Sequoyah's Cherokee D That Says Ah

On the front page of the Cherokee Phoenix, dated February 21, 1828, a character shaped like the Latin letter D appears again and again. It does not make a D sound. It makes the sound ah. [S1] Two columns over, a character shaped like R sounds out e. A W means la. [S1] These are not typos, and this is not a borrowed alphabet handled badly. It is decorative theft, committed by a man who could not read.

Sequoyah — also called George Gist or George Guess — finished his Cherokee syllabary in 1821, after roughly twelve years of work that began around 1809. [S1][S2] When he started, he was illiterate in every language: not Cherokee, which had no script, not English, not anything. [S1][S4] He was a Creek War veteran (1813–14), a silversmith, a blacksmith, and a painter, depending on the source. [S2][S7] He was not a scholar. He had never read a sentence in his life.

What he had was a printed English spelling book, given to him by a schoolteacher or missionary. [S4] He could not parse a single word in it. He leafed through it for shapes he found pleasing and copied them. About two dozen of his syllabary's characters were lifted directly from those English pages, with the original phonetic values thrown away. [S1][S4] Others he modified from Latin or Greek letters; some he invented outright. [S4] None of the borrowed Latin shapes kept their Latin sounds. A Cherokee D is ah. A Cherokee R is e. [S1]

The move that made the whole thing possible was giving up on logograms. His first attempt was a logographic system — one symbol per word — and it was impossibly large. [S4] His wife reportedly burned an early draft, frustrated by his obsession. [S2] Then came the breakthrough: Cherokee could be reduced to roughly 85 syllables, one symbol per syllable, not per word. [S4] Suddenly the system was learnable.

His own community was not pleased. Sequoyah and his daughter A-yo-ka were put on trial for witchcraft. [S2] They were acquitted after A-yo-ka demonstrated she could read a message her father had secretly written — proof, to her judges, that the marks did what he claimed. [S2]

By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in the new orthography. [S4] The linguist and former Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin observed that a Cherokee learner could become functionally literate in days or weeks, while only about a third of English-speaking Americans of the era could read English at all; estimates of Cherokee literacy by the 1830s reportedly run as high as 90%. [S8]

The Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the United States, debuted in English and Cherokee on February 21, 1828, at New Echota, the Cherokee capital in present-day Georgia. [S5] To print it, the missionary Samuel Worcester traveled to Boston to supervise the casting of metal type for each character, then shipped type and press south. [S5] Sequoyah's hand-drawn shapes were now in lead.

In the process, they were quietly altered. Elias Boudinot, editor of the Phoenix, dropped one of Sequoyah's 86 original characters when adapting the set for the press in 1828, and modified other shapes for legibility in type. [S1] In 1834 Worcester revised several more — most strikingly, he inverted the glyph for do so it would stop being mistaken for go. [S1] The recitation grid still taught today, with syllables organized by row and column, was imposed by Worcester, not by Sequoyah. [S1] The script encoded in Unicode block U+13A0–U+13FF, added in 1999 with lowercase forms in 2015, preserves the printer-revised forms — not Sequoyah's manuscript originals. [S1]

Sequoyah died in August 1843 near San Fernando de Rosas, in Coahuila, Mexico, hundreds of miles from Cherokee territory. [S2][S7] In 1842 he had set out with his son and several friends to find a band of Cherokees said by tradition to have migrated west before the American Revolution. [S7] His death is attested in a primary-source certification signed by the Cherokee men who accompanied him: "We, the undersigned Cherokees, direct from the Spanish Dominions, do hereby certify that George Guess of the Cherokee Nation, Arkansas, departed this life in the town of San-fernando in the month of August, 1843." [S2]

The standard biography is not uncontested. In 1971, a man named Traveller Bird, who claimed direct descent from Sequoyah, published Tell Them They Lie: The Sequoyah Myth. [S3][S6] He argued that Sequoyah was full-blood Cherokee, multilingual in English and Spanish, and a trained scribe in a Cherokee writing tradition that predated European contact — meaning Sequoyah did not invent the script but transmitted it. [S3][S6] Mainstream scholars reject the claim for lack of documentary evidence, though the Georgia Encyclopedia notes the book has "gained a place and some credence in academic discourse." [S3] Separately, in 2008, archaeologist Kenneth Tankersley reported finding about fifteen Cherokee syllabary symbols carved into the limestone of a southeastern Kentucky cave, accompanied by a date reading either 1808 or 1818. [S2] If the earlier date holds, Sequoyah was experimenting more than a decade before the conventional 1821 completion.

Even the basics are contested: his date of birth, his parentage, his occupation, and the origin of his name are all disputed. [S2] The dominant account names Nathaniel Gist, a Continental Army officer, as his father, though Britannica treats the identification as merely probable. [S2][S7]

What is not disputed is the result. A man with no model for what a writing system was — no schooling, no inside view of any written language, only the outside of shapes he found on a page — sat down and built one. He chose the shapes the way someone might choose fabric: by eye. He assigned sounds with no scheme except this one will be this. Within a few years his people were reading at rates the literate empire around them could not match. [S4][S8] The script he made is still in use, and the D on a Cherokee road sign has spent two centuries pretending to be the letter A. [S1]