Talk:Cherokee syllabary

LING 1101 Comments
This is quite a good article, some suggestions:
 * The section, "Syllabary" is redundant. The sections "Creation", "Description" etc... can have their own first order sections.
 * Some examples of Cherokee writing would be useful, preferably a sentence that showcases different features of the language, such as how the same character can represent both a /g/ or a /k/ sound depending on context (I think that's how it works). Possibly show a situation where a novice reader may be confused due to ambiguity in the script (if there is a possible meaningful situation).
 * Minor, but the section "Later Developments" probably shouldn't start with the word 'However', since it should be a standalone section.
 * You mention how many people currently speak Cherokee, but how many of them are literate in the syllabary, if this info is available?
 * When discussing how Sequoyah developed the script, was there a specific incident or other information that Sequoyah had access too? Where did he observe writing and how did he acquire texts to base the syllabary on?

Robert Schwartz 128.84.152.250 (talk) 03:44, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Cherokee Scouting
Can someone render "Be Prepared", the Scout Motto, into Cherokee script? Thanks! Chris 03:34, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 16:30, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Original basis for symbols?
Does anyone have any Wiki-appropriate information on what Sequoyah might have based the symbols on? What was his inspiration? I note no apparent visual link between symbols having the same vowel, or symbols having the same consonants, making each symbol seem to be purely arbitrary in form. Did Sequoyah in fact just make up each individual symbol, or was there some sort of systematic approach he used, perhaps as described in the Jamo design portion of the article on the Korean Hangul writing system?

Cheers, Erik Anderson, 19:47, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
 * I wish I had the references on hand right now, but I've always heard that Sequoyah had seen English newspapers, Hebrew books, and had access to a Greek Bible, which is probably why his syllabary resembles Greek more than any other written language. His original script can be seen here. Also he is the one that modified the syllabary for printmaking, at the urging of Samuel Worcester. -Uyvsdi (talk) 17:29, 25 March 2009 (UTC)Uyvsdi

A lot of the non-Latin looking letters resemble Georgian (Kartvelian) and Armenian. Some link is possible or just a coincidence?


 * Clearly Sequoyah looked at some of the symbols found in English texts, but it is important to note that he did not use them with anything like the same sound value. There is no evidence of a systematic shape-sound pattern, such as in the Ethiopian syllabary.  Any resemblance between the Cherokee script and either Georgian or Armenian must be the result of chance.  Let's face it: there are a limited number of basic squiggles possible so some similarity across the world is inevitable.  For example, the Roman symbol U is pronounced as "ha" in Ethiopian script, just coincidence.Pete unseth (talk) 01:14, 3 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I'd say it's coincidence. Interestingly, Cyrillic would work pretty well, so long as Yus was included. Afalbrig (talk) 06:55, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, could someone please find some sources on this and get them in here? It's very interesting. I'm actually an expert on writing systems, hieroglyphic ones in particular, and from what I've been reading it appears he was illiterate, made up a syllabary, then modified it for printing. In all other cases of syllabary-creation, each glyph represents a picture of something which is associated with a word, the first syllable of which is used as the value for the glyph. But maybe Saquoyah just chose or made random glyphs which were later modified so that they ended up looking more like Roman, Cyrilic, Greek etc. By the way, this was common in the 1800's and probably before : early typefaces for Ethiopic make it look more like Roman than it actually did. Casting the lead stamps for printing was apparently cumbersome to this effect, I can imagine.

But it is not unusual that modern users of the glyphs care nothing for their origin or etymology : most writing systems are learned like this, throughout time and space, even Roman. Although the origin of the Roman Alphabet itself is now known, this information has not been incorporated into the American curricula; not to mention Hindi, Arabic, Chinese*, Japanese*, Korean*, etc., although the *-ed incorporate some limited etymology and/or folk etymology. And it should not be like this, but that humans are lazy and that archaeology is a young discipline : the origins of these writing systems was unknown before about 1800 and we continue to use the pedagogical methods from then.

I haven't seen the original syllabaries of Saquoyah, but the glyphs as we now know them are extremely abstract. Without something in the literature from Saquoyah or some tradition originating with him, matching such glyphs to words or pictures in the Cherokee iconography would be, well, interesting, yes, but tenuous, that is to say, uncertain.

I would like to call for a "wikipedia article ring" including such "scripts" or "proto-scripts" as Cherokee as well as the Alaskan Script, the Micmac Hieroglyphic (actually a mneumonic system, per Smithsonian's research and my investigations as well), and other such Native American and also non-Native American but, say, 1500-present made-up writing systems, like Cree Syllabary, Caroline Script, these Vai and Vah Syllabaries, Shorthand systems and Deserta Script etc. All of thees have relationships one to the other and each sheds much light on the other. For a good example, if you examine the history and details of Micmac Hieroglyphic and Cree Syllabary, you will find that even if Saquoyah was illiterate, he employed concepts which were at the time floating around, especially in missionary circles - Indian writing, logographic, syllabic writing systems.

