The Writing Revolution

by Amalia E Gnanadesikan

  The first word processor or waa puro as it became known in Japan (short for waado purosessaa), weighed 220 kilograms and cost 6.3 million yen (at the time, roughly $37,000 in American dollars). Not surprisingly, it was marketed to businesses and not to private individuals. Other companies soon brought out their own word processors, however, and prices began to drop in the 1980s. The year 1987 saw the application of artificial intelligence to Japanese word processing, greatly increasing the accuracy and efficiency of the kana-to-kanji conversion function.

  Some of the most enthusiastic adopters of word processing were office workers who felt they had bad handwriting. Since the time of Genji at least, Japanese conventional wisdom has held that one’s handwriting is a window on one’s character. This belief led to a self-consciousness from which many a messy writer was pleased to escape. On the other hand, private individuals who enthusiastically embraced word processing were sometimes criticized for giving their personal correspondence an impersonal look, hiding their souls. Tradition has a valid point: handwritten material, its symbols shaped by the writer’s own body, carries along with its linguistic message a certain amount of personal information that is absent from a typed text, just as a spoken message in turn carries more information about the speaker (in its intonation, volume, and timbre of voice) than a written one does.

  Not only has word processing allowed Japan to become competitive in the area of office automation, it has given Japan access to the Internet. Because of the late arrival of word-processing programs, Internet use was slow to catch on. But the nation has made up for lost time: Japanese is now the third most commonly used language on the Internet.

  Besides the economic advantages of word processing, the technology has bolstered the private use of kanji. It is now easier for writers to use kanji that they may have partly forgotten (an effect similar to that of spell-checkers in English). Whereas a writer would once have resorted to hiragana in the face of a word whose kanji was forgotten or never mastered, with the waa puro a writer need only recognize characters, not create them perfectly from memory. The internal dictionary of the average word processor contains all 6,355 characters of Levels 1 and 2 of the Japan Industrial Standards, making available thousands more than the 1,945 of the government’s list of common kanji. A trend since the nineteenth century of using fewer and fewer kanji (and more kana) has been halted and may even be reversing. The chances of kana replacing kanji anytime in the near future are therefore slim and getting slimmer.

  The Japanese word processor was created independently of Western models. The technology behind it spread to China, Taiwan, and South Korea, strengthening the hold of characters over each country in turn. The tradition of Chinese characters thus continues to bind the region together culturally. Where the characters are the same (and they are not always, as Japan and South Korea do not use the full range of characters, the People’s Republic of China has simplified some 2,000 of its characters, and Japan has independently simplified a few hundred), a reader of one of these languages can make some sense out of a text written in another, although certain meaning differences do exist between one country’s use of a character and another’s. Written phono-logically, however (either alphabetically or syllabically), a text in one language is entirely meaningless to speakers of the other languages.

  Japan is not about to abandon kanji, the logograms its most revered author, Murasaki Shikibu, was not supposed to know – though she did. Yet the elegant hiragana syllabary in which Lady Murasaki wrote Genji is also alive and well, though relegated to a supporting role. The competing syllabary, katakana, has its place too. A complex but effective compromise has been reached in the Land of the Rising Sun.

  8

  Cherokee: Sequoyah Reverse-Engineers

  No doubt about it, Sequoyah was a genius. This visionary Cherokee, whose English name was George Gist (sometimes spelled Guess), was an able silversmith, an artist, and a veteran of the Creek War of 1813–14. More importantly, he was the first person known to history to have achieved literacy by single-handedly inventing a writing system. Unable to read or write, he nevertheless brought literacy to his people.

