Native Americans used symbols and syllables in writing systems (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Native Americans used symbols and syllables in writing systems

DENNIS ADAMS, Packet columnist
Published Sunday, November 13, 2005
http://www.islandpacket.com/editorial/col/adams/story/5329457p-4827406c.html

While researching the Beaufort County branch library's display for
National American Indian Heritage Month (Nov. 1-30), I found facts
about two writing systems native to the Western Hemisphere.

The glyphs of the Mayas were in use centuries before Europeans came to
Central America. The second system was the Cherokee syllabary,
developed in United States territory (present-day Arkansas) in the
early 19th century.

In "Maya and Other Mesoamerican Scripts" (a chapter in "The World's
Writing Systems), Martha J. Macri wrote that "a conservative estimate
of the number of distinct writing systems" in pre-Columbian Central
America is fifteen, "many only known from a single inscription." The
Aztecs, Mixtecs and Zapotecs used "codified pictorial systems" that
seldom represented the actual sounds of their languages. Instead, these
systems relied on logograms, or symbols containing the meaning of an
entire word or idea. In order to understand the "shorthand" of these
logograms, a person would have had to have been born into the culture
of a tribe -- the meanings were strictly "insider knowledge." Scholars
today rarely can produce a literal, symbol-by-symbol translation of the
paper scrolls that have survived, but must speak of general
interpretations of the texts instead of precise decipherments.

The Mayas, on the other hand, used "logographic-syllabic" writing.
Sound-symbols representing syllables in the language combined with
logograms in a system that has been deciphered to a large, if still
incomplete, extent.

Although the earliest Mayan inscriptions date to before 250 A.D., their
origins reach back to at least 500-400 B.C. Most glyphs (by some
estimates fewer than 600 symbols) fill the area of a square, and look
like elaborate ancestors of our own computer icons. They normally
appeared in double columns, read from left to right and from top to
bottom.

Unlike the ancient Mesopotamians, whose writing system evolved from
their need to keep track of daily business transactions, Mesoamericans
began writing about the night sky. According to Macri, Mayan script was
"inextricably connected with an intricate calendar and seems to have
developed partially in response to the desire to record astronomical
observations."

Cherokee syllabary

When Sequoyah (born around 1770, died 1843) first began work on a
writing system for his people, he envisioned pictographs somewhat like
the pictorial symbols of the Aztecs. According to the Encyclopedia of
North American Indians (edited by D. L. Birchfield), Sequoyah had
encountered "talking leaves" (written and printed pages) when serving
in a Cherokee division of the U.

S. Army from 1812-1814, and in other encounters with white people.

Native American Biography (edited by Sharon Malinowski and Simon
Glickman) said that Sequoyah scrapped pictographs in favor of a
syllabary of 85 symbols. While an alphabet forms syllables by combining
letter symbols, each character of a syllabary represents a complete
syllable of a language. For example, Sequoyah's symbol that resembles
the Roman letter "W" stands for the syllable "ta," "S" for "du," and
"H" for "mi."

Although Sequoyah sometimes used shapes like those in the white man's
"talking leaves," he did not borrow their sounds. Many symbols are
entirely original, such as a "winged V" ("quo") and an inverted J with
an h-like shape on its left side ("tv"). Sequoyah could not read the
Roman alphabet, nor could he understand English. But in spite his lack
of formal education, he invented a system that, in the words of Theda
Perdue (American National Biography), "reportedly could be mastered by
a Cherokee speaker in several days."

Sequoyah worked on his syllabary for 12 years. At first, his people were
hostile to his creation and even accused him of witchcraft. In 1821,
however, Sequoyah showed tribal elders how useful his system could be.
Soon there were books, newspapers, a Bible and tribal constitution
printed in the Cherokee language. Students learned how to write the
syllabary in Cherokee schools, and people could finally write letters
to each other. Medicine men recorded their formulas and traditions for
posterity.

Nearly half of Cherokee households had a person literate in the
syllabary by 1835, less than 15 years after its endorsement by the
tribe.

Dennis Adams is Information Services Coordinator for the Beaufort County
Public Library System. He can be reached at denseatoms at earthlink.net