When the white missionary Samuel A. Worcester arrived in the Cherokee Nation in 1825, charged with the task of learning Cherokee and translating the Bible, he found Sequoyah’s syllabary waiting for him. He also found an able tutor and collaborator in Elias Boudinot, a Cherokee Christian convert well educated in English and in Christian theology. Together they struggled to translate Christian concepts into a language that had never before expressed them. Worcester learned the syllabary and sent off to Boston to have type cast for it. They set up a printing press, and in 1828 Boudinot became the first editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper ever, with columns in both English and Cherokee. The press was later used for Worcester and Boudinot’s Cherokee New Testament and Cherokee hymnal, two works that remain critical to Cherokee literacy today.
Samuel Worcester was unusual among white Americans of his day in his respect for the Cherokee people to whom he had been sent. Rather than assume he could improve on a natively developed script, he adopted it enthusiastically, adding only the alphabetical order that it uses today (figure 8.1). He firmly opposed deportation of the Cherokees, winning for himself over a year’s jail time for his civil disobedience on their behalf. His adoption of Sequoyah’s syllabary made the Christian message more attractive to the Cherokees. Many of them converted, though never Sequoyah.
After the Trail of Tears, only a remnant of the Cherokee people remained in the east. A few hundred lived on lands in North Carolina outside the Cherokee Nation’s boundaries and had been exempt from the removal orders. There were also Cherokees who had managed to hide out in the mountains and avoid deportation. These two groups were the ancestors of today’s Eastern Band of Cherokees, based in the Great Smoky Mountain region of southwestern North Carolina.
Figure 8.1 The Cherokee syllabary, as invented by Sequoyah and arranged by Samuel Worcester. Only in a few cases does the syllabary make a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated initial consonants (transliterated as voiceless and voiced consonants respectively). Where no distinction is made (i.e. there is only one symbol in the box) the symbol can be used for either an aspirated or unaspirated consonant. At the bottom of the chart are the Cherokee spellings for “Cherokee” and “Sequoyah.” The name Sequoyah is often spelled as s-si-qua-ya, but he himself spelled it s-si-quo-ya, as witnessed by surviving examples of his signature.
Meanwhile, the Cherokee Nation reconstituted itself in the west, many of its administrative functions served by Sequoyah’s syllabary. To its great misfortune, the Nation sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, as the wealthier and more assimilated Cherokees had taken up slaveholding when they adopted plantation agriculture. The war left the Nation battered and impoverished, with few resources and little energy to support its distinctive literacy. Oklahoma statehood in 1907 entailed the end of autonomous government for the Cherokees.
During the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries Cherokee literacy declined, with some renewal of interest beginning in the 1960s. The spoken language also lost ground in the face of English, especially in North Carolina, so that among the Eastern Band of Cherokee today, only about 10 percent speak Cherokee and a much smaller proportion are literate in the syllabary. Since the rise of the telephone, the script’s wondrous effect of allowing communication at a distance has been less important. In the early twentieth century, government educational policies enforced monolingual education in English, and children were often punished for speaking Cherokee on school grounds. Only since the 1970s have Cherokee-speaking children in Oklahoma been allowed bilingual programs. In North Carolina, Cherokee children are now permitted to study Cherokee as a subject in school. The syllabary is taught, but (in the east, at least) transcriptions into Roman letters are used much more than the syllabary and students usually do not become comfortable using it.
Oddly enough, the Cherokee syllabary is now considered difficult to learn by Cherokee speakers, though in its early years it was famous for being easy. One reason for the difference is probably that most Cherokees nowadays first learn to read in English, which means that their expectations for how writing works become adjusted to an alphabet rather than a syllabary. English literacy probably also makes it difficult for them to reassign meaning to symbols that also occur in the Roman alphabet and to read D as a, S as du, and as go, etc. The syllabary also uses distinctions that a user of the Roman alphabet would be trained not to notice: is e but is sv (phonetically [s], the tilde indicating a nasal vowel); is la but is ta. Another factor is that learners who are not already fluent in Cherokee would be far more troubled than fluent speakers by the information omitted in Cherokee spelling, not being sure if a consonant is meant to be aspirated, and if a vowel is to be pronounced short or long, or even omitted. The syllabary therefore functions more readily as a writing system for first-language speakers than for second-language learners.
