A Written Language for the Cherokee So Efficient It Was Thought to Be Magic

ggrahambargeron about 4 hours ago 52 commentsRead Article on smithsonianmag.com

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rayiner•about 3 hours ago

The article’s title is misleading: “The Man Who Created a Written Language for the Cherokee Did It So Efficiently and Elegantly, His Peers Thought It Was Magic.”

His peers thought it was magic because they were unfamiliar with the concept of writing, not because his writing system was so efficient. He was put on trial for witchcraft because people thought he was communicating via magic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-a....

Modified3019•about 2 hours ago

For those just encountering this like me, the man in question was Sequoyah, a monolingual Cherokee. His own tribe put him on trial, being overseen by his Chief.

Slightly different from what I’d normally assume had happened from just reading the above comment.

Really impressive on his part, basically saw it was possible and looked as some examples of what others had done, then got to work.

rayiner•about 1 hour ago

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 he copied some character shapes from his wife’s family’s Bible. (Presumably they could read English if they had a Bible.) He was obviously exposed to a variety of European writing. He completed his syllabary in 1821, many years after his military service. It seems highly unlikely that someone who was so linguistically gifted to be able to invent a syllabary would not have picked up some familiarity with spoken and written English through that exposure.

IIAOPSW•32 minutes ago

Its a real shame we don't have any transcripts or other court records from that hearing...for obvious reasons.

torben-friis•about 3 hours ago

>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.

reissbaker•about 3 hours ago

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 were taught a simplified version by seafaring Canaanites — the Phoenicians — and termed it the "Phoenician alphabet" [2] despite the Phoenicians not specifically inventing it), significant alterations had to be made and it's been an imperfect match for most Western languages ever since.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

ummonk•12 minutes ago

"This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language" - nonsense. That's just because modern Hebrew is based on the written language and thus reflects spelling pronunciation rather than historical pronunciation.

Also, proto-Sinaitic is not an alphabet. That's why Persian writing became harder to read when they switched from the nearly alphabetic Old Persian cuneiform to Aramaic abjad descended from proto-Sinaitic.

nvader•about 3 hours ago

At least one counter-example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul is technically an alphabet, and is non-Canaanite derived.

reissbaker•about 2 hours ago

It wasn't directly cribbed (unlike Western alphabets), but given that Hangul was invented in the 1400s after exposure to Western alphabets, most scholars still consider alphabets to have only been invented once [1] and then copied, much like the wheel. Although I suppose that's true of Cherokee too!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

amluto•about 2 hours ago

It's not quite in the same category, but there's also Zhuyin Fuhao:

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

andsoitis•about 2 hours ago

Technically, the proto-Sinaitic script is an abjad, with the Greek alphabet being the first true alphabet (symbols for both consonants and vowels).

Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.”

Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language.

The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.

applicative•about 1 hour ago

Canaanite and its abjad have been in continuous use, in various versions, for more than 2,800 years. It's true there's no Linear B.

fnordpiglet•about 2 hours ago

My understanding is it’s the earliest known alphabet but not the ancestor to all alphabetic languages as there are Asian and other alphabetic languages that are not derived from western or Arabic alphabets. Specifically Greek and Latin alphabets and their descendants are based on it. Specifically Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic alphabets derived from kanji (and Chinese pictograms) as a simplification of the pictographic language and not derived from proto sinaitic. Others are possibly linked, like Thai, Khmer, etc through an Aramaic -> Brami-> Pallava->Khmer linkage but the Brami link is not fully established to be true.

reissbaker•about 2 hours ago

No: most scholars believe alphabets were only invented once, much like the wheel. All Western alphabets are direct descendants, and the non-Western alphabets were directly inspired by it. [1]

Phonetic alphabets were introduced to most of Asia by various Brahmic scripts; the most widely-used (albeit briefly-used) one being the Mongolian Phags-pa script [2], derived from Tibetan, derived from various Brahmic scripts, derived from Aramaic, derived from Phoenician, derived from — sure enough — proto-Sinaitic. Thai and Khmer are derived from Pallava [3], which is derived from Tamil-Brahmi, derived from other Brahmic scripts, again derived from Aramaic and thus eventually from proto-Sinaitic; etc etc.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallava_script

BigTTYGothGF•about 1 hour ago

Syllabaries are not alphabets.

