A Cherokee Silversmith Invented an Alphabet Without Knowing How to Read

Sequoyah finished his Cherokee syllabary in 1821 after roughly twelve years of work. He had never gone to school, never learned English, and could not read a single word in any language when he started. What he had was a hunch: that the strange marks white settlers stared at could carry speech, and that the same trick should work for Cherokee.

His first attempt was the obvious one. He tried to draw a separate symbol for every Cherokee word and quickly buried himself in pictograms. He scrapped it and started over. The breakthrough was hearing Cherokee as syllables, not words — pairing a consonant with a vowel and giving each pair a single mark. He landed on 86 characters, later trimmed to 85. The shapes themselves were borrowed from English, Greek, and Hebrew letters he copied off a Bible page; he liked how they looked and assigned them whatever sounds he needed. The Cherokee character shaped like a Latin D stands for the syllable do; the one shaped like W is wa. The borrowing is purely visual.

His neighbors were not impressed. His wife, Sally, is said to have burned a batch of his papers. Others accused him of witchcraft. To answer them, in 1821 he ran a public demonstration: he sent his six-year-old daughter Ahyoka out of the room, took down a word someone called out, then brought her back to read it aloud. The Cherokee Nation officially adopted the script in 1825. By 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix was printing in two columns, English on one side, Sequoyah's syllabary on the other.

Within a decade, Cherokee literacy in Cherokee was estimated near 90 percent — higher than the literacy rate of the white settlers around them. He is one of the very few people in recorded history known to have invented a working writing system from scratch, alone, in a language he could not yet write down.