The mainstays of Cherokee literacy have been the Bible and traditional medicine. Reading the Bible in their own language has special meaning for the many Christian Cherokees, while formulas of traditional medicine are recorded by traditional practitioners in their own language and script. Sequoyah’s syllabary remains closely linked with Cherokee identity; the single most widely recognized word is probably tsa-la-gi (“Cherokee”), which actually has its own keyboard key in the Cherokee font used in this chapter.
Sequoyah died in 1843 on a trip to Mexico, searching for a group of Cherokees who had supposedly settled there and whom he hoped to reunite with the Cherokee Nation. His grave is unmarked and unknown. Sequoyah himself remains a cultural icon among the Cherokees, and even white Americans idolized him during the nineteenth century. His name has been given to a county in Oklahoma, and also (spelled Sequoia) to a particularly large and long-lived subfamily of trees, a presidential yacht, and, more recently, a Toyota SUV.
9
The Semitic Alphabet: Egypt to Manchuria in 3,400 Years
The alphabet has been touted as one of humankind’s greatest inventions – and not without cause. Equally, though, the alphabet is a monument to human stupidity and hidebound conservatism. Originally conceived as a dumbed-down version of writing for the illiterate, it was simple enough to spread easily from one language to the next; however, it was rarely adapted thoughtfully to the new language. Throughout its history, innovation has been astonishingly rare.
An alphabet is a writing system in which the individual symbols stand for phonemes (individual, distinct sounds) rather than whole syllables or morphemes. The alphabet refers to the first script whose letters stood for phonemes and whose letters began with something that sounded like aleph and bet (which became alpha and beta in Greek), and by extension to its vast family of descendants. The early alphabet wrote only consonant phonemes, however, and therefore some scholars reserve the term alphabet for scripts in which all phonemes are written (though they may not each have a unique symbol); for them the alphabet is the Greek script and its descendants, which record all their vowel phonemes. The distinction between a consonantal alphabet (also known as an abjad) and a fully voweled alphabet of the Greek type is perhaps overrated; even among the Greek family of scripts very few languages manage a perfect one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes.
David Sacks has compared the alphabet to the wheel: a simple, elegant invention that, once arrived at, cannot really be improved upon. Arguably, the idea of the alphabet fits this description, but the actual alphabet rarely has. In theory, each symbol in an alphabet stands for a single phoneme of the language, but this theoretical ideal is seldom achieved and if once achieved is often lost again. A language changes over time, and an alphabet that fits a language perfectly at one stage in its history will not be such a perfect fit at another. And an alphabet that fits one particular language perfectly is unlikely to be perfect for another. This slippage has rarely prompted substantial adaptations to the alphabet, and the result is often far from elegant.
The conservatism is not without reason. For one thing, readin
g is a matter of habit. Fluent readers do not sound out words letter by letter; they employ a great deal of top-down processing, identifying whole words and phrases at a glance, and using context to tell them what words to expect next. It is a brilliant performance, really. With top-down processing readers can become quite fluent even in scripts that indicate the sounds of a word only vaguely. However, this expertise is only gained with practice; change the system and years of practice go down the drain.
It is not only reading fluency that is lost. Once a written tradition exists, there is strong motivation to continue writing the same way one’s ancestors did. As long as the writing system remains, the information stored by previous generations is still readable. Change your writing system and you lose your history. No wonder innovation is rare.
Crucially, the early users of the alphabet had no particular interest in history, at least not the history that had so far been written, which wasn’t theirs. They spoke a Semitic language, probably Canaanite, and though they lived in Egypt they were not particularly interested in Egyptian literature. It is this kind of lack of interest that allows for true innovation in the technology of writing: Sequoyah managed it, having no interest in English literature, but the Nara Japanese, who wanted to read the Chinese classics, did not.
