Talk:Sequoyah

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Painting is NOT of Sequoyah

According to this the portrait in this article is of Thomas Maw, not Sequoyah. --Rebroad (talk) 13:21, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Also, this attests to the same. --Rebroad (talk) 13:29, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe. This seems to be authentic. The Cherokee Nation and Tahlequah By Deborah L. Duvall[1] This source Sequoyah and the Invention of the Cherokee Alphabet By April R. Summitt also suggests it is Thomas Maw. The problem of course is that this apparently comes from Traveller BirdSo it's relatively recent. And the Smithsonian thinks it's genuine.[2] I don't think it can be removed, but maybe it should be discussed in the article. Doug Weller talk 14:35, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure why the Smithsonian's claim about the painting should be so quickly dismissed by an undocumented claim on a website that is about the location of graves. No claims by Traveller Bird should be automatically accepted, but rather examined carefully. I find no reason to mention the dispute about the authenticity of the painting in the article. Pete unseth (talk) 16:07, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How do you propose we do that? I'm not willing to dismiss the painting, but the claim that it was actually Thomas Maw should be mentioned. Doug Weller talk 17:19, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Sequoyah/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

I am being conservative rating this as C. Looks like it could be B. Given the work which has apparently been done on it, I was surprised not to see a rating. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 14:40, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Last edited at 14:40, 10 November 2009 (UTC). Substituted at 05:46, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Wut-teh vs Wuteh

Both are apparently used to refer to his mother. Is there a definitive concept of which is correct? Even if not it might be good to decide on one and stick with it. (It's also possible I don't understand why two names are given.) Corwinlw (talk) 03:17, 18 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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Linguist

Erudite Manatee, whereas I may agree with you that Sequoyah is a linguist, he did not study languages extensively. Sequoyah was monolingual, meaning he only spoke/read/understood Cherokee. He did study the spoken Cherokee language and broke down the sounds of its vowels and consonants to give each syllable a character. Though he could not read a word of it, he used a Bible, written in King James English, to form the symbols used for the Syllabary. It is quite a remarkable accomplishment. His young daughter assisted him too. She was also his first student. I left your good faith revision as is because it is technically true, but the explanation is somewhat misleading. --Tsistunagiska (talk) 14:35, 6 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

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Born when?

At the top of the article it says he was born in 1770. Then, later, it says 1778. SheldonHelms (talk) 08:17, 13 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"One of the few times"?

"His achievement was one of the few times in recorded history that an individual who was a member of a pre-literate group created an original, effective writing system." says the article. I can easily believe that, though I'm an amateur student of writing systems. The wording implies that there are others who did this, without naming any or citing any sources. From what I know, I wonder if it would not be correct to say he is the only person to do this. The other examples I can think of for scripts created by known (or supposed) individuals -- Cree/Inuktituk syllabary, Pollard script, Hangul -- are either created by outsiders (the first two) or a replacement script for an already literate community (Hangul).

If there are actually other examples, it would be good to cite them. Paul Koning (talk) 20:56, 12 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Also, it doesn't really even make sense to hem it in to "recorded history". As far as anyone will ever know, there were four totally independent inventions of writing in human history—which funny enough, categorically removes them from recorded history—Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, and Maya glyphs, in that order chronologically.

Moreover, and this is where I get excited—why limit oneself to individuals? Writing is invented when written symbols begin to carry spoken language, and as far as we can tell this happened in each of the above instances with proto-writing, simple ideograms pictorally communicating ideas adopting a phonetic dimension to become logographies.

Really, he's in an extremely select club of human beings ever if you consider that the communities that could have plausibly "invented writing" in the above cases were likely extremely small. In the broadest sense, I could see the figure being in the low hundreds depending on how you want to stretch "collaborated to invent". I need to do more research on this. Remsense留 04:04, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are very few who have invented scripts. If you mean people who worked out orthographies for their languages, those who worked with existing scripts, then there will be easily over a thousand. People who devised orthographies from existing scripts did a totally different task from creating scripts. Pete unseth (talk) 23:07, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I am speaking about the communities that originally invented writing with no prior exposure to the concept, I cannot imagine this process didn't happen "communally" in some way. The derivation of Etruscan from Greek, for example, was a qualitatively different thing from these other two categories, as literate people were involved in the adaptation. Sequoyah was in the middle: a person that was exposed to the idea of writing, but was himself illiterate, but invented a writing system. Remsense留 23:24, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Spelling in syllabary

The article states that the spelling ᏎᏉᏯ (Se-quo-ya) is the one "often spelled in [modern] Cherokee", but in my research, the spelling ᏏᏉᏯ (Si-quo-ya) is much more popular among modern Cherokee sources, including the Cherokee Phoenix[3] and the official documentation of the Cherokee tribes. Why isn't it treated as the modern canonical spelling? MrSwedishMeatballs (talk) 20:54, 8 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]