| | 64 | Author: | Parins, James W. | Add | | | Title: | The Genius of Sequoyah  | | | | Published: | 2004 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Sequoyah, the much-honored creator of the Cherokee syllabary, the means by which
anyone speaking the Cherokee language could become literate, was an unlettered
man himself until he finished his system. Nonetheless, the Cherokee historian
Dr. Emmett Starr reported, written language held a particular fascination for
him. Seeing the written page used by white people, Sequoyah at first thought
that each letter stood for a word. Upon closer examination, however, he
concluded that this could not be true, and that a better explanation was that
each letter represented a sound. This idea, which came to him around 1809, was
the seed from which the Cherokee syllabary grew. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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