Also, it seems likely from my reading and experience that if Saquoyah made the glyphs based on acrophonic logograms, he would have tried to get the word out so that it would make learning them easier. And are there any cursive forms?

Dwarfkingdom (talk) 20:34, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

In this same section, there is a link to a version of the "original" and it looks to me, based on all my experience with writing and pseudo-writing, that he just made up random squiggles similar to English Roman cursive. However, in Micmac Hieroglyphic and Shorthand systems, such glyphs could be assigned to single words (being in Shorthand idiomatic combinations of letters). Most people, unexperienced with writing systems, might think that people could just make up jibberish and assign it a value like "cat", but this is almost never what happens. Originally, all glyphs are pictures of things. In which case, Cherokee Syllabary makes useful my recent work on Codex Seraphinus and Voynich Manuscript and Asemic Writing. Analysis needs to be done on the original glyphs : most likely, he worked hard that there was little or no "overlap" between glyphs : none look too similar to another.

It seems just like what the traditional story says, that he was illiterate and had seen (English cursive) and so made up similar looking stuff thinking that was how it was done. Because apparently he didn't know how any writing system worked or its origins, because right off the bat he invented a script where all the glyphs look very similar, whereas in their original forms (consider Hindi, its Brahmi, and Proto-Semitic) each glyphs was at first a very distinct, recongizable picture, then later a still very distinct abstraction, and then in modern times a barely distinguishable futher abstraction.

The "for printing" version is much better in terms of more economical shapes, but still, the Roman (uppercase but not lower-case) alphabet is superior to Saquoyah's "for-print" syllabary. True Abjads are more economical than Alphabets which are more economical than Syllabaries. The Cree Syllabary is even better than this, though it was inspired by the Cherokee Syllabary's success. But using or making writing system is not entirely about economy.

So can anyone find something in the literature to this effect, some scholarly or learned opinion for this article? I'll be on the look-out. I recently looked it up in Daniels and didn't find anything terribly insightful, that I can remember, anyway.

All this brings up that there's a big leap between the "original" syllabaries and the "for-print" versions : because Saquoyah made up his alphabet mostly whole-cloth, it has a complicated creation process which I really think the Wikipedia article (and scholarly literature), should reflect. Compare the creation process for Cree Syllabary and Deseret Alphabet.

Dwarfkingdom (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 21:42, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Ling 1100-108 comments
This is a very detailed article: so great!

This is very nitty gritty, and this isn't necessarily you're doing, but I've noticed that the article says that there are 85 syllables or characters repeatedly throughout. Repetition is not bad because people might immediately skip to different sections if they're looking for specifics, but it's a little much.

Also, can you understand what dummy vowels are in the description section? I was a little confused as far as their purpose and what they look like or where they show up.

You also included a lot of the history of the syllabary and I liked everything that you included and the organization of this information. However, can you expand on the Sequoyah story a little? Maybe describe which written works he looked at while forming the syllabary for 12 years if the information is available.

Good job! --Rda2512 (talk) 04:52, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I am delighted all of you Cornell students are working on articles about writing systems. However, I suggest you think carefully about the differences between your course assignments from Ling 1100-108 and the ongoing functions of Wikipedia. As a start, I suggest you not use headers that are course specific in these discussion pages. Again, welcome aboard and I hope you improve some of the articles on writing systems!! Pete unseth (talk) 14:34, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Destruction of early version
I remember reading in a children's book (Childcraft?) that an early version of the syllabary, written on bark, was burned by other Cherokees suspecting the "talking leaves" of sorcery, or something like that. Googling, I see references to his wife burning down his workshop to try to end his work on them. Is there a reliable source saying what happened, or just conflicting semi-reliable ones?--SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:13, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I remember that as well, but can't lay my hands on my copy right now. I found links for The How and Why Library Supplement for 1989: People to Know and Childcraft: people to know. (1995) that mention Sequoyah.-- Auric    talk  17:30, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

Simple but unwieldy table, please help
I have added a simple table that lists the transliterated and Unicode versions of the syllabary. The current Unicode chart is in code-point order, which I doubt will be useful to many people trying to study the syllabary. At least the version I've added can be more or less read (and cut-and-pasted). I'm no guru with Wiki syntax, so it's currently one unwieldy column. It would be great if the whole thing could be floated left, for instance, but I'm not sure how to do that. babbage (talk) 21:40, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

