153. Caroline Island Script

 

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. Some of the symbols are obviously based on Latin letters; the origin of the other symbols is not known. The script was first described during the early 20th century by Western travelers.

Notable features

• Type of writing system: syllabary
• Direction of writing: variable
• Used to write: Woleaian, a language spoken in the Woleai group of Islands in Micronesia by about 1,600 people

Caroline Island Script

The script symbols and transliteration comes from Michael Everson's proposal to encode the Caroline Island Script in Unicode: http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/woleai.pdf (PDF, 123K)

Links

Caroline Island Script: a study site devoted to an indigenous script of the Pacific islands
http://www.carolineislandscript.com
Some information about the Caroline Island Script
http://camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog/index.php/2005/07/01/caroline-islands-script/
http://www.proel.org/alfabetos/woleai.html
Woleaían - stories in Woleaian
http://www.prel.org/PALM/Woleaian/
Information about the Caroline Islands
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Islands