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

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/man-created-written-language-cherokee-did-efficiently-elegantly-peers-thought-magic-180988850/

55•grahambargeron•2h ago

Comments

CPLX•1h ago

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

paleotrope•57m 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•28m 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.

torben-friis•1h 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.

colechristensen•53m 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•36m ago

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

colechristensen•25m 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.

Animats•52m 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•37m 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.

rayiner•53m 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•25m 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.

reissbaker•49m 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

nvader•45m ago

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

amluto•37m ago

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

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

reissbaker•33m 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

rayiner•42m 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•27m 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

fnordpiglet•35m 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•29m 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

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

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

Comments

Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

πFS

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

Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM

Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos

Aws.com and google.com don't have DNSSEC enabled

How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science

I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

L'Affaire Siloxane

PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you

Deficient executive control in transformer attention

GeoLibre 1.0

Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

World Capitals Voronoi

Unix GC Remastered

Farmer donates land for a park, city sells it for $10M as data center land

Who's the smartest corvid?

Show HN: HelixDB – A graph database built on object storage

Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use

Authentication issues related to API requests

Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications

Why are there so many canines in fine art?

Anthropic's model naming, extrapolated

All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)

Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster

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Show HN: Atlasphere – Live Infrastructure Diagrams

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