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I used to think the 'Rosetta Stone' was just about Egypt, but a podcast changed my mind
I was listening to a history podcast called 'Overlooked' and they did an episode on the Cherokee writing system. I learned that Sequoyah, a Cherokee man, created a whole written language for his people in the early 1800s, and it was adopted by the tribe in less than a year. That's way faster than any language I've heard of being created and used. It made me realize how much of indigenous innovation gets left out of the basic history we're taught. Has anyone else come across a story like that, where a whole piece of history was just missing?
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wesley1397mo ago
Sequoyah's syllabary was actually based on English letters he saw in books. He just gave them new sounds. Not exactly creating from nothing.
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ericschmidt6mo ago
Look at the letter D turned into the "a" sound, and a backwards 6 for "yo." He saw parts of a machine and built a whole new one that worked for Cherokee. It's like taking a car engine and using it to power a boat. The raw stuff was there, but the final system, the way it all fits together to write a spoken language, that was pure genius.
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