Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/man-created-written-language-cherokee-did-efficiently-elegantly-peers-thought-magic-180988850/

by grahambargeron • 1 month ago

195 105 1 month ago

smithsonianmag.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary#Unicode

CPLX• 1 month ago

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

paleotrope2• 1 month 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.

paleotrope2• 1 month 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.

mcswell6• 1 month ago

Around the same time, Christian missionaries introduced writing (using an adapted Latin alphabet) to Hawai`i. Within ten years nearly the entire population (I would guess with the exception of older people) was literate. Mark Twain remarked on Hawai`ian literacy a few decades later.

tjmc• 1 month ago

Thank you. A big omission from the original article.

LargoLasskhyfv• 1 month ago

I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree_syllabics TBH.

They look like something right out of some Sci-Fi.

torben-friis• 1 month 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.

colechristensen6• 1 month 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 month ago

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

yellowapple2• 1 month ago

Good languages borrow, great languages steal?

ianburrell• 1 month ago

English is a West Germanic language with vocabulary from other languages, primarily French and Latin. But most of the core words are Germanic. It is not a pidgin whose defining feature is simplified grammar.

Animats• 1 month 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...

alex00152• 1 month 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.

reissbaker8• 1 month 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 month ago

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

rayiner4• 1 month 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”).

fnordpiglet• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

austin-cheney3• 1 month ago

Another counter-example is Phags Pa Script.

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

tedd4u• 1 month ago

Very enjoyable documentary on this alphabetic development with relevant on-site visits.

https://www.amazon.com/A-to-Z-Season-1/dp/B0CWCHTM3B

Episode 2 then covers the printing press.

ummonk3• 1 month ago

"This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language" - nonsense. That's just because modern Hebrew is based on the written language and thus reflects spelling pronunciation rather than historical pronunciation.

Also, proto-Sinaitic is not an alphabet. That's why Persian writing became harder to read when they switched from the nearly alphabetic Old Persian cuneiform to Aramaic abjad descended from proto-Sinaitic.

QuiDortDine2• 1 month ago

"and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible": That is the definition of a dialect.

Also, I don't know how you can claim Hebrew is phonetically represented by its alphabet rather than the other way around, as a revived language the pronunciations are largely a matter of convention based on Yiddish. It would be more accurate to say that modern Hebrew uses an ancient writing system, which happens to be closely related to the ancestor of modern European alphabets.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

Terr_• 1 month ago

all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite

Counterexample: Korean Hangul [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

rafram3• 1 month ago

This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language

It most certainly does not!

I think you could more or less accurately make that claim about Standard Arabic, which has preserved a distinct sound for each letter and only rarely does things that you wouldn’t expect (tanween…).

Modern Hebrew, by contrast, has merged many consonant sounds without merging their letters (sin and samekh, tav and tet), dropped the ayin sound and left the letter as a pseudo-vowel, and decoupled long vowel sounds from their long vowel carrier letters to the point that they’re essentially arbitrary (for each letter, you can find an example of it representing every single vowel sound).

To your main point, though, the main commonality between Semitic scripts and western Latin/Greek-derived scripts is the rough order of the letters and some of the shapes. Latin alphabet isn’t an abjad, it has lots of letters that have no equivalent in Semitic… and it actually represents many languages very faithfully! English is an outlier. So I am not convinced by your argument.

kkkqkqkqkqlqlql• 1 month ago

This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language

Wasn't Hebrew dead for like 2000 years or something until the Israeli state was set up? Not hard to have a faithful alphabet when your spoken language is frozen in time. Hell, even evolving languages, like Spanish, can have somewhat phonetically accurate alphabets. As said in the other comment, English is more of an exception in that regard.

rayiner4• 1 month 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 month 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.

rayiner4• 1 month 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. His cousin, to whom he presented his syllabary, was also half European, “George Lowery.” He had extensive contact with Europeans. Moreover, his syllabary includes adaptations of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters. Part of the story is that he copied some character shapes from his wife’s family’s Bible. (Presumably they could read English if they had a Bible.) He was obviously exposed to a variety of European writing. He completed his syllabary in 1821, many years after his military service. 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.

This article does a good job of reviewing the conflicting narratives of his history: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26467045. It’s all very uncertain, and there’s a lot of mythology.

