Cherokee
Cherokee often is the language used for ceremonies
among various Indian tribes
Cherokee is the only known instance of an individual single-handedly creating an entirely new system of writing. It was created by the Cherokee known as Sequoyah. He was born around 1770 near what is now Knoxville, Tennessee. His father, an English fur trader, and his mother, the daughter of a prominent Cherokee family, named him George Gist. But it was after he adopted the name Sequoyah that he started devising a system for the spoken Cherokee language.
Sequoyah was illiterate when he watched white settlers making marks on paper, that he called "talking leaves," and recognized the power in being able to do that. Capturing that power for his people became his consuming ambition. His friends called him crazed. His wife thought it was the work of the devil and destroyed much of his early work. But he persisted and finally, near the end of his life, he and his daughter traveled to Arkansas where they presented his writing system to Cherokee leaders who smiled on his achievement and encouraged instruction in it.
Sequoyah's invention of this writing system enabled rapid strides in the education and culture of one of the largest Native American populations. Children today relate to this language because of how they recognize in it their own penchant for creativity in communicating. For instance, the numeral 4 in the middle of a word, in much the same way that people text each other today by co-opting symbols. His own name contains that numeral 4.
In his system of writing, each of the 85 sounds used in the spoken language has its own symbol. Many of the characters resemble Roman, Cyrillic or Greek letters or Arabic numerals, but there does not appear to be any relation between the sounds those symbols stand for in their original languages and the sounds they stand for in Cherokee.
