A striking illustration of this topic from the history of writing is the syllabary alphabet, invented around 1820 in Arkansas by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah. Sequoyah saw that white people drew some symbols on paper and that thanks to these icons it was much easier for them to remember and make long speeches. However, since, along with the vast majority of his fellow tribesmen, Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English, exactly how these badges worked remained a mystery to him. Being a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by inventing a system to make it easier to account for the debts of his customers. For each customer, he drew a picture, to which circles and lines of different sizes were added, indicating the amount of debt.
Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to take the next step and come up with a recording system for native language. He began again by drawing pictures, but soon abandoned this activity as too difficult to carry out - both from the point of view of volume and from the point of view of his personal artistic abilities. Then he began to come up with separate signs for each word, but he was also dissatisfied with the result, because even when the number of his signs went into the thousands, there was still no end in sight to the work.
Finally, Sequoia realized that all words consist of a relatively small number of sound elements that are repeated in many different combinations - what we call syllables. At first he came up with 200 syllabic symbols and gradually increased this number to 85, of which the majority were a combination of one consonant and one vowel.
One of the sources of signs for Sequoia was a collection of spelling exercises in English, which he got from school teacher. About a couple of dozen of his syllabic symbols were directly copied from Latin letters, although, of course, they had a completely different meaning, since they English meanings Sequoia didn't know. For example, he chose the symbols D, R, b and h to represent the syllables a, e, si and ni, respectively, and the symbol 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He obtained other symbols by modifying English letters, for example, assigning the syllables yu, sa and to symbols, and, respectively. The remaining symbols were purely a figment of his imagination - for example, (for the syllable ho), (syllable li) and (syllable well)*. The extremely close correspondence to the phonetics of the Cherokee language and the ease with which it can be learned have earned Sequoyah's syllabary the almost unanimous admiration of professional linguists. In a short period of time, almost all of the Cherokees mastered the new syllabary, bought a printing press, ordered a set of original letters, and began printing books and newspapers.
The previous post with the legend of the Cherokee Indians made me think that this legend would hardly have survived if not for the syllabary of the Cherokee Indians. Fragment from D. Diamond's book "Guns, Steel and Germs":
A striking illustration of this topic from the history of writing is the syllabary alphabet, invented around 1820 in Arkansas by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah. Sequoyah saw that white people drew some symbols on paper and that thanks to these icons it was much easier for them to remember and make long speeches. However, since, along with the vast majority of his fellow tribesmen, Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English, exactly how these badges worked remained a mystery to him. Being a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by inventing a system to make it easier to account for the debts of his customers. For each customer, he drew a picture, to which circles and lines of different sizes were added, indicating the amount of debt.
Around 1810, Sequoia decided to take the next step and come up with a notation system for the native language. He began again by drawing pictures, but soon abandoned this activity as too difficult to carry out - both from the point of view of volume and from the point of view of his personal artistic abilities. Then he began to come up with separate signs for each word, but he was also dissatisfied with the result, because even when the number of his signs went into the thousands, there was still no end in sight to the work.
Finally, Sequoia realized that all words consist of a relatively small number of sound elements that are repeated in many different combinations - what we call syllables. At first he came up with 200 syllabic symbols and gradually increased this number to 85, of which the majority were a combination of one consonant and one vowel.
One of the sources of signs for Sequoia was a collection of spelling exercises in English, which he received from a school teacher. About a couple of dozen of his syllabic symbols were directly copied from Latin letters, although, of course, they had a completely different meaning, since Sequoia did not know their English meanings. For example, he chose the symbols D, R, b and h to represent the syllables a, e, si and ni, respectively, and the symbol 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He obtained other symbols by modifying English letters, for example, assigning the syllables yu, sa and to symbols, and, respectively. The remaining symbols were purely a figment of his imagination - for example, (for the syllable ho), (syllable li) and (syllable well)*. The extremely close correspondence to the phonetics of the Cherokee language and the ease with which it can be learned have earned Sequoyah's syllabary the almost unanimous admiration of professional linguists. In a short period of time, almost all of the Cherokees mastered the new syllabary, bought a printing press, ordered a set of original letters, and began printing books and newspapers.