IIAOPSW• 1 month ago

Its a real shame we don't have any transcripts or other court records from that hearing...for obvious reasons.

dang4• 1 month ago

Ok, we've changed the title using more representative language from the article.

It's plenty interesting without superfluous claims!

rayiner4• 1 month ago

I didn’t mean to criticize the HN title—it accurately reflected the title on the linked page. I just thought the article’s choice of title was interesting given the rest of the story.

onlypassingthru• 1 month ago

There's a 1991 film (and earlier novel) called Black Robe that fictionalizes what it might've been like when the first Jesuit missionaries introduced this powerful black magic to the North American natives in the 17th century.[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cj_bSkuKVA

HoldOnAMinute• 1 month ago

Now you have me wondering what is theoretically the most compact and efficient language, without using compression

sometimelurker• 1 month ago

and now this reminds me of kolmogorov complexity

Wowfunhappy• 1 month ago

I feel like you're going to run up against the definitions of "efficient" and "compression".

For example, a language with a larger alphabet will be able to express more in fewer characters. Is that more efficient?

Similarly, you could think of each word as a sort of lookup table for information in the mind of the reader. We don't define words as we're writing, we expect the speaker to know them already. If a language has more words, each word is more precise, and fewer words can be used to express an idea—but is that efficiency? You're just relying on the reader having more preexisting knowledge.

mcswell6• 1 month ago

a language with a larger alphabet will be able to express more in fewer characters.

True, although it's not really the alphabet that determines this, it's the number of phonemes (distinctive sounds) in the language. For example, writing /s/ (the sound) sometimes with 's' and sometimes with 'c' does nothing to shorten words in English or Spanish.

But in general, languages with fewer phonemes tend to have longer words (and tone languages often have very short words---in a sense, they have more phonemes than non-tone languages). Morphology (particularly compounding) often obscures this.

zhoBEENG• 1 month ago

Claude Shannon talks about this in A Mathematical Theory of Communication. He defines redundancy as one minus relative entropy, where relative entropy is the ratio of the language's actual average uncertainty per symbol to the maximum possible uncertainty if all alphabet symbols were completely random and equally likely.

He gives some rather cute examples, like the language of Finnegans Wake by Joyce being very low redundancy (high efficiency in your words). He also states that crossword puzzles don't work in a perfectly efficient language, that 50% redundancy is pretty good for 2-d puzzles, and 33% redundancy good for 3-d puzzles. This has always been one of my favorite and in my mind most random corollaries in a paper.

https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

krapp2• 1 month ago

It's not a real language and I don't know what "compression" means in this context but I'll throw Ithkuil against the wall and see if it sticks[0,1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29036441

steve-atx-7600• 1 month ago

Not even an example of the glyphs??? Smithsonian must be another repository of clickbait like Forbes.

postoplust• 1 month ago

Eventually, he hit on 86 syllables that expressed specific sounds, each syllable represented by symbols borrowed from Greek, Hebrew and English. Later reduced to 85 symbols...

Maybe the symbols themselves aren't new.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 month ago

It's on wikipedia. I had thought everyone's seen these, but maybe I was the weird kid who'd read the encyclopedia for fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary#Unicode

cwnyth2• 1 month ago

There's at least two of us, though at the time I was limited to the World Book Encyclopedia.

You (or anyone else here) might enjoy Omniglot, an old web 1.0 site that was amazing for its comprehensive treatment of all writing scripts:

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/cherokee.htm

dang4• 1 month ago

Thanks! We'll put that in the toptext as well.

junon• 1 month ago

I love writing systems and had never seen or heard of this. Also thought it was strange that Smithsonian of all things didn't include it.

Beautiful glyph. I love it. Thanks for the link!

amiga386• 1 month ago

See this is the value of Wikipedia.

Sure, the Smithsonian has a nice article with a flowing narrative. But we want facts. Let's look up this Sequoyah chap:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah

In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in the Cherokee language.

The link is right there, you can move right on to learning about what he created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

- His original script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Original_Cherokee_Syllaba...

- More readable table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cherokee_Syllabary.svg

- Sample text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language#Samples

xoxxala• 1 month ago

Thanks to Wikipedia TIL Johnny Cash released a song about Sequoyah called "Talking Leaves". From the same album as the much more famous "Ballad of Ira Hayes".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Tears:_Ballads_of_the_A...

philipswood• 1 month ago

An invented syllabary for English: https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/engul.htm

Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

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