His peers thought it was magic because they were unfamiliar with the concept of writing, not because his writing system was so efficient. He was put on trial for witchcraft because people thought he was communicating via magic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-a....
It's plenty interesting without superfluous claims!
It's helpful when HN readers do the actual work of understanding for us because we can't read even a tiny fraction of what gets posted here (and my capacity for even that is declining monotonically). But we're always happy to swap a title when someone posts an apt observation.
I'll bet it's exhausting but your note did make ponder: If a soul was condemned to the eternal torment of reading nothing but all the user posts of one social media site for all eternity, HN would be a pretty excellent choice. I shudder to think of the alternatives.
That one man, in the 1800's, saw his thousands-year old culture had a need for a written language... and just made it. And it was effective and good, and culturally spread in just years, allowing them to reach a higher literacy rate than english speakers in the country at the time.
That's interesting to me.
This is why the Americans were so intractably behind the rest of the world by the time Columbus found em. I think it's sad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...
Slightly different from what I’d normally assume had happened from just reading the above comment.
Really impressive on his part, basically saw it was possible and looked as some examples of what others had done, then got to work.
This article does a good job of reviewing the conflicting narratives of his history: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26467045. It’s all very uncertain, and there’s a lot of mythology.
So you consider 19th century America to be Europe, or is there another reason for your choice of words?
Foreigners can serve in the US Army. Native Americans weren't automatically US citizens until 1924, but were considered citizens of their sovereign tribe.
European here clearly means both "from Europe" (eg, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters are European, not American), as well as "European Americans" (ie, Americans of European ancestry, and often with cultural ties to Europe.) Just like how "Asian" doesn't always mean "born in Asia", or how "Anglo" can refer to non-Hispanic white Americans rather than being specifically related to England.
Trading with the Spanish in Florida, English ships, or French trappers would all count as "contact with Europeans", and not simply "Americans".
Finally, recall that at the time "American" was a state of mind. A Loyalist at the time would not consider themselves "American", and a Patriot considered a Loyalist to be "inimical to the liberties of America". How do you know if Sequoyah’s father was an American or a Loyalist?