In 1905 a lost missionary named Alfred Snelling and his
Chuukese crew landed on
Eauripik, a Woleaian-speaking atoll 100 km to the southwest of Woleai proper. There they taught the islanders the Latin orthography of
Chuukese. The Woleaians, perhaps not given enough time to grasp the concept of an alphabet where each syllable is written as consonant plus vowel, understood each letter to represent its name, and thus interpreted the Latin alphabet as a defective syllabary that could only represent simple vowels and consonants plus the vowel . (Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960) call the glyphs at this stage of development "Type 2".) The glyphs were also mixed up somewhat: Although the letters resembling T, K, S, R, H, O, E, for example, stood for (there is no sound in Woleaian), and W, И stood for (that is, the letters M and N were inverted), letters resembling L, B, D stood for . (Note that these Latin letters are not necessary for Woleaian, since short and long are not distinguished.) Snelling died on Woleai on his way back to Chuuk. His crew continued, and at
Faraulep the syllabary was augmented with glyphs that Riesenberg & Kaneshiro call "Type 1". At least some of these may have been rebuses. This extended syllabary spread back to the other islands. When the next missionary,
John Macmillan Brown, reached Woleai in 1913, he found an indigenous writing system, albeit one known to only a few people. A chief named Egilimar showed it to him, and Brown published a list of 51 glyphs in 1914 that included V,
CV, CVV, CCV, and CVC syllables. ==Unicode==