
Cherokee Syllabary - Elof
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
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AlchemistCamp
The story of how Sequoyah created this is a good one. He knew of the
technology of writing and saw its power but essentially did a clean-room re-
implementation of it.

The first incarnation was closer to Chinese or ancient Egyptian in that he
tried to create a different symbol for each word. Then, after creating over a
thousand symbols and still being far from his goal, he went back to the
drawing board and took a purely phonetic approach.

Not being literate in English, he simply borrowed sritten symbols he saw,
including numerals. Ultimately, the phonetic-based system was a success and
spread through the Cherokee nation quickly.

Humans have only invented writing independently two or maybe three times. It's
amazing how much easier it becomes just knowing such a thing is possible!

~~~
cossatot
What is also quite fascinating to me is that many of the Cherokee of the time
considered writing to be a form of witchcraft. Sequoyah allegedly [e.g., 1]
decided that it was not based on his observations of white men, but his
initial trials of teaching written Cherokee were sufficient to bring charges
of witchcraft against his daughter, his first pupil. However, after some
demonstrations, it was shown to be what it is, a very simple but extremely
effective tool.

I'm sure many of the readers of this fine forum know the quote (and
provenance, which I don't) that is something like 'any sufficiently advanced
form of technology is indistinguishable from magic'.

[1]: [https://cherokee.org/About-The-
Nation/History/Facts/Sequoyah...](https://cherokee.org/About-The-
Nation/History/Facts/Sequoyah-and-the-Cherokee-Syllabary)

~~~
empath75
I’m curious what sorcery and witchcraft actually meant in the context of
Cherokee society at the time.

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pcwalton
Related (as they were influenced by the Cherokee writing system) and similarly
interesting: Canadian aboriginal syllabics [1], which are unique in that the
shape of the character determines the consonant, while the 90-degree
_rotation_ of the character determines the vowel.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics)

~~~
jcranmer
Strictly speaking, the Canadian Aboriginal syllabics is an abugida, not a
syllabary.

In the categorization of writing systems, alphabets (such as Latin) encode
each phoneme as a distinct letter; abjads (such as Arabic) encode only
consonants, with vowels as optional diacritics; abugidas (such as Indic
scripts) primarily encode consonants but mark vowels in some systematic way;
syllabaries just encode each syllable as a unique glyph without any systematic
modification; and logographic systems don't have any systematic phonetic
component (although they usually are influenced by phonetics, e.g., the rebus
principle of diagramming abstract concepts by use of homonyms).

Sequoyah had access to an English-language Bible, so although he couldn't read
the Latin text, he used several letters as inspiration for Cherokee, which is
why you see Latin characters that correspond to completely different sounds.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
While I agree the distinction you reference between abugidas and syllabaries
is useful, it's not a distinction that's always observed (e.g. Indic scripts
are sometimes referred to as syllabaries).

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yesbabyyes
I have family who are Vai, a tribe from Liberia/Sierra Leone. The Vai language
has a syllabary, one of the few independent written languages in Africa. As it
says in the article, there is a possible connection with the Cherokee
syllabary. When free African-Americans got the option to settle in Liberia
some Cherokee opted to join, apparently not seeing a future in their colonized
homeland.

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bane
For people who might be interested in the modern Cherokee (including lessons
on the language, food and culture) might enjoy a Cherokee produced show called
Osiyo [http://osiyo.tv/](http://osiyo.tv/)