The earliest samples of alphabetic writing yet found were discovered in the 1990s in a dry valley in Egypt named Wadi el-Hol (“Valley of Terror”), just north of the Valley of Queens and across the Nile from the pharaonic capital of Thebes (though at the time of the inscriptions the capital was at Memphis). Carved into the wadi’s cliffs are two short alphabetic inscriptions dating from around 1900 to 1800 BC, during the Middle Kingdom, Egypt’s literary golden age.
Wadi el-Hol was the site of an Egyptian army encampment along an ancient road. Some army units at the time were composed of Semitic-speaking mercenaries from the lands east of Egypt, relatives or ancestors of the people known to later history as Canaanites, Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Aramaeans. The Middle Kingdom also saw the growth of Semitic-speaking communities living in the Nile delta.
The Egyptians had long had a full set of signs that each stood for a single consonant, but they generally used them only as phonetic complements, resorting to consonant-by-consonant spelling only in rare words or foreign names. Tradition perpetuated a logoconsonantal writing system, but the Semitic mercenaries or delta dwellers who created the Semitic alphabet were not interested in maintaining Egyptian tradition. What interested them greatly was the Egyptian ability to store information, keep accounts, label their possessions, and permanently dedicate objects to the gods.
Some Semitic speakers must have acquired at least some literacy in Egyptian, and they must have grasped the advantage it would be if others of their community could also write. But it was too much to expect them all to learn Egyptian and the complex hieroglyphic writing system that few people knew well, even among native Egyptians. So they created their own bare-bones set of uniconsonantal signs, modeled after the Egyptian ones. This was the “For Dummies” version of writing, stripped of all complexity and redundancy, pared down to something an illiterate soldier could learn in a few sessions. It must have looked funny to the Egyptian scribes: to write any word at all required several signs – how inefficient! The letters did not have to be grouped into boxes, but could just straggle after each other in a line – how ugly! And there was nothing in the spelling of a word that pointed directly to the meaning of the word – no pictographic clue, no determinative – but the word had to be laboriously sounded out before it made any sense – how cumbersome! It was the world’s first alphabet, made for people who lacked either the time or the motivation to learn the 500 or so signs that literacy in Egyptian required.
Some of the Egyptian uniconsonantal signs seem to have been designed on the acrophonic principle, by which the first sound in the name of the object depicted became the consonant for which the hieroglyph stood. Though the acrophonic idea may have been Egyptian, and many of the signs used were Egyptian, the names used in creating the alphabet were Semitic. For example, a rippled line, showing waves on water, was n in Egyptian, but m in this new Semitic alphabet, because the word for “water” in the relevant Semitic language began with m-, something like mm. Today, nearly 4,000 years later, we still use a descendant of the ripply line for M. Similarly, an ox-head stood for the glottal stop that began the word for “ox,” something like ?alp; and a rough enclosure pictured a house, bt. These were the ancestors of A and B, and the ultimate source of the word alphabet.
The letters which resulted from this acrophonic exercise were all consonants; words in the West Semitic languages did not begin with vowels. Like Egyptian, Semitic languages build their words around a core of consonants: writing the consonants recorded the nuclear morpheme of a word, as well as the consonants of any prefixes and suffixes, while the inflectional vowels could be judged by context.
Deducing the story of the early alphabet is very much an exercise in connecting the dots, as the evidence is meager and scattered. From Wadi el-Hol, the next evidence for the alphabet comes from the Sinai, where Semitic speakers were employed in Egyptian mines; and from there the next is in Middle-Bronze-Age Palestine, homeland of the Semitic Canaanites. These early stages of the script, known as protoCanaanite, are known from only a handful of short inscriptions. Even the total number of letters is not firmly known, though there were probably 27 of them.
Working with the Sinai material, W. F. Albright claimed in 1966 to have deciphered the correct phonemic value of 23 of the letters, though skeptics remain for a number of these values. Only a dozen or so words can be read in the Sinai texts; they are short, and the thread that connects them to later, fully deciphered scripts is weak. Occasional proto-Canaanite inscriptions on stone, metal, and potsherds survive, but anything written on papyrus (probably the vast majority of texts) is long gone, destroyed by the elements.