...
An excellent illustration of unification under the threat of external power is the formation of the Cherokee Indian Confederacy in the southeastern United States. The Cherokees were originally divided into 30–40 independent chiefdoms, each a village of about 400 people. Gradually, the expansion of white settlements began to lead to armed conflicts between whites and Cherokees. When individual Indians pillaged or attacked settlers and merchants, whites could not distinguish one Cherokee chiefdom from another, and so retaliated with military expeditions or trade boycotts indiscriminately. As a result, the Cherokees gradually began to realize the need to unite into one confederation, which took shape in the middle of the 18th century. It began in 1730, when the larger chiefdoms chose from among their ranks a single leader, a chief named Moytoi (the position passed to his son in 1741). The first task of such a leader was to punish those who committed attacks on whites and to deal with the white government. Around 1758, the Cherokees streamlined the decision-making process of the confederacy and established an annual council that was modeled after the village councils they were familiar with and held in the same village (Echota), thereby effectively becoming their unofficial capital. Over time, the Cherokees developed their own written language and adopted a written constitution.
The most developed of the writing systems created by the American Indians is the Cherokee syllabary. The Cherokees are a North American Indian tribe that speaks the Iroquoian language. The Cherokees used to live in Northern Georgia and North Carolina (USA), but in 1838-1839. were moved to a reservation in Indian Territory.
Cherokee writing was invented in 1821 by an Indian named Sequoia, or Sikwaya, who was also called John Gist, Gest or Hess. Apparently, he was an uneducated man, but very gifted and understood what advantages writing could give his people. At first he created ideographic writing, but, soon realizing how cumbersome it was, he invented syllabic writing. About ten years later, the writing he created became so widespread that almost all the men of the tribe became literate; many Chiroque manuscripts have survived 1 A newspaper was even published in this script. The Cherokee writing system is now out of use.
The Cherokee syllabary consists of eighty-five characters, which can be divided into four groups:
- signs based on the forms of uppercase and lowercase Latin letters (not coinciding with them in meaning);
- signs that are inverted or otherwise modified Latin letters (for example, with some additional lines), also having a different meaning;
- European numbers, used in the same way as Latin letters;
- arbitrary signs.
Cherokee syllabics.
Cherokee writing is characterized by an abundance of consonants and consonant clusters and a wide variety of vowels. Overall, this writing system stands up flawlessly. scientific basis and, as experience has shown, it is easily and quickly absorbed.
Origin
The origin of the Cherokee syllabary is one of the best historically attested examples of the creation of a writing system. Some scholars believe that the phonetic meanings of Sequoia's signs and the corresponding Latin letters differ because Sequoia did not know the English alphabet well. However, this explanation appears to be erroneous. The fact that the Cherokee characters in no case retained the meaning of the Latin letters is, in our opinion, the clearest proof of Sequoyah's intention to create a writing completely different from English alphabet. And the fact that Sequoia's syllabary quite satisfactorily conveys the Cherokee language confirms that the creator of this writing understood how to approach the solution of the problems that he faced.
It is difficult to explain why Sequoia replaced the Latin alphabetic writing system with a syllabary. It is possible that Sequoyah understood the very principle of alphabetic writing and that he was completely satisfied with dividing words into their constituent syllables. However, it is also quite possible that Sequoia deliberately preferred the syllabic system to the alphabetic one, since it was fully consistent with the Cherokee language - adapting syllabic writing to a language like English, for example, which is characterized by a frequent accumulation of various consonants, would have been much more difficult.
Be that as it may, the Cherokee writing is one of the best examples of borrowing a script without preserving the original phonetic meaning of the corresponding characters.
