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Sequoyah

Cherokee polymath and creator of the Cherokee syllabary

For other uses, see Sequoyah (disambiguation).

Sequoyah (sə-QUOY-yə; Cherokee: ᏍᏏᏉᏯ, Ssiquoya,^[a] or ᏎᏉᏯ, Sequoya,^[b]pronounced[seɡʷoja]; c. 1770 – August 1843), also known as George Gist or George Guess, was a Native American polymath and neographer of the Cherokee Nation.

In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in the Cherokee language. One of the first North American Indigenous groups to gain a written language, the Cherokee Nation officially adopted the syllabary in 1825,^[2] helping to unify a forcibly divided nation with new ways of communication and a sense of independence.^[3] Within a quarter-century, the Cherokee Nation had reached a literacy rate of almost 100%, surpassing that of surrounding European-Americansettlers.^[4]

Sequoyah's creation of the Cherokee syllabary is among the few times in recorded history that an individual member of a pre-literate group created an original, effective wr

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Sequoyah and the Creation of the Cherokee Syllabary

In the early years of the 19th century, the remarkable inventiveness of a Cherokee man, named Sequoyah, helped his people preserve their language and cultural traditions, and remain united amid the encroachment of Euro-American society into their territory. Working on his own over a 12-year span, Sequoyah created a syllabary—a set of written symbols to represent each syllable in the spoken Cherokee language. This made it possible for the Cherokee to achieve mass literacy in a short period of time. Cherokee became one of the earliest indigenous American languages to have a functional written analogue.

Sequoyah was born in present-day U.S. state of Tennessee in the years preceding the American Revolution. He was afflicted by physical lameness that caused him to limp, and as a young man, he worked as a trader, an industry he learned from his mother. He later became a silversmith and a blacksmith. By the year 1809, he had spent considerable time thinking about the written forms of communication used by European Americans and the po

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Sequoyah

Sequoyah is widely celebrated as an unlettered Cherokee Indian who, entirely from the resources of his own brilliant mind, endowed his whole tribe with learning-the only man in history to conceive and perfect in its entirety an alphabet or syllabary.

Soon after 1800, Sequoyah began to realize the magic of writing. He and other Indians of the time, who occasionally saw samples of writing, called these mysterious pages the white man's "talking leaf." He experimented aimlessly at first, but gradually his conception took practical shape. It was slow and laborious work for an untutored Cherokee.

Finally, after twelve years of labor and discouragement, he completed his syllabary, composed of eighty-five symbols, each representing a sound in the Cherokee language. The simplicity of the syllabary and its easy adaptability to the speech and thought of his people enabled them to master it in a few days. The Cherokee nation was made practically literate within a few months.