[rayiner]

The article’s title is misleading: “The Man Who Created a Written Language for the Cherokee Did It So Efficiently and Elegantly, His Peers Thought It Was Magic.”

His peers thought it was magic because they were unfamiliar with the concept of writing, not because his writing system was so efficient. He was put on trial for witchcraft because people thought he was communicating via magic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-a....

[dang]

Ok, we've changed the title using more representative language from the article.

It's plenty interesting without superfluous claims!

[rayiner]

I didn’t mean to criticize the HN title—it accurately reflected the title on the linked page. I just thought the article’s choice of title was interesting given the rest of the story.

[dang]

On the contrary, your point was a great one and we want HN titles to be accurate! This is implicit in the ancient PG lore: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

It's helpful when HN readers do the actual work of understanding for us because we can't read even a tiny fraction of what gets posted here (and my capacity for even that is declining monotonically). But we're always happy to swap a title when someone posts an apt observation.

[mrandish]

> we can't read even a tiny fraction of what gets posted here

I'll bet it's exhausting but your note did make ponder: If a soul was condemned to the eternal torment of reading nothing but all the user posts of one social media site for all eternity, HN would be a pretty excellent choice. I shudder to think of the alternatives.

[Modified3019]

For those just encountering this like me, the man in question was Sequoyah, a monolingual Cherokee. His own tribe put him on trial, being overseen by his Chief.

Slightly different from what I’d normally assume had happened from just reading the above comment.

Really impressive on his part, basically saw it was possible and looked as some examples of what others had done, then got to work.

[rayiner]

The notion that Sequoyah was a monolingual Cherokee is dubious. He had a European father (though he was raised with his mother) and worked as a trader and served in the U.S. Army. His cousin, to whom he presented his syllabary, was also half European, “George Lowery.” He had extensive contact with Europeans. Moreover, his syllabary includes adaptations of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters. Part of the story is that he copied some character shapes from his wife’s family’s Bible. (Presumably they could read English if they had a Bible.) He was obviously exposed to a variety of European writing. He completed his syllabary in 1821, many years after his military service. It seems highly unlikely that someone who was so linguistically gifted to be able to invent a syllabary would not have picked up some familiarity with spoken and written English through that exposure.

This article does a good job of reviewing the conflicting narratives of his history: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26467045. It’s all very uncertain, and there’s a lot of mythology.

[TedDoesntTalk]

I found it interesting that you used the term European several times, but never once the term American. He served in the American military, lived in America, had an American father (according to the article).

So you consider 19th century America to be Europe, or is there another reason for your choice of words?

[simiones]

"American" would be ambiguous in this context, right? Both the Cherokee and the English-speaking residents of the USA are American, but the specific point here was about whether Sequoyah was only a Cherokee speaker or if he had any knowledge of English, Spanish, French, Latin or any other European language. In this context, saying that Sequoyah's father was "American" would not make any point - it wouldn't tell anyone reading the comment that he was not Cherokee nor from any other native population; whereas European makes that point succinctly.

[eesmith]

I find it interesting that you think "served in the U.S. Army" isn't American enough for you.

Foreigners can serve in the US Army. Native Americans weren't automatically US citizens until 1924, but were considered citizens of their sovereign tribe.

European here clearly means both "from Europe" (eg, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters are European, not American), as well as "European Americans" (ie, Americans of European ancestry, and often with cultural ties to Europe.) Just like how "Asian" doesn't always mean "born in Asia", or how "Anglo" can refer to non-Hispanic white Americans rather than being specifically related to England.

Trading with the Spanish in Florida, English ships, or French trappers would all count as "contact with Europeans", and not simply "Americans".

Finally, recall that at the time "American" was a state of mind. A Loyalist at the time would not consider themselves "American", and a Patriot considered a Loyalist to be "inimical to the liberties of America". How do you know if Sequoyah’s father was an American or a Loyalist?

[TedDoesntTalk]

Loyalists were gone by from America by the mid-1780s.

[karavelov]

Article says he was born in 1770s, so his missing father can be Loyalist

[bcjdjsndon]

He's owned you there Ted, made you look a right tool

[IIAOPSW]

Its a real shame we don't have any transcripts or other court records from that hearing...for obvious reasons.

[onlypassingthru]

There's a 1991 film (and earlier novel) called Black Robe that fictionalizes what it might've been like when the first Jesuit missionaries introduced this powerful black magic to the North American natives in the 17th century.[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cj_bSkuKVA