  All writing is an invention, but the inventors of the world’s ancient writing systems are lost to history. Cuneiform, whose early history is best preserved, took centuries – and the input of numerous individuals – to develop from a book-keeping system to a complete orthography for the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. Over the succeeding millennia other individuals created new scripts or altered old ones to fit new languages; but these innovators were already literate and understood how writing worked. Sequoyah, on the other hand, was a monolingual Cherokee speaker who never learned to read the Roman alphabet. A few individuals have since replicated his achievement, as King Njoya did in Cameroon and Shong Lue Yang did for the Hmong language of Southeast Asia. Compared to the original inventors of writing, these modern script creators have had the advantage of knowing that writing exists and that language – at least some languages – can be represented by written signs. Nevertheless, the intellectual achievement of these men is staggering, the more so when we manage to stop taking our own literacy for granted and imagine ourselves in their shoes – setting aside all knowledge of what the marks on a page mean and in what way they are related to speech.

  Few details of Sequoyah’s life are known with certainty. He was born sometime around 1770 in the former Cherokee village of Tuskegee on the Little Tennessee River, just upstream from the Tennessee River in Tennessee (see appendix, figure A.5). The village site is now under the waters of the Tellico Reservoir, though a museum has been erected nearby in his honor. Sequoyah was born into the Cherokee tribe, which numbered about 12,000 at the time, far fewer than a few generations earlier, when smallpox arrived. The tribe held lands in southern Appalachia and surrounding areas, lands that now constitute parts of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. These holdings were rapidly shrinking with the relentless encroachment of white settlers onto traditionally Cherokee territory. Sequoyah’s own father was white, but left when Sequoyah was an infant, leaving the child to be raised by his mother. Cherokees reckoned their clan affiliations though the mother’s line, and so Sequoyah was never considered anything but Cherokee. He grew up speaking only his tribal language.

  Sequoyah lived during a critical time for the Cherokee people. Land-hungry whites were pressing in upon them, unwilling to recognize the territorial claims of a people who marked no borders, held no deeds to their land, and sowed crops in only a small fraction of their soil. The Cherokees resisted, in some cases by taking on those aspects of white culture that whites scorned them for not having. They organized into a formal nation with a representative constitutional government. The Nation’s lands extended from the Tennessee River southward in Alabama and Georgia, and from the river eastward in Tennessee and into North Carolina. Some took up plantation agriculture and had their children educated in English at mission schools.

  Increasingly, the federal and state governments pressured the Cherokees to move west, to sell their homeland in exchange for lands in Arkansas and in Oklahoma, designated Indian Territory. The state of Georgia, in particular, wanted its share of Cherokee lands, which the federal government had promised in 1802 to buy for it as soon as it peaceably could. Georgia became especially insistent after the discovery of gold on tribal lands in 1829. The Nation spent much of the 1830s staving off deportation, which finally came in the form of the Trail of Tears, during which many Cherokees died on the way to Indian Territory over the winter of 1838 to 1839.

  Sequoyah was not subjected to the Trail of Tears, having already moved to Arkansas in 1818 with other Cherokees who emigrated westward at the urging of the federal government. Although Sequoyah apparently liked his new home in Arkansas, he was deeply opposed to the white government’s treatment of his people. While pondering the power of the ever-advancing whites he made an astute observation: there was a close relationship between th
e power of whites and the marks they made on paper, which let them communicate, like magic, across long distances. He was right, of course. Writing is indeed a powerful tool – or weapon.

  At the time, literacy had reached unprecedented rates among Europeans, becoming part of their cultural self-image. Europeans, in their own eyes, were literate and civilized, unlike the illiterate red savages of the New World (Maya literacy was conveniently forgotten by now). This intellectual accomplishment helped justify the Europeans’ belief that they were superior to the Native Americans. Sequoyah acknowledged the power of the technology but set out to disprove the doctrine of superiority.

  According to later accounts, Sequoyah began thinking seriously about writing in about 1809, claiming to his friends that the white man’s skill in making and reading marks could not be so very hard to duplicate. He was roundly ridiculed for his presumptuous claims. How could an Indian language be written down? No one had ever seen it done. How indeed? This question was to occupy him on and off for years. He never knew it, but these same years saw Champollion laboring on the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs across the Atlantic in France. Both men were engaged in a quest to reverse-engineer the technology of writing. Both puzzles were long and difficult ones, but Sequoyah was to solve his a year before Champollion, in 1821.

