Video: Exploring Cherokee History: Sequoyah & The Syllabary

From YouTube “Join us for a new Exploring Cherokee History celebrating the Cherokee Syllabary Bicentennial! In this episode, we sit down with Roy Boney Jr., Cherokee Nation’s Language Program Manager, to discuss Sequoyah’s creation of the Cherokee syllabary and the impact that it has had on Cherokee Nation to this day. 

Some notes from the video:

1809–1821 Sequoyah created the modified syllabary. Introduced in 1821 to Cherokee people.

86 characters were grasped quickly and literacy spread quickly.

Adaption of characters to print. 1828 first Cherokee newspaper.

1827 newsletter printer in syllabary went from cursive to print. Other Cherokees modified the syllabary for print.

New words are added by a Cherokee consortium submitted by others. For example “email” is translated as “lightening paper.” Apple and Android can adapt keyboard for syllabary. Before that was translated for earlier technologies. Cherokee translated into unicode by early 2000s. Fonts developed for the screen.

An additional video on the history that goes into much more detail, “Cherokee Syllabary History with Roy Boney, Jr.” can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV4_aESsq58