It's on wikipedia. I had thought everyone's seen these, but maybe I was the weird kid who'd read the encyclopedia for fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary#Unicode

There's at least two of us, though at the time I was limited to the World Book Encyclopedia.

You (or anyone else here) might enjoy Omniglot, an old web 1.0 site that was amazing for its comprehensive treatment of all writing scripts:

https://www.omniglot.com/writing/cherokee.htm

I love writing systems and had never seen or heard of this. Also thought it was strange that Smithsonian of all things didn't include it.

Beautiful glyph. I love it. Thanks for the link!

Thanks! We'll put that in the toptext as well.

See this is the value of Wikipedia.

Sure, the Smithsonian has a nice article with a flowing narrative. But we want facts. Let's look up this Sequoyah chap:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah

> In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in the Cherokee language.

The link is right there, you can move right on to learning about what he created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

- His original script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Original_Cherokee_Syllaba...

- More readable table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cherokee_Syllabary.svg

- Sample text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language#Samples

Thanks to Wikipedia TIL Johnny Cash released a song about Sequoyah called "Talking Leaves". From the same album as the much more famous "Ballad of Ira Hayes".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Tears:_Ballads_of_the_A...

> Eventually, he hit on 86 syllables that expressed specific sounds, each syllable represented by symbols borrowed from Greek, Hebrew and English. Later reduced to 85 symbols...

Maybe the symbols themselves aren't new.