r/todayilearned
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u/Pfeffer_Prinz
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11d ago
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TIL the Cherokee writing system was made by one man, Sequoyah. It's one of the only times in history that someone in a non-literate group invented an official script from scratch. Within 25 years, nearly 100% of Cherokee were literate, and it inspired dozens of indigenous scripts around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah947
u/ATL-East-Guy 11d ago
If you are ever traveling through north Georgia on I-75, check out New Echota. It’s the original site of the Cherokee capital that is now a state park about 1 min off the interstate in Calhoun.
It’s a fantastic museum and has tons of period buildings you can walk through. I believe they even have the Cherokee Phoenix printing press, although it may just be a period correct press.
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u/clip_clop86 11d ago edited 10d ago
I live just a few miles from New Echota and I believe that the printing press there is a historical recreation, but I could be wrong because it has been around 10 years since the last time I visited. If folks are interested in New Echota, they should also check out the Chief Vann House in Chatsworth. It is about a 20-25 minute drive north on highway 225 from New Echota.
EDIT: New Echota is located off of exit 317 on I-75 in Georgia.
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u/hurhurdedur 10d ago
You're right that it's a historical recreation. I remember seeing it back in around 2000-2001.
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u/TheConnASSeur 10d ago edited 10d ago
Just a little clarification for those interested. OP is talking about the Eastern Band of The Cherokee. There are 3 main groups of Cherokee: The Cherokee Nation, which consists of around 383,000; The United Keetoowah Band, which consists of around 14,000, and The Eastern Band of The Cherokee, which consists of around 13,000. When most people talk about The Cherokee Capital they're thinking about Tahlequah Oklahoma.
And the Cherokee Phoenix is a real paper that continues to be published to this day. It publishes in both Cherokee and English. Check it out: Here
edit: My mistake I could have sworn OP said New Echota was the capital, as in present tense.
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u/clip_clop86 10d ago edited 10d ago
The OP is semi-correct. New Echota was the capital before it was forcibly moved to Oklahoma.
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u/K1LL3RM0NG0 10d ago
If you go further north up I75 to Loudon, TN they have a museum dedicated to Sequoyah specifically. That part of the state has a lot of areas named after and tributes to different historical native Americans.
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u/Rhom_Achensa 10d ago
Imagine walking from there to eastern Oklahoma. That’s the Trail of Tears.
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u/RKRagan 10d ago
I was driving through Cherokee, NC and saw road signs with a second language posted under the English. I thought it was Cyrillic on first glance and then realized I had never seen it before. Then the obvious hit me and I realized I had never heard of a North American native written language before. Google led me down the rabbit whole and I was fascinated. It’s beautiful really.
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u/kramerica_intern 10d ago
The characters are really cool. I wish it was more prevalent here in Western North Carolina.
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u/Pfeffer_Prinz 11d ago edited 10d ago
posted this yesterday but it was taken down for tenuous evidence about his biographical stuff. In any case, here's more interesting info (including some of the stories):
- Technically, it's not an alphabet, it's a syllabary; that means each symbol doesn't represent a sound, but a whole syllable (i.e. a combination of consonants & vowels).
- Despite having 85 symbols to learn, the Cherokee system is immensely easier to adopt (for speakers of the language) than most alphabets, since all possible sounds are represented clearly.
- "The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve" [Wikipedia].
- The design of the symbols (called syllabograms) was influenced by the shapes of letters in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and Glagolitic (the oldest Slavic alphabet). But the sounds are completely unrelated — Sequoyah didn't know how to read any language (before his own).
- After working for over a decade, Sequoyah finished this system in 1821. In 1825 it was adopted as the official Cherokee script. By 1830, 90% of Cherokee were literate, and by the 1850s it was nearly 100%.
- In 1828, the Cherokee got a printing press and launched the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in both English & Cherokee. This was the first bilingual newspaper in the US [NatGeo], and it was free for any Cherokee [Wikipedia). It's still around today!
- Story time (tenuous evidence): Sequoyah traveled across the land, teaching the system to Cherokee everywhere. Most tribes were doubtful, so Sequoyah would ask each leader to say a word, which he wrote down, and then called his daughter in to read the words back. He was then allowed to teach it to a few students — they were still suspected of witchcraft until the students demonstrated the same reading ability. This took months, but the language soon spread widely.
- After the syllabary was officially adopted by the Cherokee in 1825, Sequoyah set up a blacksmith shop. He still taught the writing system to anyone who asked.
- His work inspired the development of at least 21 scripts around the world, used to write more than 65 languages — from Cree, to other indigenous groups in Canada, to Bassa in Liberia, to other West African languages, and even one in China.
