Cherokee syllabary
ᏣᎳᎩ ᎠᏂᏛᏗ
The Cherokee syllabary has 85 characters, each representing a full syllable of the Cherokee language (Tsalagi). It was invented around 1821 by a single man — Sequoyah, who spoke no English and could not read any other script — and within a few years of its publication, the Cherokee Nation was more literate than the surrounding United States.
All 85 syllables
History
Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ, c. 1770–1843) was a Cherokee silversmith who became convinced that the power of white settlers came from their "talking leaves" — their ability to transmit language on paper. Over roughly 12 years, amid ridicule from his own community, he invented a complete writing system from scratch. He first tried a logographic system (one character per word) and abandoned it; his breakthrough was to realize Cherokee syllables were finite and could each get their own sign. He presented his finished syllabary to the Cherokee National Council in 1821, and by 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper was being published in it. Literacy rates in the Cherokee Nation rapidly surpassed those in neighboring US states — an almost unparalleled achievement in world history of writing systems.
Things you might not know
- Sequoyah is the only person in recorded history known to have single-handedly invented a complete writing system for their own language without being literate in any other script.
- Many Cherokee letters look like Latin letters but sound completely different — D = "a", R = "e", T = "i", G = "nah".
- The Cherokee Nation had its own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, publishing bilingual articles in English and Cherokee from 1828.
- The giant sequoia tree was named in Sequoyah's honor by a German-Austrian botanist in the 1840s.