86th character
Wha did the 86th character look like, and what was its sound value? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:38, 10 December 2010 (UTC)


 * It was another hv, and looked like a vertically-inverted tsa (so somewhat like G). You can see it in section 4.2 of this page:
 * http://www.evertype.com/standards/jl/jalagi.html --92.142.62.229 (talk) 21:50, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
 * There is no evidence that it was ever used as mv. In all 19th century sources it is listed as being similar to hv. The idea that it was mv is a modern speculation based on the fact that mv is missing.
 * It looks like the character Ꮐ (nah) without its “serif” on top.
 * Here it is shown between Ᏺ (yo) and Ꮁ (hu).
 * http://www.languagegeek.com/rotinonhsonni/tsalagi/tsa_syllabarium.html Here the orders of the "mv" and the rare Ꮐ (nah) are mixed up. OosakaNoOusama (talk) 19:31, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
 * This character is currently proposed for Unicode in http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n4537.pdf (see figure 1 and 2), along with a proposal to add casing to Cherokee.Frédéric Grosshans (talk) 14:56, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Cushman says that the character was used for "mv",, as does Languagegeek, and the official Unicode chart. What are the sources that say it was similar to "hv"? Kaldari (talk) 08:09, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
 * It looks like Worcester himself stated that it was similar to "hv": "The sound of Ꮂ is more open than G. This distinction has been regarded as of so little consequence, particularly by Maj. Lowerey, who has been the oracle on this subject, that the character has been omitted." I guess that's hard to argue with. Kaldari (talk) 09:00, 2 October 2016 (UTC)
 * My only source was ’s unicode proposal above. I don’t know much about the Cherokee syllabary myself, but Michael Everson explicitely argues with your source, since this text is given in the proposal (figure 2) and he says «Even when Cherokee was being first encoded, it was recognized that Sequoyah’s document (illustrating his original character designs alongside handwritten versions of the typographic symbols being designed for them) contained an extra letter; back in 1994 this was mis-identified by Michael Everson as “archaic hv” (most likely due to the comparison given with Ꮂ hv in the Cherokee Phoenix, 1828-08-06—see Figure 2). The actual reading of the character is mv, a very rare syllable in Cherokee usually represented by ma in standard orthography.» But I agree, he doesn’t give his source for the reading.Frédéric Grosshans (talk) 13:07, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
 * I assume you're referring to . I suppose if Everson changed his mind on this one, we should probably follow his lead, although I would really like to know why he changed his mind and why so many sources (including Cushman) also support the "mv" theory without any primary sources to support it. Interestingly, Giasson mentions that the Cherokee word for elephant originally used the sound "mv", but this gradually changed to "ma" due to the spelling. Kaldari (talk) 21:04, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
 * It was used for a particle like "um" or "hmm" if I remember my conversations with my Cherokee colleagues correctly. A very rare syllable, which is why the gap was left in the older standard syllabary. -- Evertype·✆ 23:11, 6 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info Michael. If the actual sound was something like "hmm", I guess that means that both claims about it (that it was "mv" and sounded similar to "hv") could be true. After all, Worcester's transliteration is just a rough approximation, and the "v" sound (a nasal schwa) is fairly close to an /m/. I just wish we had some sources to cite. Kaldari (talk) 17:59, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

Interestingly, a syllabary chart published by the Cherokee Nation shows the 86th character representing the "mv" sound:. Kaldari (talk) 05:16, 15 January 2018 (UTC)


 * So what's the real sound value? Like a mv or hv sound? I am a Green Bee (talk) 13:15, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

(Sans) Serif Version?
Does anyone know--and can someone post--if the Cherokee syllabary, as we see it in the article, is designed in such a way that the serifs and thicker/thinner edges are actually part of the actual language, or is simply the "serif" version of it, such that a sans-serif version of the Cherokee syllabary exists as well? -- 66.92.0.62 (talk) 08:15, 17 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The typeface Aboriginal Sans Serif is available here, which includes Cherokee. — ᚹᚩᛞᛖᚾᚻᛖᛚᛗ (ᚷᛖᛋᛈᚱᛖᚳ) 06:21, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Doesn't chr.wikipedia.org have an article on the syllabary?
This would be surprising, but it isn't linked in the "languages" tab. Unfortunately, I wouldn't know how to find the article on chr:, since I don't actually read the language... -- megA (talk) 15:26, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
 * No, there isn't one yet. -Uyvsdi (talk) 16:48, 18 March 2012 (UTC)Uyvsdi
 * Weird. Pity I can't contribute one myself. Thanks. -- megA (talk) 10:03, 20 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Ironically, I don't think there's a word for syllabary. -Uyvsdi (talk) 18:13, 20 March 2012 (UTC)Uyvsdi
 * Hmmm. So that's the reason there is no article ;-) -- megA (talk) 15:49, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

