Writing System
Cherokee is written in an 85-character syllabary invented by Sequoyah (also known as Guest or George Gist). Many of the letters resemble the Latin letters they derive from, but have completely different sound values; Sequoyah had seen English, Hebrew, and Greek writing but did not know how to read them.
Two other scripts used to write Cherokee are a simple Latin transliteration and a more precise system with diacritical marks.
Read more about this topic: Cherokee Language
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or system:
“For your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)