Cherokee scripts created by Maurice and Eubanks
J. Mooney mentions two newer scripts created around 1890. An attempt to apply them to the Cherokee language failed.
1) Abbot Maurice, who served at the mission of the fort on the lake. Stuart in British Columbia, developed a semi-alphabetic script modeled on the syllabaries of the Dane (or Tinne) and Cree tribes. “In this system, all related sounds are represented by the same sign in different positions, as well as with the addition of a dot or bar.” As Mooney points out, the design was very simple and the signs were easily distinguishable, “but unfortunately they were difficult to combine into words in handwriting.”
2) The second system was much more ingenious; it was invented by William Eubanks. He himself was half-Cherokee, originally from Tahlek, located in Indian Territory. Eubanks' system was a kind of shorthand writing, very convenient for cursive writing. “Fifteen basic characters, written using a single straight or curved line, were combined with differently placed dots, thus conveying all the sounds of the language” (Mooney).
Cherokee Indian writingHardly a legend about Milky Way would have been preserved if not for the syllabary alphabet of the Cherokee Indians.
Fragment from D. Diamond's book "Guns, Steel and Germs":
A striking illustration of this topic from the history of writing is the syllabary alphabet, invented around 1820 in Arkansas by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah. Sequoyah saw that white people drew some symbols on paper and that thanks to these icons it was much easier for them to remember and make long speeches. However, since, along with the vast majority of his fellow tribesmen, Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English, exactly how these badges worked remained a mystery to him. Being a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by inventing a system to make it easier to account for the debts of his customers. For each customer, he drew a picture, to which circles and lines of different sizes were added, indicating the amount of debt.Around 1810, Sequoia decided to take the next step and come up with a notation system for the native language. He began again by drawing pictures, but soon abandoned this activity as too difficult to carry out - both from the point of view of volume and from the point of view of his personal artistic abilities. Then he began to come up with separate signs for each word, but he was also dissatisfied with the result, because even when the number of his signs went into the thousands, there was still no end in sight to the work.
Finally, Sequoia realized that all words consist of a relatively small number of sound elements that are repeated in many different combinations - what we call syllables. At first he came up with 200 syllabic symbols and gradually increased this number to 85, of which the majority were a combination of one consonant and one vowel.One of the sources of signs for Sequoia was a collection of spelling exercises in English, which he received from a school teacher. About a couple of dozen of his syllabic symbols were directly copied from Latin letters, although, of course, they had a completely different meaning, since Sequoia did not know their English meanings. For example, he chose the symbols D, R, b and h to represent the syllables a, e, si and ni, respectively, and the symbol 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He received other symbols by modification English letters, for example, by assigning the syllables yu, sa and to the designations, and respectively. The remaining symbols were purely a figment of his imagination - for example, (for the syllable ho), (syllable li) and (syllable well)*. The extremely close correspondence to the phonetics of the Cherokee language and the ease with which it can be learned have earned Sequoyah's syllabary the almost unanimous admiration of professional linguists. In a short period of time, almost all of the Cherokees mastered the new syllabary, bought a printing press, ordered a set of original letters, and began printing books and newspapers.
...
An excellent illustration of unification under the threat of external power is the formation of the Cherokee Indian Confederacy in the southeastern United States. The Cherokees were originally divided into 30–40 independent chiefdoms, each a village of about 400 people. Gradually, the expansion of white settlements began to lead to armed conflicts between whites and Cherokees. When individual Indians pillaged or attacked settlers and merchants, whites could not distinguish one Cherokee chiefdom from another, and so retaliated with military expeditions or trade boycotts indiscriminately. As a result, the Cherokees gradually began to realize the need to unite into one confederation, which took shape in the middle of the 18th century. It began in 1730, when the larger chiefdoms chose from among their ranks a single leader, a chief named Moytoi (the position passed to his son in 1741). The first task of such a leader was to punish those who committed attacks on whites and to deal with the white government. Around 1758, the Cherokees streamlined the decision-making process of the confederacy and established an annual council that was modeled after the village councils they were familiar with and held in the same village (Echota), thereby effectively becoming their unofficial capital. Over time, the Cherokees developed their own
writing and adopted a written constitution.