
Sequoyah – Inventor of the Cherokee Script - Bootvis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah
======
yesbabyyes
Even more fascinating is that the Cherokee syllabary may have been the
foundation for the West African tribe Vai's syllabary, one of few scripts
invented in Africa. When freedmen went to Liberia, or rather what would become
Liberia, some Cherokees opted to join. One of them became a chief.

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

Edit: See also [https://whyafricanlanguages.org/2019/01/28/sequoyahs-
ghost-a...](https://whyafricanlanguages.org/2019/01/28/sequoyahs-ghost-at-
grand-cape-mount-liberia/)

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AlchemistCamp
I've always loved this story. It's a great demonstration of how _incredibly_
difficult inventions become easier just by knowing they're possible. Other
than once in the fertile crescent (arguably once soon after by Egypt), once in
China and once in Mesoamerica people haven't successfully invented writing.

But after knowing writing was _possible_ it just took a single determined
individual, such as Sequoyah, to create a writing system for a language
previously only spoken.

~~~
whatshisface
He knew more than just that writing was possible. He also knew how writing
worked and he had the idea of using characters to correspond to phenomes. It's
closer to building a device once you know how it works than it is to inventing
something once you know that it's possible.

~~~
jcranmer
> He also knew how writing worked and he had the idea of using characters to
> correspond to phenomes.

Actually, he didn't. He knew that the Americans had a writing system that was
sparse in its use of characters, and that it was capable of reflecting all
text, but he didn't know any of the actual principles. This is why he created
a syllabary (each character is roughly a syllable [1]) instead of an alphabet
(each character is a phoneme). He also had access to an English-language
Bible, although he couldn't read it--this is why Cherokee has several
characters that look like Latin letters but have completely different
pronunciation (ᏣᎳᎩ is pronounced "tsalagi").

The creation of the syllabary also corroborates the general history of
scripts: most scripts start out as logographic, morph into a rebus phase
(homophonic punning--using a picture of an eye to represent "I" because they
sound the same), and then transition into a syllabary. In the development of
Egyptian, the script instead became an abjad (reflecting only consonants); by
the time this came to the Greeks, they added vowel letters to make the first
alphabet (and all alphabets are essentially derived from the Greeks); the
abugida innovation (marking vowels systematically) happened a few times,
although most existing abugidas derive ultimately from the Brahmi script.
Sequoyah skipped straight to a syllabary because of access to Latin script
that illustrated that logographic script wasn't necessary.

[1] Mapping are of course rough in all forms of scripts, but syllabaries are
usually even rougher to map, since languages can have quite complex consonant
clusters. In practice, most such scripts tend to stick to classifying CV
(consonant-vowel) pairs as syllables and use multiple characters to represent
CVC, CCVC, CVCC, etc. syllables.

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bryanrasmussen
It's funny but I don't remember much about it now, other than he was one of my
heroes when I was young. I can't remember the age I was either - but I think
it was between 8 and 10.

The only thing I do remember is having a book with the portrait by Henry Inman
in it [https://npg.si.edu/blog/portrait-sequoyah-henry-
inman](https://npg.si.edu/blog/portrait-sequoyah-henry-inman) I still remember
that portrait, and sitting around daydreaming that I was him.

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Bootvis
I found his name in Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”, I’m halfway and
it’s an interesting read about how the world became to be as it is and
generally interesting tidbits.