By about 1400 BC, the pictographic nature of the letters had been largely lost, the letters now formed as simple lines. The transitional stages from proto-Canaanite to this linear Old Canaanite alphabet have not been found, but a roughly contemporary cul-de-sac in the alphabet’s history has been. The city of Ugarit, whose ruins are now known as Ras Shamra on the coast of Syria, was a flourishing city-state between 1450 and 1200 BC. Ideally situated to facilitate trade between the Aegean, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, it developed a cosmopolitan civilization. Like most of their colleagues along the Fertile Crescent, Ugaritic scribes wrote Mesopotamian cuneiform on clay tablets. They themselves were speakers of a West Semitic language (closely related to the Canaanite group), and they learned of the simple script their relatives were using. Accustomed to writing in cuneiform, they assigned each of the 27 Canaanite letters a cuneiform sign. At some point they added three more letters to extend the system to write Hurrian, an important regional language of the time which allowed vowel-initial words and had a sibilant (s-like) consonant that didn’t appear in Ugaritic.
Written on clay tablets, the Ugaritic texts have withstood the centuries and are the earliest texts of any appreciable length in a West Semitic language (East Semitic, by contrast, is well attested, comprising Akkadian and its Assyrian and Babylonian dialects). They are also the earliest evidence for alphabetical order: a number of tablets bear the signs of the Ugaritic alphabet listed in order – the same order known from later Semitic traditions, and the same order, essentially, as the one we use today.
Alphabetical order was almost as useful an invention as the alphabet itself. We have no certain idea of what inspired the order that we ended up with (other, rival orders existed in the Bronze Age), or whether it ever had any significance. Quite possibly, it was transmitted through a song or rhyme that helped the semi-literate Canaanites remember their letters (just as modern semi-literates, our children, sing the “alphabet song” today). The brevity of the alphabet – so jealously guarded, even for languages with much larger numbers of phonemes – served to keep alphabetical order me
morable, while recitation of the fixed list helped discourage additions and changes.
It is remarkable how seldom alphabetical order has been tampered with, despite the fact that the order of the list has no intrinsic meaning. The Greek and Roman alphabets use essentially the same order attested in ancient Ugaritic, as did Phoenician, Old Hebrew, and Aramaic, and most of their descendants. Only a few cultures, such as the Arabs and the Mongols, have dared to reorder the alphabet.
Once firmly ordered, the alphabet could be used to number things. In much of the Near East the letters of the alphabet did double duty as numerals, at least until the introduction of a separate set of numerals from India (the ancestors of what we now call “Arabic” numerals after the people who later introduced them to the Europeans). Today the order of the alphabet serves a vital role, organizing the data of the Information Age. Anything that can be given a name can be put in an ordered, alphabetical list. The potential of alphabetically ordered databases of knowledge – encyclopedias, dictionaries, indexes, telephone books – was well beyond the imagination of the alphabet’s inventors, however. Originally a mere mnemonic device, alphabetical order is one of the great serendipitous inventions of history.
The Ugaritic branch of the alphabetic family died out with the fall of Ugarit around 1200. Meanwhile, the Old Canaanite script was used in much of the area archaeologists call (with no political intent) Syria-Palestine, though only hints of its presence have been preserved. A branch following a different alphabetical order migrated southward, mutating significantly along the way, and became Old South Arabian, used for ancient South Semitic languages such as Sabaean, the language of the Queen of Sheba. That script later crossed the Bab el-Mandeb Strait into Africa, where it was used for Classical Ethiopic (Ge′ez or Giiz), the South Semitic written language of the Aksum Empire. At some point, roughly contemporary with the introduction of Christianity into Ethiopia around AD 350, the script was substantially modified to include vowels, written as appendages to consonants in a manner strongly reminiscent of the scripts of India (chapter 10). The new version, now written left to right, became the written vehicle for the distinctive Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. In modern times the script is also used for the Semitic languages Amharic and Tigrinya in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
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