tedd4u•about 1 hour ago

Very enjoyable documentary on this alphabetic development with relevant on-site visits.

https://www.amazon.com/A-to-Z-Season-1/dp/B0CWCHTM3B

Episode 2 then covers the printing press.

rayiner•about 2 hours ago

Egyptian hieroglyphics already had alphabetic elements, and the canaanites borrowed those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs (“Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system”).

reissbaker•about 2 hours ago

Egyptian heiroglyphs were not an alphabet, even if they had alphabetic elements (in addition to pictographic ones). Scholars generally agree that proto-Sinaitic was the first alphabet, and all subsequent alphabets used today are either direct descendants or directly inspired by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

austin-cheney•about 1 hour ago

Another counter-example is Phags Pa Script.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script

buildsjets•21 minutes ago

Explain. The wiki you linked to specifically states that it is descended from Tibetan script, which is in turn descended from Proto-Sinaitic script.

Animats•about 3 hours ago

There's an International Phonetic Alphabet for transcribing speech literally.[1] Automation is now available. Languages to IPA, IPA to various languages, text to speech, speech to text, evaluation of pronunciation.

[1] https://easypronunciation.com/en/english-phonetic-transcript...

alex0015•about 2 hours ago

The IPA still relies on convention to transcribe sounds. There's plenty of academic papers out there describing lesser studied languages and, if those conventions don't yet exist, the papers often contradict each other.

A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. Everyone pronounces words differently than the writing system prescribes, in every language. Words are shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.

retroflexzy•about 1 hour ago

> A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad.

This is, for better or worse, what is being done to incorporate aboriginal names into things like streets and bridges in places like Vancouver.

- [stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stal%CC%95%C9%99w%CC%93as%C9%9...) - [šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street](https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/musqueamview-street-signs...)

I see the practicalities of adopting this IPA-lite form, but it's a struggle to use, even though I've previously been trained in IPA.

colechristensen•about 3 hours ago

English is three* languages in a trenchcoat, all languages borrow but English in particular is a cobbled together mess. Like a salors' pidgin language except instead of sailors, driven by the ruling class of Britain at the boundary of several language families who kept conquering each other.

*(or 7 or whatever number makes you feel best)

dataflow•about 2 hours ago

Might be a mess linguistically, but it's sure nice to have only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard.

pocksuppet•about 1 hour ago

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.

mootothemax•about 1 hour ago

It’s great compression: Y sometimes a vowel, sometimes a consonant.

And while not encoded on a keyboard, it still blows my mind that English has a crazy number of past tenses - and a such a bad hack of a future tense that it’s hard to classify as such.

Linguistics is fun. The accents are alright.

colechristensen•about 2 hours ago

>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.

HoldOnAMinute•about 1 hour ago

Now you have me wondering what is theoretically the most compact and efficient language, without using compression

zhoBEENG•8 minutes ago

Claude Shannon talks about this in A Mathematical Theory of Communication. He defines redundancy as one minus relative entropy, where relative entropy is the ratio of the language's actual average uncertainty per symbol to the maximum possible uncertainty if all alphabet symbols were completely random and equally likely.

He gives some rather cute examples, like the language of Finnegans Wake by Joyce being very low redundancy (high efficiency in your words). He also states that crossword puzzles don't work in a perfectly efficient language, that 50% redundancy is pretty good for 2-d puzzles, and 33% redundancy good for 3-d puzzles. This has always been one of my favorite and in my mind most random corollaries in a paper.

https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

Wowfunhappy•about 1 hour ago

I feel like you're going to run up against the definitions of "efficient" and "compression".

For example, a language with a larger alphabet will be able to express more in fewer characters. Is that more efficient?

Similarly, you could think of each word as a sort of lookup table for information in the mind of the reader. We don't define words as we're writing, we expect the speaker to know them already. If a language has more words, each word is more precise, and fewer words can be used to express an idea—but is that efficiency? You're just relying on the reader having more preexisting knowledge.

sometimelurker•about 1 hour ago

and now this reminds me of kolmogorov complexity

CPLX•about 3 hours ago

In case anyone is curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

paleotrope•about 3 hours ago

Amazing "By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography.[5]". It even has a reference so it must be true.

paleotrope•about 2 hours ago

Anyway I put in a request to get a copy at my local library so I will update here in a few months when I have a copy of the book.