- The Sequoia tree was possibly named after him. Some people question this, but the person who named the tree (Stephan Endlicher) was also a linguist, so he probably knew about Sequoyah, who was famous in linguist circles.
EDIT: from u/excited_to_be_here :
If anyone is interested, /u/DiplomacyPunIn10Did added a Cherokee Syllabary alpha set to the KAT Napoleonic mechanical keycap project:
https://diplomacyvariants.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/24-alphas-cherokee-sequoyah.png
and here they are in action: https://i.imgur.com/ybddYKq.jpg
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u/Gemmabeta 11d ago edited 11d ago
"The Cherokee student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing might require two years to achieve"
When King Sejong and his scholars invented the Korean Alphabet (which was another script, like Cherokee, that was created from linguistic first principles to fit the language), he declared that:
A wise man may acquaint himself with them before noon; a stupid man, ten days.
Which feels like a real classy burn against the Chinese Characters they had to make do with before.
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u/highbrowshow 11d ago
There was initial pushback when Hangul was introduced because there were other already more established alphabets. But Hangul was easier to learn and ultimately won out because of its simple design
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u/IRefuseToGiveAName 11d ago
Hangul is so easy to learn. I took two Korean electives in college, and I can still remember the alphabet all these years later. A friend of mine likes to joke even if I can't speak it, I could still read a newspaper to a blind man.
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u/alQamar 10d ago
I learned arabic and it’s the same. I’ve lost almost all vocabulary but could definitely read it to someone.
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u/oneeighthirish 10d ago
Arabic looks gorgeous, too
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u/DiligentHelicopter54 10d ago
I love the look of Arabic! I’m almost afraid to learn it and ruin its aesthetic.
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u/i-d-even-k- 10d ago
Don't be. Arabic is unironically the prettiest script on Earth, regardless of what you think of the language or religion or cultures. It is no wonder the main art form of the Arabic world for a long time was calligraphy!
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u/FuckingKilljoy 10d ago
I think they meant that their handwriting is shit lol, but I agree with your point
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u/whirled-peas 10d ago
Could you? I feel like the fact that written Arabic usually omits the vowels means you’d have to already know the words to be able to read them correctly. On the other hand, Devanagari (the script used to write Hindi and Sanskrit) is beautifully consistent, very simple and easy to learn as far as phonetic writing systems go.
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u/TrueSchwar 10d ago
It’s actually a lot more complicated than that. I have a video in my profile the goes over the history of writing systems in Korea and Japan.
But the gist of it for Korean is that even after Hangul was invented, Idu and Classical Chinese were still the official scripts used in government. It wasn’t until the 1890’s/1900’s that Korea switched from Classical Chinese and Idu to a mixed script Hangul Hanja system, where any Sino-Korean word was written in Hanja, and the rest in Hangul.
It wasn’t until after WWII, with Korean liberation, that Hangul only became a thing due to Nationalist sentiment. Now the idea of writing Hangul only in Korea existed before the Japanese occupation, but became so much stronger after due to Hanja, and mixed script in general, became associated with Japanese influence. So that nationalist drive to “purify” the language, plus much the of the people being illiterate, meaning they didn’t have a close attachment to Hanja, leads us to today, where Korean is written in Hangul. Though Hanja still exists, and there are people advocating bringing back a mixed script.
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u/airblizzard 10d ago
mixed script in general, became associated with Japanese influence
This is so interesting. I never knew Korean had this.
Though Hanja still exists, and there are people advocating bringing back a mixed script.
I understand this. As a Japanese student I hated learning kanji, but reading is actually much faster with a mixed system.
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u/IWasGregInTokyo 10d ago
Hangeul would be easier to read if there was a form of the script for loan words like the way katakana is used in Japanese.
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u/blargfargr 10d ago
it didn't ultimately win out for design reasons. koreans themselves stopped using it for centuries in favor of chinese characters, and it was only officially used in the mid 20th century for nationalistic reasons.
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u/my-name-is-puddles 10d ago
I dunno that I'd really say "for design reasons". The main reason is that Chinese characters had already been and continued to be the writing system of scholars. Hangul was for the peasants, and no self-respecting scholar would write in that peasant scratch. Also, Hangul was actually banned in Korea multiple times; the peasants can't write bad things about the government if they can't write at all, so they banned the script that was easier to learn without spending a lot more time studying, effectively banning lower classes from writing/reading.
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u/Dramatic_Original_55 11d ago
Thumbs up for the Hangeul reference!
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u/love-from-london 11d ago
Yeah, once you know the alphabet, Hangeul is surprisingly easy to read. Still have to learn what words mean, but you can at least figure out the loanwords.
