Carvings From Cherokee Script ’sDawn (fwd link)

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Carvings From Cherokee Script’s Dawn

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: June 22, 2009
NYT

The illiterate Cherokee known as Sequoyah watched in awe as white settlers made
marks on paper, convinced that these “talking leaves” were the source of white
power and success. This inspired the consuming ambition of his life: to create
a Cherokee written language.

Born around 1770 near present-day Knoxville, Tenn., he was given the name George
Gist (or Guess) by his father, an English fur trader, and his mother, a daughter
of a prominent Cherokee family. But it was as Sequoyah that around 1809 he
started devising a writing system for the spoken Cherokee language.

Ten years later, despite the ridicule of friends who thought him crazed, he
completed the script, in which each of the 85 characters represented a distinct
sound in the spoken tongue, and combinations of these syllables spelled words.
Within a few years, most Cherokees had adopted this syllabary, and Sequoyah
became a folk hero as the inventor of the first Native American script in North
America.

Access full article below:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/science/23cherokee.html?_r=1&ref=science