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Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

smithsonianmag.com

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

#121

Post by zhengyi13 »

mcswell wrote: post #117
ianburrell wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

English has sometimes been called a creole, i.e. what was a pidgin language but after it has been spoken by several generations of native speakers. One thing it lost some time around the Norman Conquest was the case marking phonology (apart from some pronouns).

I think your point about the loss of case generally stands, but surely the genitive isn't lost?

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

#122

Post by birdsongs »

bcjdjsndon wrote: post #108
birdsongs wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Except many native cultures in the Americas had written languages, going back thousands of years. I think the large scale genocide was a bit more sad.

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

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

#123

Post by colechristensen »

lmm wrote: post #52
colechristensen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard This was caused by the printing press and the typewriter (keyboard) both of which forced simplifications in the written English language.

And yet other languages have managed to resist those simplifications. So it's clearly not 100% forced.

Who says other languages haven't undergone significant changes?

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

#125

Post by nneonneo »

krapp wrote: post #85
Dylan16807 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pronunciation is so bad though. The consonants are mostly fine, but the way we write vowels is a total mess. We'd need at least a dozen vowel letters to sanely represent English. And we could cut a couple consonant letters to help make room, for maybe 30 letters total, still no accents.

Come now. English can be understood well enough through tough thorough thought.

Just today the NYT Strands puzzle gave a great example: you can find one set of prefixes that make each of the following rhyme, and a different set of prefixes that make them all sound different:

-ooze -oose -ews -ues -use -oes -uise

You can do this purely with prefixes ending in consonants, i.e. not by turning -use into -ouse, for example.

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

#126

Post by nneonneo »

krapp wrote: post #85
Dylan16807 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pronunciation is so bad though. The consonants are mostly fine, but the way we write vowels is a total mess. We'd need at least a dozen vowel letters to sanely represent English. And we could cut a couple consonant letters to help make room, for maybe 30 letters total, still no accents.

Come now. English can be understood well enough through tough thorough thought.

(spoilers for the little -ooze puzzle: for rhymes, booze choose brews blues ruse shoes cruise; for non-rhymes, snooze loose pews plagues obtuse toes guise; many others are possible, and rhyming or lack thereof may depend on accent).

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

#127

Post by bcjdjsndon »

birdsongs wrote: post #122
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Except many native cultures in the Americas had written languages, going back thousands of years. I think the large scale genocide was a bit more sad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...

There's only so much you can pass on without writing. It's a massive benefit to a society to not have to keep everything in people's heads.

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

#128

Post by karavelov »

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.

Article says he was born in 1770s, so his missing father can be Loyalist

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

#129

Post by xoxxala »

amiga386 wrote: post #104
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/Cher…

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...

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

#130

Post by observationist »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #11
observationist wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Also "Sequoyah’s syllabary was not simply a creative triumph, but a new means of self-government and cultural memory"

There are all sorts of tell-tales, but the last paragraph is the most overt. I'd grant that it could be a mix, but at the very least it's heavily AI rewritten. The whole thing has an AI tempo and vibe, though.
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