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u/iostream64 11d ago
I remember some language learning site said that out of the three East Asian languages Korean was the most difficult to learn despite having the easiest writing system.
Is that true?
I heard Chinese grammar was actually pretty simple but the characters plus the pronunciation and it being a tonal language make it extremely difficult for new learners.
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u/ReallyGuysImCool 11d ago
As someone whos learned both - spoken Korean is a lot harder than spoken standard Mandarin. But being literate is a pretty important part of life too lol so it's pretty hard to say what the hardest east Asian language is. Also spoken Chinese dialects/languages (not necessarily mandarin) varies much more than Korean.
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u/AStrangerSaysHi 10d ago
As a Korean learner, I was blindsided when I first heard jejueo. Literally didn't understand why I couldn't understand anyone.
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u/ReallyGuysImCool 10d ago
Ha, yeah true. Just watched a clip. But just by virtue of size and regional history, the chances of you meeting a Chinese person who's first language is a dialect non-intelligible with Mandarin is much much higher than in Korean. I looked up jejueo and there's only ~5000 native speakers. Eventually standard mandarin will probably take over China completely too but it's still a big hurdle in learning and communicating in Chinese
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u/AStrangerSaysHi 10d ago edited 10d ago
I wasnt trying to disagree btw. I was just giving a personal anecdotal example. While I was in college at yonsei everyone always told me how beautiful jejudo was so I visited just expecting all korean to be at least mostly similar because it's so small.
I heard all the familiar sounds, and every now and then I'd catch like a word and I was just like internally thinking "how do I... just... I should be understanding them, right?"
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u/dragmehomenow 11d ago
It's simple, relatively speaking, but it's still a pain in the ass compared to other languages.
In English, it's one snake, one horse, one cat. In Mandarin, it's 一条蛇,一匹马,一只猫. It turns out you classify nouns and indicate you're measuring them with a specific word. For example, snakes (蛇) are measured as 条, but horses 马 are measured as 匹.
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u/ultimatetrekkie 11d ago
Probably not a 1:1 comparison, but the way it was explained to me was to think of English phrases like "Two sheets of paper" or "10 head of cattle."
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u/dragmehomenow 11d ago
Yup! There's actually an internal logic to how these nouns are categorised, but most native speakers (like me) internalise it as a kid, so we struggle to explain it. Like, I think 条 generally refers to things that snake on the ground, like snakes, ropes, and rivers, but I'm sure someone who studied Chinese grammar will correct me on this.
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u/PM_ME_UR_POKIES_GIRL 11d ago
As a native English speaker and an American I know intellectually that English is just as obtuse in many ways, but I nonetheless recoiled in horror at what you just described.
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u/dragmehomenow 11d ago
条 can also be used for lives (一条命), but I have no idea why! It might imply that lives are long and thin and snake-like.
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u/TheChance 11d ago
English is obtuse in pidgin ways, half a millennium though it’s been. Standard Chinese is obtuse in “you should see the old version” ways.
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u/nihaopengyou 10d ago
When I first started learning I was so confused. It’s different because every word has it’s own measure word but similar to English like ‘a pack of dogs’, ‘two flocks of birds’.
English you can just say ‘three pens’ or ‘ three tables’ but in Chinese they have different measure words 三支笔 san zhi bi three pens and 三张桌 san zhang zhuo three tables
The zhi and zhang are the different measure words. When in doubt you can default to 个 ge for everything but it’s pretty basic. I recently saw a meme of the people around the table pointing swords to the middle and the outside was all the measure words and the middle point was 个 lol
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u/incer 11d ago
I mean, you guys are taught spelling as kids because hearing a word often doesn't tell you enough to transcribe it properly, and vice versa.
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u/nihaopengyou 11d ago
I’m native English and have studied Chinese for a long time/lived there/programs taught in mandarin etc and it took so long to kinda internalize like you instead of just brute memorization. Now I’m like duh 张 is for flat-ish things like tables or paper lol
But you’re definitely right about the categories for measure words. If you’re ever curious I recommend the Pleco app and if you scroll to the bottom for the character info it should tell you what it generally applies to.
For 条 it says “for things with a long narrow shape” and gives 河 and 鱼 as two examples. I guess if you consider all fish to have a long narrow shape it works haha
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u/chetlin 10d ago
The interesting thing there is that the measure word for cows in Chinese is also the word for head, so you do literally say "10 head of cattle" for both languages. It's 十頭牛/十头牛
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u/DiscoHippo 11d ago
That'd why I sound like a toddler and just use "ge" for everything
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u/dferrantino 10d ago
Is this a safe spot to complain about "er" vs "liang"?
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u/dailycyberiad 10d ago
And about whether to use "了"?
I need a support group or something.
