Posted on 08/27/2011 9:48:30 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The authors investigate the origins of the earliest script of the Cherokees, using inscriptions in the Red Bird River Shelter. Their analysis suggests that the engravings in the cave show the experimental creation of a syllabary (alphabet of signs). This in turn offers support for the historical notion that this writing system was not an ancestral practice preserved through missionaries, but an invention of the early nineteenth century; one that should be credited to the Native American pioneer scholar, Sequoyah.
(Excerpt) Read more at antiquity.ac.uk ...
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Sorry. Writing had already been “invented” 5000 years earlier.
FLASH: Earliest Native American Writing Discovered: Smudges on cave roof shown to be smoke signals.
Isn't an alphabet an "alphabet of signs"? The way I heard it in grad school is that each of the signs in a syllabary represents a syllable, rather than an individual sound, as in an alphabet. I believe Japanese has a syllabary.
You are correct. :’) This was the writer’s way of explaining it without going into a bogging-down detail. Alphabets caught on because they are easier to learn and easier to teach, and more useful in other ways. Syllabaries are way older though. Once people were used to writing systems of that kind, they usually produced easier ways to write, based on the older, underlying system, while simultaneously continuing to use the older system for recordkeeping, official business, diplomatic communiques, and religious uses. The Rosetta Stone has the same proclamation in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek, for example.
Hmmm. The symbols in the middle of the picture make reference to a certain Arne Sacknussen...
Indians didn't care about much...they liked the "kill" of the hunt...includng each other. They never "grew" and probably would have annihilated themselves if it wasn't for the white man. (I think it was Teddy Roosevelt who said that".
The Korean system shows you where to put your tongue in your mouth when you pronounce the various syllables. It's missing a few sounds which limits its ability to communicate Indo-European languages.
Japanese has THREE writing systems ~ http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writjpn.html gives a fair description.
Syllabary's are NOT alphabets. Their proponents claim them to be easier to learn ~ which is probably true.
Ideographs require substantial additional education to be able to use them ~ my understanding is that to become adept at written Chinese you need about 8 years of study. American Indian sign language ~ possibly a derivative of the earliest sign languages used in China, is fairly easy to learn if you can remember right and left.
Turning the "signs" into a coherent way of representing spoken languages took a bit longer ~
To a degree Sumerian writing arose out of the need for accountants to keep books.
Most American Indian writings are more recent than Sumerian but not necessarily more recent than a great number of Old World systems.
Seyquoia was half-white- did you know ? His Cherokee wife divorced him because he spent too much time working on his alphabet, instead of helping out around the place. He was sort of a ner-do-well in Cherokee terms.
Oh, I think you and Teddy forgot the massacre of Indian men, women and children at Sand Creek, after which the federalized Colorado volunteers rode into Denver wearing women’s scalps and butchered vaginas around their necks. But then, some value bigotry and hate more than the facts of history.
:’D
Perhaps. Still, the invention of a syllabary, essentially an independent written language, done just from the knowledge that it was possible, is an act of genius.
Reference Seyquoia in Oliver LaFarge’s Pictoral History of the American Indian. c 1956, reprint 1974. It’s a marvelous browser history and the photographic collection is amazing.
Hybrid vigor.
I am not denigrating the guy- his accomplishment speaks for itself- I hope I didn’t come across that way. My kids have Cherokee ancestry, so we did a homeschool unit on him. I was simply adding facts that I knew.
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