Unicode Demystified

Cherokee

Unlike all of the other scripts we've examined so far, the Cherokee script doesn't have a long history. It was invented in 1821 by Sequoyah, a monolingual Cherokee. It was quickly picked up by the Cherokee nation in general, having spread as early as 1824.^[3] Sequoyah apparently got the idea from seeing written English, then invented his script based on the same general idea. The modern forms of many of the characters resemble Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic letters and Arabic digits, although no relationship exists between the sounds of the characters in Cherokee and the sounds of similar-looking characters in other scripts. (Sequoyah's original letterforms are said to have been unique, but the forms were later modified by missionaries to ...