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u/DiscoHippo 10d ago
If it happened in the past, then sometimes it's right to use.
Sometimes.
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u/Chimie45 11d ago
Both Japanese and Korean do this as well, Korean not as much as Japanese or Chinese though.
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u/mrsegraves 11d ago
I took Mandarin through all 4 years of college. Chinese grammar is insanely easy. It always felt closer to (really easy, basic) math than a language. You just plug and play. The hard part is learning tones
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u/ShakaUVM 11d ago
Mandarin is a simple and easy to learn language, kind of a pain to memorize the characters in the writing system. Korean is the opposite, the writing is really easy to learn, but Korean as a language is hard.
Japanese decided to combine both and get the worst of both worlds. You have to memorize all the characters, and both their Chinese and Japanese pronunciation, and you also have to do conjugation.
Chinese has effectively no conjugation (just the le particle to indicate completion mainly), so you just write the character. But in Japanese if you want to be -ING (study-ING) something then you write the character, conjugate the ending to the て form, add an いる after (the -ING suffix) then conjugate the ている based on politeness and tense and etc. (私は勉強しています)
Mandarin, you just add a 在 to the sentence to indicate you are -ING it (我在學習)
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u/Chimie45 11d ago edited 10d ago
As a note Korean grammar is the same as Japanese.
공부 하다 > 공부 하고 > 공부 하고 있다 > 공부 하고 있습니다.
Or to put it into Japanese if you don't know Korean,
勉強する > 勉強して > 勉強してる > 勉強しています
Like it's quite literally step by step the exact same grammar.
As someone who is fluent in both, I will say I agree 100%. Korean is much harder than Japanese.
Edit (as a note to all replying, I meant in the process here for this conjunction the grammar is the same, not entirely across the whole language, albeit it is quite similar across large swathes)
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u/RandyDandyHoe 11d ago
If the writing is easier and the grammar is the same, why's korean harder?
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u/badmartialarts 10d ago
Pronunciation is way harder in Korean. (in my opinion)
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u/deirdresm 10d ago
Which is odd given that Hangul is based on mouth position to make the sound.
But it’s like sheet music: “This will get you in the ballpark, but is not an accurate representation of the sequence of sounds.”
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u/towa-tsunashi 10d ago
Negative conjugation is different in Korean though.
As someone who has Chinese/Japanese family and has at least 2 years of learning in all 3 languages, I also would say that Korean is the hardest of the East Asian languages. I love the writing system but everything past that is extremely difficult, even knowing Japanese grammar and Chinese/English loanwords.
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u/mrsegraves 10d ago
See, this is why Mandarin is the shit-- no conjugation. You use the same exact verb no matter what the nouns are. If it's past tense, you just slap a very easy character (了)after the verb or at the end of the sentence. You want to say you're actively doing something? Just slap a 在 before the verb and you're golden. Makes things much easier when you don't have to learn conjugations on top of pronunciation, tones, and characters
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u/PM_ME_UR_SHEET_MUSIC 10d ago
I actually think it makes it harder. It's easier in simple sentences, sure, but all of the work the verb endings and case particles are doing in Japanese/Korean has to be done by syntax alone in Chinese, which can quickly get very confusing. I much prefer synthetic languages to analytical ones for this reason.
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u/dimensionpi 10d ago
Well it's "literally" the same grammar up to a certain level/breadth.
So my confidence is rewarded when using Korean and Japanese grammar interchangeably 90% of the time.
Then 10% of the time I end up letting a big error through without realizing 😢
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u/Poiuy2010_2011 11d ago
and both their Chinese and Japanese pronunciation
To be clear, not the actual Chinese pronunciation but a "japanified" one loaned at some point in time. Knowing Chinese beforehand wouldn't help you that much in this department.
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u/PartyCurious 10d ago
The Chinese grammar is similar to English compared to Spanish in someways. Bai jiu. Would be White Alcohol in English where the the adjective comes first. I think Chinese pronunciation is easier than Vietnamese. Vietnamese is easier to read as it uses a type of alphabet. Reading in Chinese was impossible for me while in Vietnamese I suck but can get some sounds down. Some people pick up these tonal languages. I don't and feel Chinese and Korean are easier to understand than Vietnamese or Thai.
I learned while in China "chow me in" is the same as Americans say "chow main". Americans spell it right "chow mein" but say it wrong. Chow is fried, mein is noodle. Fried noodles. They don't have s on end of word if more than 1, also easy for grammar.
