Portal:Tennessee/Selected biography/1

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sequoyah (about 1767 - about 1843), also known as George Guess, Guest or Gist, was a Cherokee who invented the Cherokee syllabary, thus earning him a place on the list of inventors of writing systems.

The exact place and date of Sequoyah's birth are unknown, since no written record exists. However, James Mooney, a prominent anthropologist and historian of the Cherokee people, quoted a cousin in saying that Sequoyah spent his early years with his mother in the Overhill Cherokee village of Tuskegee, Tennessee. His mother, Wut-teh, is known to have been a Cherokee. Mooney states that she was the niece of a tribal chief. Sequoyah's father was either white or part-white and part Native American.

Some time before 1809, Sequoyah moved to the Willstown settlement in Alabama and established his trade as a silversmith. As a silversmith, he dealt regularly with white settlers in the area. Native Americans were often impressed by the writing used by white settlers, referring to their correspondence as "talking leaves."

Around 1809, Sequoyah began to create a system of writing for the Cherokee language. After attempting to create a character for each word, Sequoyah decided to divide each word into syllables and create one character for each syllable. Utilizing the Roman alphabet and possibly the Cyrillic alphabet, he created 86 characters to represent the various syllables. This work took Sequoyah 12 years to complete.

At first, his fellow Cherokee doubted the value of his syllabary. In order to prove his creation, Sequoyah taught his daughter Ah-yo-ka how to read and write in Cherokee. After amazing locals with his new writing, Sequoyah attempted to display his feat to tribal medicine men who rebuffed him for being possessed by evil spirits. Sequoyah finally proved his feat to a gathering of Chickamaugan warriors. Quickly news of the syllabary spread and the Cherokee were filling schools in order to learn the new written language. By 1823 the syllabary was in full use by the Cherokee Nation. The writing system was made official by the Cherokee Nation in 1825. From 1828 to 1834 the language was used in the Cherokee Phoenix which represented the Cherokee Nation. It is still used today by many Cherokee speakers. (Read more...)