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The Cherokee word for warrior, Dahnawa Danatlihi, literally means “War They-Are-Running-Place.” One way to translate that would be “They run to the place of war.” Or you could say, “Where they run is war.”
"I believed, and could not let go, that there had to be a way to understand, not just mimic like a parrot or a crow, but a way to understand it and know what you were saying. That is why this has been developed."
The Cherokee language had to be simple and easy and logical, if people spoke it as an oral language for thousands of years. They had to have an agreement about the meanings of the words and the parts of words.
In order to find the patterns in the words, you have to look at the full form of the word. Many speakers and even dictionaries do not give the full syllables of the word. You need to see these syllables to see the patterns.
As we tried to follow the Cherokee patterns in the Cherokee language, we kept running into two problems. One was not having the full forms of the words. (We’ll talk about the second problem a little later in the blog—English.)