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u/Wonderful_Delivery 10d ago
I’m English Speaking Canadian but lived in Taiwan for a while so I speak fair Mandarin, no reading etc but I remember when I first arrived I saw some won-ton noodle place and went to order and was saying it the English way ‘ Wan-tawn’ and the lady was like ‘wtf are you saying , and then a customer said ‘ he wants wun-twun ‘ . First time I realized that being from Vancouver I probably pronounce it like Cantonese style or just the way we say it in the English world.
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u/-Vayra- 11d ago
I would consider Chinese and Japanese harder languages to learn, at least to read/write. Korean has some difficult pronunciation, compared to Japanese which at least to me is super easy to pronounce. Grammar-wise I don't there's a huge difference between them in terms of difficulty.
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u/DUKE_LEETO_2 10d ago
Yeah while this is really cool, I realized it is more akin to opera singers being able to sing in many languages using a phonetic alphabet than learning a language. You still have to learn the definition of words and the whole grammatic structure.
Another example is that I can read most Spanish words, but that doesn't mean I know what they all mean. Or be able to use them in a different sentence.
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u/excited_to_be_here 11d ago
If anyone is interested, /u/DiplomacyPunIn10Did added a Cherokee Syllabary alpha set to the KAT Napoleonic mechanical keycap project:
https://diplomacyvariants.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/24-alphas-cherokee-sequoyah.png
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u/AJ_Mexico 11d ago
The interesting part for me was that the reason Sequoyah had trouble getting the elders to approve his system was that not only were they illiterate, they were also unfamiliar with the concept of a written language and had to be convinced that there was such a thing. This is why he had to do the trick with getting his daughter to read back what was written.
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u/atomfullerene 11d ago
Glagolitic
That's gotta be coincidence, right? Or was there some settlement of Serbians in Georgia that I don't know about?
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u/dangerbird2 11d ago
He got written material from missionaries written in different languages. Presumably, he had access to Bible translations written in Greek, Hebrew, and Church Slavonic, all of which would be fairly available to a seminary-educated preacher at the time. Crucially, he couldn't actually read any of it, which is why the Cherokee syllabary is so unique
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u/Gemmabeta 11d ago edited 11d ago
Another thing was that Sequoyah was also inspired by the printed word. He wanted his language to cross over to mechanical printing immediately, so he was somewhat constrained to letter-shapes that are already available in print-shops (hence a lot of Latin/Greek letters, rotated letters, letters with a small serif added, and such).
His original conception of the Syllabary was considerably more "florid", but I doubt that would be easily printable--and making the printing dies would have cost a fortune.
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u/whoami_whereami 10d ago
and making the printing dies would have cost a fortune.
Yeah, it was sort of bad timing for developing a new font for printing. During the 16th century the market for typefaces had been saturated with high quality products to the point that in the 17th and 18th century the art of punchcutting was almost lost again due to lack of demand. In 1818 when the British needed a new small typeface for anti-counterfeiting measures on bank notes there were only four or five people left in England that could do it. And it was only from mid-19th century onwards when new technologies like electrotyping in the 1840s and especially pantograph engraving in 1880 came along that replaced manual punch cutting and made creating letter punches (which were the basis for making casting moulds for movable types) a lot easier.
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u/Firewolf420 11d ago
Damn, kinda makes you wish that they had that as a font now in modern times, for it. Now that the printing press is no longer a restriction.
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u/JostlingAlmonds 11d ago
And Andrew Jackson was still a dick and ordered us removed.
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u/MNHarold 11d ago
Well of course! Got to make way for the people, not the...nah I'm not even going to say that for the meme lol.
Ain't history fun? You get to find out all about famous cunts!
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u/3Dartwork 11d ago
In the irony, Jackson just wanted them gone so he could acquire massive amounts of land for basically free that was suitable for cotton growing and sell those acres to Southerners for massive profits.
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u/g00fyg00ber741 11d ago
Well, he also believed they were lesser than white people, and he threatened and bribed them to either assimilate or relocate. I don’t think it was just for the land, I think he also was racist against them pretty clearly.
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u/Ovi-wan_Kenobi_8 11d ago
I’d never seen Cherokee script until today. Very interesting. I’m sure it’s coincidence, but many of the symbols resemble Armenian letters.
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u/Pfeffer_Prinz 11d ago edited 11d ago
Interestingly, the Armenian alphabet was also invented by one person! (Mesrop Mashtots, c. 405 AD). Except in that case, Armenians were literate — they just used Greek, Persian, and Syriac scripts.
Still fascinating! especially the letter shape coincidence — never noticed that before!
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u/mrsmetalbeard 11d ago
If you ever drive through the city of Cherokee, Tennessee all the municipal street signs and a lot of business signs are written in both languages. Great museum and hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
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u/desertedlemon 11d ago
Yeah it's a really cool place. Cherokee is in North Carolina, however. I highly recommend stopping by if anyone is passing through the area.
