Sequoyah

This article is about the inventor of the Cherokee script. For the projected but unrealized US state of the same name, see Sequoyah (State) .

Sequoyah with a table of the Cherokee script he developed. The picture was taken in 1828 during a visit by Sequoyah to Washington. Around his neck he wears the silver medal that the Cherokee Nation awarded him for his services to the writing of the Cherokee language and the development of a new script. This lithograph was made from a portrait made by Charles Bird King in 1828 of Sequoyah in Washington, which was lost in a fire in the mid-19th century.

Sequoyah ( ᏍᏏᏉᏯ Ssiquoya ) (* around 1763 in Tuskegee , † August 1843 in San Fernando ) was the inventor of the Cherokee script , which is still used today when writing the Cherokee language .

Sequoyah (English predominantly George Guess called occasionally Gist , Guist or Guyst written) was the son of a Cherokee - Indian and an unlicensed dealer of European origin. However, the child grew up in an Indian environment without his father. His mother, who belonged to the "Red paint" -Clan of the Cherokee ( Aniwodi -Clan), ran a trading post in Tuskegee. The place called Taskigi by the Cherokee was on the Little Tennessee River near Fort Loudoun. This English fort was located at the confluence of the Little Tennessee River and the Tellico River . The area of ​​Tuskagee near today's Vonore sank in 1979 when the Tellico Reservoir was flooded .

Life

Sequoyah statue in front of the Cherokee Museum in North Carolina

In his younger years Sequoyah worked as a warrior and took part in many campaigns, including the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend . The following year he is said to have married his wife Sally.

It is not certain when Sequoyah moved from his birthplace. Various whereabouts have come down to us, but only sparsely documented. Sequoyah is said to have lived in Wills Town , Alabama for some time . He later apparently moved from Alabama to Arkansas , only to settle further west in Oklahoma .

At some point he suffered a knee complaint, which is why he has not been able to work as a warrior or hunter since that time. Perhaps that is why he began to work as a blacksmith or silversmith. He is said to have developed amazing craftsmanship in this area.

In principle, however, it should be borne in mind that many of these details about Sequoyah's life are rather vague and only proven by infrequent sources, some of which do not complement each other or even contradict each other in terms of time, so that at least in parts a certain uncertainty remains.

There is, however, a detailed report by the American lawyer, writer and publisher Samuel Lorenzo Knapp (1783–1838), who had an extensive conversation with Sequoyah with the help of two interpreters in 1828 on the occasion of a visit by a Cherokee delegation to the American capital summarized in his book Lectures on American literature , which came out in 1829, the year after the meeting in Washington.

Here many details are given not only about Sequoyah as a person, but also how he explains the invention of his writing to the writer with the help of the two translators. Knapp calls him See-quah-yah and says that his English name is George Guess . This spelling of the English name also coincides with the spelling in the English-language meeting minutes of the Cherokee nation from this time. Furthermore, Knapp says that See-quah-yah says of himself that he is 65 years old, whereby he almost puts it afterwards because he does not seem to know the exact year of his birth himself. Knapp also reports that, unlike the other members of the delegation, See-quah-yah did not go to Washington in European clothing, but in his traditional Cherokee clothing.

He describes him as an impressive personality who not only took adequate time to think about his answers and who occasionally pulled his pipe, but who also regularly asked the two interpreters whether Knapp understood everything correctly have. In addition, Knapp also mentions that Sequoyah also deals with calculation methods and painting and drawing.

