Prentice Robinson's books, tapes and CDs about how to speak Tsalagi (Cherokee) As we find more web sites that present more of our culture and language, we will post them here. For now we say; donadagohvi (till we meet again).