Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee • Hacker News Board

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#101

Post by simiones » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #83

rayiner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I found it interesting that you used the term European several times, but never once the term American. He served in the American military, lived in America, had an American father (according to the article). So you consider 19th century America to be Europe, or is there another reason for your choice of words?

"American" would be ambiguous in this context, right? Both the Cherokee and the English-speaking residents of the USA are American, but the specific point here was about whether Sequoyah was only a Cherokee speaker or if he had any knowledge of English, Spanish, French, Latin or any other European language. In this context, saying that Sequoyah's father was "American" would not make any point - it wouldn't tell anyone reading the comment that he was not Cherokee nor from any other native population; whereas European makes that point succinctly.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#102

Post by simiones » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #96

QuiDortDine wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Hebrew is not based on Yiddish, lol; only Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation was influenced by Yiddish. Modern Israeli Hebrew uses primarily Sephardi pronunciation, and Ashkenazi is mocked (i.e. Shabbat is Sephardi, Shabbos is Ashkenazi; modern Israeli Hebrew uses Shabbat). I grew up around Ashkenazi pronunciation in America, and had to unlearn it when I spent time in Israel. Nonetheless, Yemenite, Sephardi, and Ashkenaz…

> And a modern Hebrew speaker can easily understand Biblical Hebrew — they're closer than even Modern English and Shakespearean.

Of course, because modern Hebrew was constructed based on (the modern understanding of) Biblical Hebrew around the 1920s or slightly earlier, whereas Modern English naturally evolved for ~400 years from Shakespearean English and other forms of English.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#103

Post by rafram » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 11:44 AM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #22

torben-friis wrote: post #4

>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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#104

Post by amiga386 » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:12 PM UTC

steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #62

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

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

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#105

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:15 PM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #91

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found it interesting that you used the term European several times, but never once the term American. He served in the American military, lived in America, had an American father (according to the article). So you consider 19th century America to be Europe, or is there another reason for your choice of words?

I find it interesting that you think "served in the U.S. Army" isn't American enough for you. Foreigners can serve in the US Army. Native Americans weren't automatically US citizens until 1924, but were considered citizens of their sovereign tribe. European here clearly means both "from Europe" (eg, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters are European, not American), as well as "European Americans" (ie, Americans of Europ…

Loyalists were gone by from America by the mid-1780s.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#106

Post by birdsongs » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC

sourcegrift wrote: post #100

dang wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, we've changed the title using more representative language from the article. It's plenty interesting without superfluous claims!

[flagged]

> Would you care to enumerate what specifically you found interesting?

That one man, in the 1800's, saw his thousands-year old culture had a need for a written language... and just made it. And it was effective and good, and culturally spread in just years, allowing them to reach a higher literacy rate than english speakers in the country at the time.

That's interesting to me.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#107

Post by kkkqkqkqkqlqlql » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #22

torben-friis wrote: post #4

>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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#108

Post by bcjdjsndon » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

birdsongs wrote: post #106

sourcegrift wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Would you care to enumerate what specifically you found interesting? That one man, in the 1800's, saw his thousands-year old culture had a need for a written language... and just made it. And it was effective and good, and culturally spread in just years, allowing them to reach a higher literacy rate than english speakers in the country at the time. That's interesting to me.

> That one man, in the 1800's, saw his thousands-year old culture had a need for a written language...

This is why the Americans were so intractably behind the rest of the world by the time Columbus found em. I think it's sad

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#109

Post by bcjdjsndon » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #105

eesmith wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that you think "served in the U.S. Army" isn't American enough for you. Foreigners can serve in the US Army. Native Americans weren't automatically US citizens until 1924, but were considered citizens of their sovereign tribe. European here clearly means both "from Europe" (eg, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters are European, not American), as well as "European Americans" (ie, Americans of Europ…

Loyalists were gone by from America by the mid-1780s.

He's owned you there Ted, made you look a right tool

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#110

Post by tengwar2 » Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #49

pocksuppet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

long s and thorn would like to have a word with you, but they can't because they were removed from the keyboard In Unicode, that's ſ and þ. Both historical English letters that are no longer used.

"Ye Olde Mill" or whatever archaic silliness you'll find at fairs and whatnot was the result of the printing press dropping þ (as in þe, þ is just th-) and was never supposed to be pronounced with a "y" sound. "Ye Olde" ye was not the same word as "Hear ye, hear ye!", that ye is a plural 'you' basically the same word as "y'all" and never had a thorn.

This happened with more than one letter. For instance the Scots language had a letter yogh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh), which was written somewhat like a rounded "3" but lower on the line. Early printers had only the characters of the English language, and since this character looked like a hand-written z, that is what they used in its place. Hence the name "Menzies" is pronounced "Ming-is", since that isn't actually a z.

Welsh suffered more: it used to be full of "k"s. When the first Welsh Bible was printed, the English printer did not have enough "k"s, and substituted "c", and the language now does not use "k" at all. Apparently the printer's note on the matter still exists.