Development of the font

Sequoyah reported to Samuel Knapp during his visit to Washington in 1828 that the idea of ​​developing a script first occurred to him when he was still a warrior and was participating in one of the campaigns that began around the time of the defeat of General St. Clair ( St. Clair's Defeat ) at the Battle of the Wabash River in 1791 or shortly thereafter. There was an incident with a prisoner of war about the contents of a letter. This incident sparked a discussion among the Cherokee of Sequoyah's unit about the nature of these "talking leaves". While his fellow warriors came to believe that this was a special gift of the Great Spirit to the whites, Sequoyah insisted on his view that it was something developed and learned by humans. Sequoyah reported that although he had been concerned with the matter again and again afterwards, he had often pondered the way the whites did it, but without ever seriously tackling the matter. This went on for a while before a knee swelling forced him to stay longer in the house. Due to the protracted illness, which in the long run led to the fact that his sick leg shortened and that he then had only limited ability to walk for the rest of his life and could neither go hunting nor go to war, he now began seriously with to deal with the mystery of Scripture. It is difficult to say today when exactly this point in time was, because Sequoyah did not give any further details of the time until the point where he presented his writing to the public. At least from what he said, it is clear that he was married and had children. After that, it should have happened between 1810 and 1820. His wife and children had actively supported him because he said of himself that his hearing was not sharp enough to hear the subtleties of the sounds, but that this was essential for developing the phonetic signs.

Sequoyah also reported that he first tried to solve the problem with the help of images such as birds or other animals. However, he soon gave up this idea because the approach soon seemed futile to him. Then he came up with the idea of ​​using the help of randomly selected characters without any visual reference to the syllable sounds represented. Only in a few exceptional cases did he use characters with a visual reference to the pronounced syllable, but only because it was easier to remember. In this way, with the support of his family, he succeeded, after long attempts, to develop 200 characters that were sufficient to reproduce the sounds of the Cherokee language in syllable spelling. With the help of his daughter Ayoka, who apparently had a special talent in this regard, it was possible to further refine this system of signs and in the end to reproduce the Cherokee language in writing with only 86 characters. Then he began to work on the shape of the characters so that they would look more pleasing to the viewer. Up to this point he had scratched the characters with the point of a knife or a nail in the bark. Now he asked for pen and paper. He made the necessary ink himself from bark extracts. After reworking the pen a bit, he managed to put his newly developed characters on paper. During the development of these signs, he had withdrawn greatly from the social life of his tribe and some people were already starting to look at him suspiciously. In the end, however, he went public with his invention and demonstrated his development to the tribal leadership together with his daughter. After an initial skepticism, the tribal leadership agreed that Sequoyah should teach several young men the script over the next few months, and they would then see. After a few months another meeting was called and Sequoyah was able to clearly prove with the help of the young men that it was by no means an opaque trickery, but a skill that could be learned by anyone very quickly. The leadership of the tribe was enthusiastic about the demonstration and decided that as many Cherokee as possible should learn this script as quickly as possible. First of all, however, a big festival was celebrated to honor the invention accordingly.

This demonstration took place in 1821 and Samuel L. Knapp mentions in his report that perhaps many Americans were not even aware that in the meantime (1829) even types of lettuce had been cast and a newspaper was partly printed in Cherokee using this font . It should be noted that Knapp has great admiration for the performance of Sequoyah, whom he consistently calls see-quah-yah . Because of Knapp's philological knowledge, it can be assumed that this phonetic reproduction using English orthography comes very close to the actual pronunciation.

Examples of the Cherokee script

Sequoyah had developed this completely independent writing system for the Cherokee language without further contact with whites and without any previous training. Knapp also confirmed that Sequoyah cannot speak any other language besides his mother tongue and cannot read any other script than his own.

However, there were a number of people among the Cherokee who could both speak and read English, such as Charles Hicks, who allegedly showed Sequoyah how to write his name. He wanted to label his silversmiths' works of art with his English surname, as was customary at the time.

Therefore it will not have been difficult for him to borrow an English book from someone in order to get inspiration for his characters. However, he did not know the meaning of these letters.

With the 86 characters contained in his font, all syllables occurring in the Cherokee language can now be reproduced. Many of the characters resemble individual letters in the Latin script - sometimes also Latin letters lying on their side or upside down - but because he could not read English, their sound assignment is completely different. The top line in the adjacent picture, which looks roughly like CWY , is read, for example, "tsalagi" (= Cherokee).

