Zahlen, bitte! 85 mysterious characters of the Cherokee syllabary

The Cherokee are still the largest indigenous people of North America today. In contrast to the "talking leaves" of the English and the secessionist colonists with whom they concluded treaties, the Cherokee Sequoyah developed their own script based on the language they spoke.

His syllabary with 85 characters was faster to learn than the alphabet soup of the English language with its 26 characters and soon ensured that by around 1828, the majority of the Cherokee could read. It was different for his number symbols based on the spoken numbers from one to nineteen. They were soon forgotten. Only in 2012 were they reintroduced into school education by the Cherokee Language Consortium and supplemented with the number 0.

Zahlen, bitte!

In this section, we present amazing, impressive, informative and funny figures ("Zahlen") from the fields of IT, science, art, business, politics and, of course, mathematics every Tuesday. The wordplay "Zahlen, bitte!" for a section about numbers is based on the ambiguity of the German word "Zahlen." On one hand, "Zahlen" can be understood as a noun in the sense of digits and numerical values, which fits the theme of the section. On the other hand, the phrase "Zahlen, bitte!" is reminiscent of a waiter's request in a restaurant or bar when they are asked to bring the bill. Through this association, the section acquires a playful and slightly humorous undertone that catches the readers' attention and makes them curious about the presented numbers and facts.

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Even during his time as a warrior supporting British troops against the French, the Cherokee Sequoyah (British name George Guess or Gist) had noticed how the troop units communicated using couriers and "talking notes." He debated with his companions how this could work. While they believed in magic in the paper, he thought more about signs in the sense of the pictograms used by the Sioux and Ojibwe to tell stories.

After becoming incapacitated by a knee injury, Sequoyah began developing such a script but abandoned it after developing about 2000 characters. Only the focus on the syllables of the spoken Cherokee language brought the breakthrough. With the support of his better-hearing daughter Akoya, he developed 86 characters (PDF file), which he presented to the Cherokee Council. They were accepted in 1825 and spread quickly thanks to the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, which began appearing in 1818. According to calculations by Brad Montgomery-Anderson, 90 percent of the Cherokee could read before the Trial of Tears, the forced relocation of the Cherokee to Oklahoma.

The Cherokee language has individual words for the numbers one to nineteen; at twenty, it continues with double tens. Accordingly, Sequoyah designed individual characters for the basic numbers and an additive representation for higher numbers. Only a single draft of this system has survived, which was created by the American poet John Howard Payne. Payne was very committed to the concerns of the Cherokee, whom he considered one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Although the Cherokee Council accepted Sequoyah's numbers (PDF file), the proposal did not catch on. The system (PDF file) was forgotten and was only revived intending to completely represent the Cherokee syllabary in Unicode and expanded with numbers such as zero, billion, and trillion. Sequoyah's system ended at one million.

The linguists Ruth Bradley Holmes and Betty Sharp Smith explain this by the fact that the Cherokee had known Arabic and Roman numerals since their first contact with the Spanish and had to use them in their trade with the Europeans. The anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis pointed out that while the literacy of the Cherokee could be accepted, their numeracy marked the Cherokee as backward in America, which was in a period of upheaval at the time.

Among the approximately 100 number systems developed by humans since the beginning of written records, the Cherokee numbers were a marginal phenomenon, according to Chrisomalis. "Instead of calling such attempts 'dead ends' (compared to the Western number system), we should see them as proof of our species' innovative ability to explore the world."

(mki)