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u/mrsmetalbeard 11d ago
Ooh, good catch. I just remembered it was close to Gatlinburg Tennessee (which also has a great aquarium) but Cherokee is in fact in North Carolina.
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u/theflyingfucked 11d ago
Pretty much in the course of a single decade the Cherokee nation in GA created a written language, started a free press, ratified a constitution, established a capitol and were more literate than surrounding poor whites
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u/respondin2u 11d ago
In Oklahoma, elementary school books are often awarded “Sequoyah books” and are often presented on accelerated reader lists.
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10d ago
I must assume this is something awesome! But I actually have no idea what you are saying. It’s kind of ironic… or unironic, I don’t know, I don’t read good.
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u/respondin2u 10d ago
Sorry I’m not sure how to explain it but basically these books would be awarded this prestige and these would be books kids could read over a year and get a special reward at the end of the year if they read them all.
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u/GreedyLack 10d ago
I remember doing the challenge in elementary school where you had to read a certain amount of Sequoyah books to go on a trip if we’d accomplished the goal amount read.
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u/FrenchFreedom888 10d ago
Some more information:
Every State in the US has their own system of awards for books they give each year. Oklahoma's is called the Sequoyah Award, and has chosen books annually since 1959. There are three categories, Children's, Intermediate, and High School, each with their own "master list" of 15 (I think) books.
I remember at my elementary then middle school in Oklahoma, if you read at least three of the books on your grade level's respective list for that year, then you would get to vote for your favorite from the list. I believe that the winner of the award is still decided by a popular vote like that.
The Sequoyah list has been a great list of good book options for me, as the yearly list's books are almost always at least worth reading, and the winner of the Award is exceptional. I encourage anyone reading this to go check out their own State's award, and I would appreciate it if any of y'all want to share insights you have about your own States' systems!
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u/_BloodbathAndBeyond 11d ago edited 10d ago
My fiancés great aunt worked on a dictionary for their language. She was the last fluent speaker of their native tongue so she spent a lot of time writing it down and getting it all recorded. She died last year though, so no more fluent speakers. Another dead language.
Source: https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/films/maries-dictionary
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u/Uuugggg 10d ago
So dead that the only reference of it I’ll ever hear doesn’t even mention its name
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u/somefish254 10d ago
Wukchumni (200 ppl left) of the larger Yokut (50,000 left) in central california
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u/_BloodbathAndBeyond 10d ago
This was her: https://www.globalonenessproject.org/library/films/maries-dictionary
Here's the documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4079806/
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u/somefish254 10d ago
What does heritage mean to you and your fiancé? Are you interested in the topic or is more of a curiosity
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u/pingpongtits 10d ago
That's incredibly sad. Especially that no one learned the language from her. Is it possible for others to take her efforts and learn to be fluent or are young people just not interested in their own culture and history?
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u/_BloodbathAndBeyond 10d ago
It's probably not possible for anyone to ever be as fluent, but there are a lot of dictionaries and recordings of her so it might be possible. But most people don't care since a language only used by like 5 people on Earth is useless.
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u/Southern_Blue 10d ago
There is an immersion language school in Cherokee NC. Enrolled students, mostly little kids, go throughout the school day hearing and speaking nothing but Cherokee.
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u/pingpongtits 10d ago
That wonderful to hear. It's not like a child can't learn multiple languages, especially with immersion.
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u/goldstar_femme 10d ago
Exactly. I am local to the area where the headquarters is located, and we have plenty of language immersion. A great many of my friends are fluent, and I grew up speaking it. Although I am rusty, I can still hold my end of the family gossip. Lol
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u/notyogrannysgrandkid 10d ago edited 10d ago
If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend the Cherokee National History Museum in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. It’s very well done, from the static exhibits (one of which is about Sequoyah’s syllabary) to the live Cherokee village with artisans demonstrating traditional crafts and aspects of their culture.
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u/didijxk 11d ago
Imagine how much knowledge was lost because these groups lacked a written language. We know what we know about the Celts thanks to the Romans who wrote down their experiences but it's also viewing them through the lens of their enemies.
To read about them on their own terms would be a far more interesting prospect because they may not have been as barbaric as the Romans said they were.
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u/pl233 11d ago
Think of all the Eurasian steppe nomads we know basically nothing about
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u/Legate_Rick 10d ago
There's a lot of that. During the late bronze age there were raiders who attacked civilizations on the coast of the Mediterranean sea. They're only referred to as "sea peoples" other than that historians can only take educated guesses as where they came from.
