MooNEYl THK CHEKOKKK SYLLABARY 219 



" Hi il fiirlln'r i')i(ivtr<l, Tliiit any person or jjersons who nliiill violate tlu' [irovi^ioiiH 

 of the second section of this act, an<l shall resist or refuse to appear at the place 

 designated for trial, or ahscond, are hereby rlei'lared to be outlaws; and any person 

 or persons, citizens of this nation, may kill him or them so offending at any time 

 an<i in any manner most convenient, within the limits of this nation, and shall not 

 lie held accountable to the laws for tlic same. . . . 



" Hi' il fiirllicr fiKfiii'il, That no treaty shall be binding upon this nation whi<-h aJiall 

 not be ratified by the general council, and approved by the principal chief of the 

 nation. DecemWr 2, 1842." — Laws of the Cherokee Nation, ISliS. 



(40) The Chekokee syll.\h.\rv {p. 110): In the various schemes of syml>olic 

 thought representation, from the simple pictograi)h of the primitive man to the lin- 

 ished alphabet of the civilized nations, our own system, altln>ugh not yet i>erfecl, 

 stands at the head of the list, the result of three thousand years of development by 

 Egyptian, Phienician, an<l (ireek. Sequoya's syllaliary, the unaided w<irk of an 

 uneducated Indian reared auiid semisavage surroundings, stands second. 



Twelve years of his life are said to have been given to his great work. Being entirely 

 without instruction and having no knowleilge of the jihilosophy of language, being not 

 even aci|uainted with English, his first attempts were naturally enough in the direc- 

 tion of the crude Indian jiictograph. He set out to devise a syndjol for each word of 

 the language, and after .several yeans of experiment, finding this an utterly liopeless 

 task, he threw aside the thousands of characters which he had carved or scratched 

 upon pieces of bark, and started in anew to study the construction of the language 

 itself. Hy attentive observation for another long period he finally discovered that 

 the sounds in the words used by the Cherokee in their daily conversation and their 

 public speeches coidd be analyzed and i-lassifie<l, and that the tliousands of possible 

 words were all formed from varying condnnations of hardly more than a hundred 

 distinct syllables. Having thoroughly tested his discovery until satisfied of its cor- 

 rectne8.s, he next proceeded to formulate a symbol for each syllable. For this purpose 

 he made use of a number of characters which he found in an old English spelling 

 book, picking out capitals, lower-case, italics, and figures, and placing them right .side 

 up or upside down, without any idea of their sound or significance a,s used in English 

 (see ])late v) . Having thus utilized some thirty-five ready-made characters, ti i which 

 must be added a dozen or more produced by mollification of the same originals, lie 

 designed from his own imagination a.s many more as were necessary to his iiuri>ose, 

 making eighty-five in all. The complete syllabary, as first elaborated, would have 

 reijuired someone hundred and fifteen characters, but after nnich hard study over 

 the hissing sound in its various combinations, he hit upon the expedient of re|ire- 

 senting the sound by means of a distinct character — the exact eipiivalent of our letter 

 s — whenever it formed the initial of a syllable. Says Gallatin, " It wanted but one 

 step more, and to have also given a distinct chara<'ter to each consonant, to reduce 

 the whole number to sixteen, and to have had an al|ihabet similar to ours. In prac- 

 tice, however, and as applied to his own language, the superiority of (xuess's alphabet 

 is manifest, and has been fully proved by experience. You nmst in<leed learn and 

 remember eighty-five characters instea<l of twenty-five [•'-"ic]. Hut this once acconi- 

 ]>lished, the education of the pupil is completed; he can read and he is perfect in his 

 orthography without making it the subject of a distinct study. The boy learns in a 

 few weeks that which occupies two years of the time of ours." Says Pliilli|)s: " In 

 my own observation Indian children will take one or two, at times several, years to 

 master the English printetl and written language, but in a few days can read and 

 write in Cherokee. They do the latter, in fact, as soon as they learn to shape letters. 

 As soon as they ma.ster the alphabet they have got rid of all the perplexing ipiestions 

 in orthography that puzzle the brains of our children. It is not too much to say 

 that a child will learn in a month, by the same effort, as thoroughly in the lanL'uai;e 



