• DOI:10.2307/482159
• Corpus ID: 156008097

The early history of the Cherokee syllabary

@article{Walker1993TheEH,
  title={The early history of the Cherokee syllabary},
  author={Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh},
  journal={Ethnohistory},
  year={1993},
  volume={40},
  pages={70-94}
}

• Willard Walker, James Sarbaugh
• Published 24 January 1993
• History
• Ethnohistory

In the number and forms of its characters, the printed Cherokee syllabary is virtually the same today as it was in i8z8. Before I8z8 the characters underwent dramatic changes, which have been attributed in recent decades to missionary influence; but documents written by Sequoyah himself, the testimony of a number of his contemporaries, and the Hicks syllabary of 1825 all suggest that Cherokees alone developed the syllabary and adapted it to the requirements of printing. There is no evidence for native literacy in America north of Mexico prior to 1492. But, following the European invasions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writing systems derived from those of Europe were developed for several North American languages, and native literacy was promoted by Euroamericans, both Catholic and Protestant, in an effort to spread Christianity and integrate native peoples into the expanding political and economic systems of the New World. Although native literacy never became pervasive in North America, it was established successfully here and there in the territories claimed by France, Spain, Russia, Great Britain, and, later, the United States, Mexico, and Canada. In the nineteenth century the development and dissemination of native writing systems continued to be largely the result of missionary efforts to assimilate native polatations. In the early i8zos, however, a writing system for Cherokee that did not conform to this pattern was invented, accepted, and rapidly disseminated. The Cherokee case is unusual in several respects. The writing system, unlike those of Europe, is syllabic. The inventor was a monolingual speaker of Cherokee without links to Christianity or to Euroamerican schooling. The syllabary was disseminated without the aid of Euroamerican institutions, but seems to have had an almost Ethnohistory 40:I (Winter I993). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 0014-1801/93/$I.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.111 on Tue, 02 Aug 2016 05:53:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Early History of the Cherokee Syllabary immediate impact on all Cherokee-speaking communities both east and west of the Mississippi. Perhaps the most striking feature of Cherokee literacy in the i8zos was that it was enthusiastically embraced both by those Cherokees who had moved west to avoid further conflict with white frontiersmen and by those who had stayed in the east and asserted their right to continued self-government. Most missionary groups concerned with Cherokees adopted the syllabary by 1826. It has never been identified with assimilation, however, and has always been a key element in the maintenance of Cherokee social boundaries and ethnic identity. In any event, Cherokee literacy became an international sensation in the i8zos; at no time since has any other Native American writing system received so much attention.