credit: Fred Coy and Andras Nagy
Posted on 06/23/2009 5:40:05 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The illiterate Cherokee known as Sequoyah watched in awe as white settlers made marks on paper, convinced that these "talking leaves" were the source of white power and success. This inspired the consuming ambition of his life: to create a Cherokee written language. Born around 1770 near present-day Knoxville, Tenn., he was given the name George Gist (or Guess) by his father, an English fur trader, and his mother, a daughter of a prominent Cherokee family. But it was as Sequoyah that around 1809 he started devising a writing system for the spoken Cherokee language. Ten years later, despite the ridicule of friends who thought him crazed, he completed the script, in which each of the 85 characters represented a distinct sound in the spoken tongue, and combinations of these syllables spelled words. Within a few years, most Cherokees had adopted this syllabary, and Sequoyah became a folk hero as the inventor of the first Native American script in North America... his achievement is the only known instance of an individual's single-handedly creating an entirely new system of writing... Roughly inscribed on the limestone wall, Dr. Tankersley said, were 15 identifiable characters from the syllabary. They are accompanied by a date, apparently carved by the same hand. Part of the date is hard to read, but it appears to be either 1818 or 1808, at least a year earlier than any previously known records of the script... If the date proves to be 1808, Dr. Tankersley said, Sequoyah was probably the only one then with knowledge of the writing and so must have carved the characters himself. If it was 1818, he said, it was possible that someone he taught had made the characters.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
credit: Fred Coy and Andras Nagy
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Well, I’m pretty close to the border of the Cherokee Nation, here in Oklahoma..., and I’m managed to stay away from those arrows... :-)
We have you surrounded, we are everywhere!
‘Drink More Ovaltine’
The Cherokee syllabary enabled those fluent in the spoken Cherokee language to learn to read and write after a short time of study, as little as two weeks in some cases.
Dillsboro? Any pickles? :’)
Thanks!
We were told they filmed the Fugitive there and Tommy Lee Jones loved their barbecue. It's a nice little town.
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