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u/TaliesinMerlin 11d ago
There are also many groups that had written languages, but those materials were not preserved. The pre-Roman Etruscan language is an example. The Romans tell us that there was Etruscan literature and even plays, but the surviving corpus of written language is small. To your example about the Celts, several Celtic groups like the Gauls and the Picts did use writing, even if larger bodies of work didn't survive.
Some Mesoamerican groups also had written languages long before the Europeans arrived. Olmec, Zapotec, Isthmian, Mayan, and other scripts existed, and some (esp. Mayan) are well-known.
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u/louploupgalroux 10d ago
Me: "It's terrible that we lost all that knowledge."
My Brain: [It's the time travelers. They went back and scooped up all the good stuff. We need to go back to the lab and try harder. First person to make the jump wins.]
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u/Perfect_Wrongdoer_03 10d ago
The Inca also had a writing system, iirc, although a little unusual due to using ropes.
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u/buckleycork 10d ago
In fact the Gauls could actually read and write in Greek but decided that writing their religion and culture and shit was taboo
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u/TheBalrogofMelkor 11d ago
Easter Island appears to have briefly developed a writing script after Europeans first visited (debatable - one of the symbols seems to be a tree that went extinct before European arrival).
Seems once people understand the concept of writing down language, it's not too hard for them to make the leap.
They almost only wrote on banana leaves, and writing died out within a few decades, probably because of disease and societal upheaval. This is also when they tore all the moai (Easter Island heads) down. All we have left are like 2 pieces of driftwood.
Unrelated, but the sequoia trees (massive evergreens of the American West Coast) are named for Sequoyah.
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u/IAMTHEUSER 11d ago
Interestingly, the etymology of Sequoia is hotly debated. Some think they’re named for Sequoyah, some think the name comes from the Latin verb Sequor
https://mashedradish.com/2017/01/10/sequoia-a-giant-sized-controversy/
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u/TheBalrogofMelkor 10d ago
How dare my memory of Sequoyah's Wikipedia page that I read one time several years ago lie to me!
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u/tlollz52 11d ago
Hey I remember reading a book about this in 2nd grade. Couldn't remember if I made it up or not.
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u/grizzlyblake91 10d ago
My middle school (in central Oklahoma) was named after him! We learned all about him in middle school history there. I remember being in awe when I found out what he did for the Cherokee people.
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u/Abell421 10d ago edited 10d ago
The Eastern Band of Cherokee has a Sequoyah Birthplace Museum in Vonore TN. It's located between the Smokies and the Ocoee if you are ever coming through.
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u/Swimming-Tap-4240 10d ago
Johnny Cash had a song about it.The Talking Leaves.
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u/gigiallinhadid 10d ago
Thrilled to see my culture being recognized for our achievements!
The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma just opened a language immersion school, the Durbin Feeling Language Center,, where we are now teaching young speakers and the Master Apprentice Program, I believe. The MAP is for adults to solidify their fluency. Something some never thought could be done, and now we’re thriving. Anyone can go online and learn for themselves too!
Our history has ups and downs, but our language is vital to us.
ᏩᏙ (wado, thank you) for sharing!
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u/wapfelite 11d ago
Talk about timing! I've been learning Blackfoot & other regional dialects - I'm going to try applying this, tunsay
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u/Juutai 11d ago
Sometimes I think about the Blackfoot people and I wonder if they have a non English name for themselves.
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u/andrew01292 11d ago
Per Wikipedia “The Blackfoot Confederacy, Niitsitapi, or Siksikaitsitapi[1] (ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ, meaning "the people" or "Blackfoot-speaking real people”
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u/data_ferret 11d ago
It's amazing how many people's names for themselves are simply "the people" or "the real people."
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u/SerasTigris 11d ago
I mean the planet we live on is called 'earth'. It kind of makes sense. When you're the only ones around, you don't exactly need a unique and creative name for yourselves.
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u/_Dead_Memes_ 10d ago edited 10d ago
Pretty sure groups only had a need to develop more unique and descriptive names if they were interacting with other ethnicities and groups heavily and frequently. Usually in the context of larger populations, longer distance trade, being united under larger states/kingdoms, and more complex civilization (not saying groups such as the Blackfoot werent “civilized” or “complex”, rather they just weren’t in the sense of dense settled agricultural populations).
So like the northern Mayas developed their name for themselves from the term “mayab” meaning “flat”, I think due to their homeland being relatively flat, and the Mayas were a dense settled agricultural population that engaged in frequent and long distance trade with other groups.
Please correct me if this is wrong tho
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u/A0ma 11d ago edited 11d ago
They do. Many Indigenous tribes in the US received a French, English, or Spanish name depending on who colonized their region first.
The Spanish gave the names Seminole, Pueblo, etc.
The French gave the names Nez Perce, Gros Ventre, Coeur d'Alene, etc.
