Sequoyah's Twelve Year Invention

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sequoyah could not read or write in English, or in any other written language, when he decided sometime around 1809 that the Cherokee people needed a writing system of their own. He first tried assigning one symbol to each word, an approach that collapsed almost immediately under the sheer number of words in the language. His real insight, reached only after years of failed attempts, was to break Cherokee down into its syllables instead, a far smaller and more manageable set. He drew on shapes he recognized from a printed English spelling book for some of his eighty six characters, borrowing their forms without any idea what sound they represented in English, and simply assigned each one a Cherokee syllable value of his own choosing. In 1821 he demonstrated the finished system to Cherokee leaders with the help of his daughter, Ahyokah, who had grown up learning it alongside him and could read messages written in it that she had never seen before, proof to a skeptical audience that the system genuinely worked. The Cherokee National Council formally adopted it four years later, and within a generation Cherokee literacy rates using the new syllabary outpaced those of neighboring English speaking communities.