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I am feverish in bed post-vaccine, please tell me a cool fact about something
@ian OK, I’ll chime in:
Most writing systems either evolve over generations, or are created by expert linguists.
But Cherokee’s was invented by one person, Sequoyah, who not only was not a linguist, but never went to school and never learned to read or write.
He saw English-language books, and despite not speaking English, understood the general principle, and thought, “I can do that for my language!”
He spent 12 years developing his writing system, and it is still the standard today.
@ian
In _Languages of the World_, Kenneth Katzner remarks that the creation of a writing system that suits its language so well by someone with no linguistic training at all “must surely rank as one of the most impressive intellectual feats achieved by a single person.”
@recursive@hachyderm.io@inthehands @ian I think an awesome thing about this is that he basically tried some of the major historical approaches, discarded them as impractical and kept trying.