A Written Language for the Cherokee So Efficient It Was Thought to Be Magic

A Written Language for the Cherokee So Efficient It Was Thought to Be Magic(smithsonianmag.com)

66 points by grahambargeron 2 hours ago | 37 comments

rayiner 1 hour ago |

The article’s title is misleading: “The Man Who Created a Written Language for the Cherokee Did It So Efficiently and Elegantly, His Peers Thought It Was Magic.”

His peers thought it was magic because they were unfamiliar with the concept of writing, not because his writing system was so efficient. He was put on trial for witchcraft because people thought he was communicating via magic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-a....

Modified3019 1 hour ago | |

For those just encountering this like me, the man in question was Sequoyah, a monolingual Cherokee. His own tribe put him on trial, being overseen by his Chief.

Slightly different from what I’d normally assume had happened from just reading the above comment.

Really impressive on his part, basically saw it was possible and looked as some examples of what others had done, then got to work.

rayiner 29 minutes ago | | |

The notion that Sequoyah was a monolingual Cherokee is dubious. He had a European father (though he was raised with his mother) and worked as a trader and served in the U.S. Army. He developed his syllabary in “Willstown”—a Cherokee trading post named after Will Weber, who was also half Cherokee and half European. These were people who had extensive contact with Europeans. Moreover, the syllabary includes adaptations of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters. He was obviously exposed to a variety of European writing. It seems highly unlikely that someone who was so linguistically gifted to be able to invent a syllabary would not have picked up some familiarity with spoken and written English through that exposure.

torben-friis 2 hours ago |

>The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English.

I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.

reissbaker 1 hour ago | |

Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who were taught a simplified version by seafaring Canaanites — the Phoenicians — and termed it the "Phoenician alphabet" [2] despite the Phoenicians not specifically inventing it), significant alterations had to be made and it's been an imperfect match for most Western languages ever since.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

nvader 1 hour ago | | |

At least one counter-example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul is technically an alphabet, and is non-Canaanite derived.

fnordpiglet 1 hour ago | | |

My understanding is it’s the earliest known alphabet but not the ancestor to all alphabetic languages as there are Asian and other alphabetic languages that are not derived from western or Arabic alphabets. Specifically Greek and Latin alphabets and their descendants are based on it. Specifically Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic alphabets derived from kanji (and Chinese pictograms) as a simplification of the pictographic language and not derived from proto sinaitic. Others are possibly linked, like Thai, Khmer, etc through an Aramaic -> Brami-> Pallava->Khmer linkage but the Brami link is not fully established to be true.

andsoitis 40 minutes ago | | |

Technically, the proto-Sinaitic script is an abjad, with the Greek alphabet being the first true alphabet (symbols for both consonants and vowels).

Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.”

Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language.

The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.

rayiner 1 hour ago | | |

Egyptian hieroglyphics already had alphabetic elements, and the canaanites borrowed those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs (“Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system”).

austin-cheney 25 minutes ago | | |

Another counter-example is Phags Pa Script.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script

Animats 1 hour ago | |

There's an International Phonetic Alphabet for transcribing speech literally.[1] Automation is now available. Languages to IPA, IPA to various languages, text to speech, speech to text, evaluation of pronunciation.

[1] https://easypronunciation.com/en/english-phonetic-transcript...

alex0015 1 hour ago | | |

The IPA still relies on convention to transcribe sounds. There's plenty of academic papers out there describing lesser studied languages and, if those conventions don't yet exist, the papers often contradict each other.

A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. Everyone pronounces words differently than the writing system prescribes, in every language. Words are shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.

colechristensen 1 hour ago | |

English is three* languages in a trenchcoat, all languages borrow but English in particular is a cobbled together mess. Like a salors' pidgin language except instead of sailors, driven by the ruling class of Britain at the boundary of several language families who kept conquering each other.

*(or 7 or whatever number makes you feel best)

dataflow 1 hour ago | | |

Might be a mess linguistically, but it's sure nice to have only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard.

CPLX 2 hours ago |

In case anyone is curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

paleotrope 1 hour ago | |

Amazing "By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography.[5]". It even has a reference so it must be true.

paleotrope 1 hour ago | | |

Anyway I put in a request to get a copy at my local library so I will update here in a few months when I have a copy of the book.