The Cherokee Syllabary
By the time Ama, a fellow Cherokee inmate scribed this document for Walter Duncan, over 2000 handwritten Cherokee language documents in archives across the United States. Each individual writer of Cherokee had their own unique style of forming the characters; indeed, those writing culturally sensitive documents often adopted a penmanship style so idiosyncratic as to make it legible to only the initiated few (Leopold). Documents written in Sequoyan, or the Cherokee syllabary, have no capital or lower case characters in either print or manuscript forms. In many manuscript pages, punctuation if present is inconsistent. Anna Gritts Kilpatrick, a native Cherokee speaker and scholar who translated several of these documents with her husband Jack Kilpatrick, once lamented: “Some degree of uncertainty is always present in arriving at the translation of any document in Cherokee. Manuscripts in Sequoyah ordinarily have no capitalization and no punctuation; the symbols are formed with the widest exercise of personal taste” (Kilpatrick and Kilpatrick, viii). As a result, documents written in Sequoyan can be quite difficult to decode.
Duncan’s neatly handwritten letter is a remarkably legible sample in this light. Indeed, finding a Cherokee language manuscript written with such legible handwriting is noteworthy, precisely because it so closely matches the printed characters one might find on Worcester’s arrangement of the “Cherokee Alphabet” (Mooney and Ellison). Each character in Duncan’s letters is formed with precision along a straight line to the point that it looks to be identical to Cherokee type. Each of the characters rests along a ruled baseline in every line of this letter, as though Duncan’s friend Ama was faithfully replicating a printed page in Cherokee type. Cherokee type has no ascenders rising above the ascender line nor does it have descenders or loops that fall below the baseline of type. Ama’s artful script uses clear serifs and loops to distinguish between similar characters. Note the distinction between his precise and serif free Ꭼ /gv/ andᏒ /sv/ in line two in contrast to the curled serifs in the characters Ꮛ/quv/ and Ꭱ /e/ in line three (see figure 3 [please list under contents on website #3]). There’s no mistaking those characters from each other in the syllabary or from “E” or “R” in the Roman alphabet. Note as well his punctuation including periods at the end of most sentences and especially the use of an underscore-cum-hyphen to show the continuation of a long word between lines seven and eight when he writes, “ᏙᏛᎩᎸᏫ - ᏍᏓᏁᎵ” /dodvgilvhwi-sdaneli/ meaning “I will work.” He uses another hyphen between lines 14 and 15 for the compound noun, “ᎦᏩᏯ_” /gawaya/ “ᏗᎨᎵᏍᎩ” /digelisgi/ or huckleberry pie. The legibility of this letter on this stationary raises interesting questions: Why might have such pains been taken to make this letter so legible? And what to make of the context in which this letter was written?