The character Ꮩ do
We require some proper evidence for the assertion in note 2. "The character Ꮩ do is shown upside-down in the chart, and in some fonts. It should be oriented in the same way as the Latin letter V." It displays like the Greek capital letter lambda Λ in all the Unicode fonts that I've come across so far. Likewise in both Chrome and Firefox browsers. DFH (talk) 21:07, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
 * implies that there was a difference between the old-form DO (Λ-like) and (presumably) a new-form DO (V-like). The standard Digohweli font displays the new-form. Old Do Digohweli and Code2000 fonts both display the old-form. DFH (talk) 21:22, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Main page updated to suit. DFH (talk) 21:26, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Try viewing Cherokee text on a Mac; it will display correctly there. The old way is too easily confused with Ꮑ, but Ꮩ opens upwards.  It's written that way in the Cherokee New Testament, and every in-print textbook or periodical I've ever come across.  It's also written that way by hand, as you can see here http://www.worldlanguage.com/LanguageSamples/128.gif (eg third line from the bottom) and here http://www.grahamcounty.net/gchistory/01-precountyhistory/lordsprayer.JPG (eg in the first two full lines).  I'm not aware of the old Ꮩ being used by anyone since the Civil War, though I don't know the exact date of the change. --145.226.30.44 (talk) 14:27, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Lowercase Syllabary
There should be something on the lowercase version of the syllabary, recently accepted by Unicode according to this blogpost: https://edward32blog.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/unicode-accepts-cherokee-lower-case-syllabary-character-set/

The encoding suggestion can be seen in this pdf: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14064-n4537-cherokee.pdf

Although it may still be on the drawing board (I don't know how long it takes for a unicode block to become standard), I think it would be a great improvement of the page to have some information on, for example, the handwriting of the Cherokee syllabary, and the history of typesetting it with two different point sizes, which lead the Unicode Consortium to accept a lowercase character set into their standardization process. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.225.121.137 (talk) 13:37, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I have now put it in the "later development" section, but if anyone knows more about it, maybe it could have its own section.80.71.135.96 (talk) 21:55, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Braille
Is the Braille system truly a syllabary, or simply Consonants and Vowels? Also, is "crontracted" a word or a typo? Pete unseth (talk) 12:58, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Was this writing system ever made to work on another indigenous language?
Unlike Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, I have not seen if anyone else ever tried to make this writing system work for any other languages, yeah I read on here about the possible influence this script may have had on one in Africa, not another one in the U.S. much less the Americas?! How could that be? -- sion8 talk page 06:19, 28 October 2015 (UTC)


 * The shapes of the syllabary were not borrowed, but the idea of people creating a unique script, especially a syllabary, was clearly borrowed. However, a group of Kickapoo in Mexico thought they were using Sequoyah's syllabary, but it turns out they were using the Great Lakes Algonquian Syllabary instead. Pete unseth (talk) 15:09, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Can you give me the source about those Mexicans that thought they were using Sequoyah's script for their indigenous language? -- sion8 Flag_of_Barranquilla.svg talk page 01:43, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The main source that mentions the Kickapoo in Mexico claiming to use the syllabary invented by Sequoyah is the book by Felipe Latorre and Delores Latorre (1976), The Mexican Kickapoo Indians, pp. 30,172,217. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. (Later sources derive their information from this book.) The Kickapoo were not correct, but enjoyed linking their syllabary to the Cherokee. Pete unseth (talk) 17:06, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

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86th character unreadable
§ Syllabary shown using Unicode text contains the sentence
 * Note that A the 86th character (Ᏽ) is obsolete.

The "character" in the parentheses is a black block for me; I guess it is presented here in a font I don't have, unlike the other Unicode representations of the characters. This makes it impossible to tell what character is meant, even when referring to the previous section where the script is shown with images. Please identify the character in some other way, like by using an image. --Thnidu (talk) 13:56, 9 June 2017 (UTC) Thnidu (talk) 13:56, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Just get a font. -- Evertype·✆ 22:07, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
 * What do other articles on obscure languages do? Kaldari (talk) 22:20, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The issue is your local display, not the encoded character. -- Evertype·✆ 21:59, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Images
It would be useful to add images (instead of only unicode) for the complete syllabry, so that we can see the characters without having the requisite font sets. -- 67.70.33.184 (talk) 07:27, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