The English gave the names Crow, Blackfoot, etc.It was also common for them to receive a name from a different tribe (usually one that had better relations with the colonizers). Apache comes from the Zuni word for "enemy" and Comanche comes from a Ute word meaning "Those who fight with us."
Here is an incomplete list.
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u/L07 11d ago
I mean, it kind of makes sense why it happened when many native languages refer to themselves as “the people” when translated to English.
So, we’re getting a somewhat egocentric view no matter what.
Comanche? Numunu “the people” Apache? Indé - “Person” or “People” Blackfoot? Niitsapi “the people” Ute? Núuchi-u “the people” Seminole? Yat’siminoli “free people”
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u/UnderstandingSmall54 11d ago
When you do something like this for your people you will be remebered for ever. What an astounding person.
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u/breakfastBiscuits 10d ago
OSDA!
If you'd like to hear it spoken, you can check out the Visit Cherokee Nation Youtube channel. THey have a "Cherokee Word of the Week" playlist here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr72tsFRQzI&list=PLLAaEbcbNmakT3cHPYMkcA4ORnt10_xwg&index=152
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u/SLR107FR-31 10d ago
My grandmother and her siblings can all speak Cherokee. They had to learn English back in the day and my great grandparents spoke nothing but Cherokee
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u/keanutrees 10d ago
My band Whoa Sequoia wrote a song about this called 86 Characters. Which was the amount of symbols, or characters, in the original system.
Can listen here: https://open.spotify.com/track/6JTGVZTqx7pj3cOlkiCqqB?si=615ca6181dff417f
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u/ButterflyAttack 10d ago
As someone who has studied and applied this shit in a couple of ways, I totally bow to this fucker.
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u/feisty-spirit-bear 11d ago
Korean was also invented from scratch
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u/Gemmabeta 11d ago edited 10d ago
The King of Korea was not illiterate.
The Koreans already had a writing system (Hanja), Sejong just replaced it with a simpler one.
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u/ThePerryPerryMan 10d ago
The people of Korea were largely illiterate though. The only people who were literate belonged to the upper class. Even then, they learned hanja (Chinese script). So, the vast majority of Koreans were illiterate. King Sejong the Great changed this with the introduction of Hangeul.
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u/Thue 11d ago
But necessarily various other writing systems in the dawn of history were made by illiterate people. E.g. cuneiform script - there has to be a first script.
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u/RedditWillSlowlyDie 11d ago
And they did it when they didn't know of other writing systems. This guy used other written languages as a source for his written language.
Sequoyah's final attempt was to develop a symbol for each syllable in the language. Using the Bible as a reference along with adaptations from English, Greek, and Hebrew letters, by 1821 he created 86 symbols, later to be 85 symbols, that depict the syllables of the Cherokee language.
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u/SweatyStrain 11d ago
Had a free subscription to the Cherokee Phoenix last year (we forgot to sign back up this year). They still occasionally run stories in the syllabary - it’s super cool!
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u/SEND_NUDEZ_PLZZ 10d ago
Afaik, in the history of mankind, writing has been invented 5 times.
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u/lazyfinger 10d ago
After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825. It unified a forcibly divided nation with new ways of communication and a sense of independence. By the 1850s, their literacy rate reached almost 100%, surpassing that of surrounding European-American settlers.
This made me tear up for some reason.
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u/Blue-cheese-dressing 11d ago
I grew up near New Echota, if your down that was it’s an interesting visit. Many in Government saw that printing press and the news paper as a threat and the Georgia Guard was actually sent in to confiscate it.
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u/mynameisjebediah 10d ago
Dude got up one day and decided to write his entire language down.
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u/Lovely_Quesadilla 10d ago
If you are ever traveling through north Georgia on I-75, check out New Echota. It’s the original site of the Cherokee capital that is now a state park about 5 min off the interstate in Calhoun
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u/grassiopeia 10d ago
The Museum of the Cherokee in Cherokee NC is a great learning experience and well worth a visit. Last time I was there, they had a syllabary exhibit about the language with many contributing artists, it was exceptional and very interesting. Highly recommend!
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u/haysanatar 10d ago
Fun Fact: The Cherokee weren't originally from the South East, they originated around the great lakes and displaced a few tribes like the Creek and Muskogee. The name Cherokee is actually a creek word that means people of another tongue, AkA "you don't sound like you're from around here".
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u/jaquanthi 10d ago
Let me all introduce you to a lone genius called Tenevil of the Chukchi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenevil
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u/Gemmabeta 11d ago
Here is a copy of the Cherokee Phoenix from 1828, the first Native American newspaper printed in a Native language in America.
https://www.cherokeephoenix.org/site/about.html