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I didn’t mean to criticize the HN title—it accurately reflected the title on the linked page. I just thought the article’s choice of title was interesting given the rest of the story.

The notion that Sequoyah was a monolingual Cherokee is dubious. He had a European father (though he was raised with his mother) and worked as a trader and served in the U.S. Army. His cousin, to whom he presented his syllabary, was also half European, “George Lowery.” He had extensive contact with Europeans. Moreover, his syllabary includes adaptations of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters. Part of the story is that he copied some character shapes from his wife’s family’s Bible. (Presumably they could read English if they had a Bible.) He was obviously exposed to a variety of European writing. He completed his syllabary in 1821, many years after his military service. It seems highly unlikely that someone who was so linguistically gifted to be able to invent a syllabary would not have picked up some familiarity with spoken and written English through that exposure.

This article does a good job of reviewing the conflicting narratives of his history: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26467045. It’s all very uncertain, and there’s a lot of mythology.

Its a real shame we don't have any transcripts or other court records from that hearing...for obvious reasons.

I love writing systems and had never seen or heard of this. Also thought it was strange that Smithsonian of all things didn't include it.

Beautiful glyph. I love it. Thanks for the link!

There's at least two of us, though at the time I was limited to the World Book Encyclopedia.

You (or anyone else here) might enjoy Omniglot, an old web 1.0 site that was amazing for its comprehensive treatment of all writing scripts:

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/cherokee.htm

Thanks! We'll put that in the toptext as well.

Thanks to Wikipedia TIL Johnny Cash released a song about Sequoyah called "Talking Leaves". From the same album as the much more famous "Ballad of Ira Hayes".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Tears:_Ballads_of_the_A...

> This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language

It most certainly does not!

I think you could more or less accurately make that claim about Standard Arabic, which has preserved a distinct sound for each letter and only rarely does things that you wouldn’t expect (tanween…).

Modern Hebrew, by contrast, has merged many consonant sounds without merging their letters (sin and samekh, tav and tet), dropped the ayin sound and left the letter as a pseudo-vowel, and decoupled long vowel sounds from their long vowel carrier letters to the point that they’re essentially arbitrary (for each letter, you can find an example of it representing every single vowel sound).

To your main point, though, the main commonality between Semitic scripts and western Latin/Greek-derived scripts is the rough order of the letters and some of the shapes. Latin alphabet isn’t an abjad, it has lots of letters that have no equivalent in Semitic… and it actually represents many languages very faithfully! English is an outlier. So I am not convinced by your argument.

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

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.

Technically, the proto-Sinaitic script is an abjad, with the Greek alphabet being the first true alphabet (symbols for both consonants and vowels).

Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.”

Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language.

The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.

> This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language

Wasn't Hebrew dead for like 2000 years or something until the Israeli state was set up? Not hard to have a faithful alphabet when your spoken language is frozen in time. Hell, even evolving languages, like Spanish, can have somewhat phonetically accurate alphabets. As said in the other comment, English is more of an exception in that regard.

"and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible": That is the definition of a dialect.

Also, I don't know how you can claim Hebrew is phonetically represented by its alphabet rather than the other way around, as a revived language the pronunciations are largely a matter of convention based on Yiddish. It would be more accurate to say that modern Hebrew uses an ancient writing system, which happens to be closely related to the ancestor of modern European alphabets.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

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”).

Very enjoyable documentary on this alphabetic development with relevant on-site visits.

https://www.amazon.com/A-to-Z-Season-1/dp/B0CWCHTM3B

Episode 2 then covers the printing press.

> all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite

Counterexample: Korean Hangul [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

Another counter-example is Phags Pa Script.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script

"This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language" - nonsense. That's just because modern Hebrew is based on the written language and thus reflects spelling pronunciation rather than historical pronunciation.

Also, proto-Sinaitic is not an alphabet. That's why Persian writing became harder to read when they switched from the nearly alphabetic Old Persian cuneiform to Aramaic abjad descended from proto-Sinaitic.

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.

English is a West Germanic language with vocabulary from other languages, primarily French and Latin. But most of the core words are Germanic. It is not a pidgin whose defining feature is simplified grammar.

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

Good languages borrow, great languages steal?

Around the same time, Christian missionaries introduced writing (using an adapted Latin alphabet) to Hawai`i. Within ten years nearly the entire population (I would guess with the exception of older people) was literate. Mark Twain remarked on Hawai`ian literacy a few decades later.

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.

> a language with a larger alphabet will be able to express more > in fewer characters.

True, although it's not really the alphabet that determines this, it's the number of phonemes (distinctive sounds) in the language. For example, writing /s/ (the sound) sometimes with 's' and sometimes with 'c' does nothing to shorten words in English or Spanish.

But in general, languages with fewer phonemes tend to have longer words (and tone languages often have very short words---in a sense, they have more phonemes than non-tone languages). Morphology (particularly compounding) often obscures this.