Numerals
I'm trying to figure out what the section Numerals is really describing. If 504 is written with characters for 5, 100, and 4, obviously, it is not a standard positional notation system. Is it, in fact, a specialized set of characters used to write the spoken names of number in the Cherokee language, rather like writing like "five hundred and four" in English? If so, are they "numerals" in any meaningful way? ("Five hundred and four" - i.e., that sequence of 18 letters and 3 spaces - are a valid notation for the number 504, but would hardly qualify as numerals.)--Nø (talk) 12:44, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * : Yes, they are numerals and separate glyphs than are used for the syllabary, but it's not a purely decimal system. Think of it as similar to Roman numerals: DIV is 500-1-5, which is glossed as 504. Similarly, with Sequoyah's numerals, the glyph for 5, the glyph for 100, and the glyph for 4 would be combined as 5-100-4 and understood as 504. For a smaller example, "twenty five" would be written with the glyph for 20 and the glyph for 5 or 20-5, 25. You can see examples of this in this poster from the Cherokee Nation Language Technology program: https://language.cherokee.org/media/hl1d1km0/sequoyahnumbers.pdf The section would be better if images of the numbers in use were included (as is done in the Cyrillic numerals article to illustrate a similar additive system), but I haven't seen any images that don't have potential copyright issues. Carter (talk) 14:33, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Alas, the poster is unintelligible to me, not knowing any Cherokee (numerals or otherwise). For Greek, Roman, unary and Cistersian numerals and many other systems, there are clearcut rules for translation between those systems and any other equally systematic system (with the understanding that e.g. Greek, Roman and Cistercian only can represent numbers up to certain limits, and that e.g. Roman numerals come with variations such as IIII for 4, IC for 99, or CIↃ for 1000, neither of which are standard). The description in the present article is not clear enough to establish any such rules, and that makes it an oddity in Template:Numeral_systems, where it appears presently. However, perhaps one may deduce the following system: Numbers 1 through 20 have their own symbols, as do the tens from 20 to 100. Other numbers from 21 to 99 are written as a the symbol for the tens (20 through 90), followed by the symbol for the ones (1 through 9), as in your example with 25. I here suppose e.g. 99 is written 90-9, though 80-19 as in French would also be possible - and it would be nice to address this ambiguity. (In my native tongue, Danish, 99 is, arguably, ½-5-20-9 ...) Numbers up to 1999 can be represented as e.g. 5-100-4 for 504, and (possibly) 19-100-90-9 for 1999. As a rule, one could say that when the 100-numeral follows smaller numerals (or possibly another 100-numeral), it is multiplied unto everything to the right of that point. It is not clear if e.g. 2021 can be represented with Cherokee numerals, although 19-100-100-20-1, or 20-100-20-1, might work -- or 2-1000-20-1 if there is a numeral for 1000 as well. Likewise, 31425 might be represented as 3-100-14-100-20-5, but I'm inclined to think it isn't. The string 19-100-100-20-1, hypothesized before for 2021, might alternatively represent 190021.--Nø (talk) 16:02, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * So, you're right that there are numerals for 0 through 20, then for the "tens" from 30 to 100. That gets through what's in the poster. As best I understand it, 1-19 are used alone and the tens are used only with 1-9 (so no 80-19 for 99). As in spoken English, 11-19 are formed differently than 20 and higher in spoken Cherokee (so 9 is ᏐᏁᎳ (sonela) and 19 is ᏐᏁᎳᏚ (soneladu) where the -du suffix is similar to the -teen suffix in English's nineteen). The Chrisomalis article cited goes into some of this and has some speculation as to what influenced Sequoyah in devising the system. Wandering into WP:OR, there appear to be some superficial parallels to Kaktovik numerals here in how the numbers are formed and the relationship between the glyphs for 1–4, 5–9, 10–14, and 15–19. How the thousands, millions, billions, and trillions symbols are used isn't completely clear to me. At first I thought they might be similar to the Cyrillic modifying signs, but the sources I've seen don't seem to support that. It could be that they are used just as the hundred character is; if so 2021 would be 2-1000-20-1. What I'm hearing from you is that the rules here should be outlined in more detail. I agree the section could use more detail and examples (as well as images) to help better explain it all. As I have time to read up more on it, I hope to make some of the description clearer, but if you have time, please take a look at the sources and see what you can incorporate in to the article. Carter (talk) 16:27, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Here is another image of the numbers in Sequoyah's hand -- https://collections.gilcrease.org/object/4026312 -- that shows how the thousand character (actually a series of characters) was used: 5-1000, for example. Carter (talk) 19:29, 25 March 2021 (UTC)