This typeface caught on soon after its legendary performance in 1821 among the Cherokee, and after a comparatively short time there were hardly any illiterate people among them. Europeans also noticed how easy this new font was to learn. There are reports that some Cherokees learned the script within 14 days, while in English schools literacy took years. This ability to learn quickly led the European missionaries to give up some of the laborious English-language literacy and to publish the New Testament in Cherokee script. As early as 1828, the Cherokee Phoenix was the first newspaper in the Cherokee and English languages. Other newspapers in the Cherokee language followed later. To this day, the Cherokee language is written with its own script.

Sequoia trees

In 1847 , after examining the wood, bark, needles and cones of the coastal redwood , the well-known Viennese botanist Stephan Endlicher recognized that it was a member of a new genus, and gave the only representative of this genus the name Sequoia gigantea . Since Decaisne had also given the giant sequoia this name in 1854 , a confusing situation existed for almost a century, but it was resolved in 1939 by John T. Buchholz . Today the scientific name for the coastal sequoia is Sequoia sempervirens and that for the giant sequoia Sequoiadendron giganteum .

Finally, like Decaisne, chose the genus name Sequoia most likely in honor of the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary. That it enjoyed a certain fame in Europe in the middle of the 19th century is impressively proven by a report in the gazebo from 1869. Even if there is apparently no confirmed written evidence that Endlicher and Decaisne chose their generic names Sequoyah in honor, it can be assumed that this name is otherwise quite unusual.

Today the subfamily of sequoias ( Sequoioideae ) as well as its three genera, namely the giant sequoia ( Sequoiadendron ), the primeval sequoia ( Metasequoia ) and coastal sequoia ( Sequoia ), trace their scientific name back to the inventor of this North American syllabary.

The Sequoia National Park in California is also named after him and at the same time the coastal sequoia is the state tree of this US state.

literature

• The Indian's "speaking paper" . In: The Gazebo . Volume 41, 1869, pp. 655-658 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ This year of birth results from the report by Samuel L. Knapp about his conversation with Sequoyah in Washington in 1828. According to other information, he was born around 1770.
2. ↑ In the middle of the 19th century, according to the gazebo, he was called "Georg Gueß" in the Großer Brockhaus.
3. ↑ Tuskegee tennessee.gov ( Memento of the original from May 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ^ Wills Town Mission and Cemetery - Fort Payne, Alabama exploresouthernhistory.com
5. ↑ The Cherokee Relocated to Northwest Arkansas at: Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings nps.gov
6. ↑ Sam. L. Knapp, Lectures on American literature archive.org
7. ↑ About the Indian languages ​​of America . 1834, books.google.de
8. ↑ In 1847, Endlicher of Vienna, one of the most eminent botanists of his time, wrote a comprehensive work on botany, and, having seen sections of the wood, cones, bark and leaves of the big trees of California found them to be a distinct variety, and named them in honor of the great Cherokee, Sequoyah gigantea. in: Chronicles of Oklahoma, Volume 8, No. June 2, 1930 THE LIFE AND WORK OF SEQUOYAH By John B. Davis, BS, MA digital.library.okstate.edu
9. ↑ The Americans promptly published a spate of invalid names. The French (always ready to irritate the English) then intervened in the person of Joseph Decaisne, who in 1854 published the species as Sequoia gigantea, a plausible assignment that ultimately won acceptance by British botanists. Thereafter Wellingtonia slowly disappeared from the literature. Unfortunately, Sequoia gigantea was an invalid name, having been previously used by Endlicher to describe a horticultural variety of the coast redwood, and this problem was not satisfactorily resolved until the American John T. Buchholz described Sequoiadendron in 1939. in: Sequoiadendron giganteum (Lindley ) Buchholz 1939 biologie.uni-hamburg.de