  Details of how Sequoyah went about it vary in later accounts – there was certainly no one there to make written records of it at the time. He himself never wrote the story down, perhaps out of modesty, or perhaps because it never occurred to him. He was interested in a technology that would help him keep business accounts and communicate with people in distant places. In his culture, events and exploits were recounted in the oral tradition, and so the use of writing to create history seems not to have occurred to him, just as it failed to occur to the Mycenaean Greeks before him.

  When Sequoyah first began experimenting with symbols to represent language, he scratched them with a nail on a whetstone or on wooden shingles. Later he bought a pen and paper. Making marks was not hard. What was very hard was deciding what the marks should symbolize. Some say he started with symbols for entire sentences – units of information that a person might want to convey. “I arrived safely” would be a single symbol, for example. The symbols multiplied rapidly, and Sequoyah abandoned this approach as impossibly cumbersome. How about a symbol for each word? Most accounts relate that he worked for some time at inventing symbols for words. His inventory of logograms mounted up. And up. After a while he had a few thousand, and could no longer remember what the earlier ones stood for. It was time to try a new approach.

  I suspect that the reason Sequoyah – with most other modern script inventors – abandoned logographic writing so quickly was that it was obvious to him from the outset that his system would have to apply to his entire language. The ancient Sumerian book-keepers and the ancient Maya calendar-keepers probably did not realize when they first assigned symbols to commodities and to days and months that in time every word of their language would have to be writable. In order to get to that point, all logographic systems – even the Chinese – had to call on some sort of phonological representation. Sequoyah also realized that phonological representation was necessary, but unlike the ancients, he had no existing logographic tradition to honor.

  Sequoyah had built himself a cabin for his literary labors and would sequester himself there, to the neglect of his family and all other work. His preoccupations, typical of genius, must have made him infuriating to live with. His wife is said to have burned his cabin – or at least his work – in frustration, hoping to get him back to more productive labors. Sequoyah was discouraged but soon returned to his quest, and this time the solution began to take shape (plate 6).

  Words, he realized, were made of smaller pieces. They were made up of sounds, which could recur in many different words. The number of sounds was much smaller than the number of words. It was the sounds he should represent.

  Sequoyah set about trying to determine how many sounds there were in his language. For an illiterate person with no background in linguistics, this is a difficult task. What, after all, is a distinct sound? Does the word Sequoyah have three sounds – se-quo-yah – or six – [s I kw o y a]? There was no one to explain to him about phonemes and syllables. He had to work it out for himself, pronouncing words slowly and carefully, over and over, trying to isolate the recurring pieces. He must have sounded like a madman. Small wonder his friends and family looked askance at his project.

  He came up with about 200 phonological pieces. Still too many, he considered. What he wanted was a system that people could easily memorize. He set about trying to streamline the system. Were there sounds that were so much alike that they could share a symbol? What kinds of symbols were easy to write? He whittled away at the system and eventually arrived at a set of 86 – later reduced to 85 – signs, some of whose final shapes (but not sounds) he took from a sample of English text which he inspected closely but could not read. His young daughter, Ahyokeh, was the first convert to his cause, helping him in the final streamlining and testing of his new system.

  The system Sequoyah ended up with was a CV syllabary. A syllabary does not match the Cherokee language as well as it does Japanese, but it is a much better fit than it would be for English – and far better than Linear B was for Greek. Most Cherokee words end in vowels, but there are some word-internal sequences of consonants, and the language has more distinct consonant sounds than the syllabary indicates. Cherokee makes considerable use of aspiration, but the syllabary distinguishes between aspirated and unaspirated consonants in only a few cases (this may be, in part, because the pronunciation of aspiration differs between slow, careful speech and more rapid speech, and Sequoyah may not have considered it a consistent enough effect to pin down in writing). The syllabary also ignores long vowels, the glottal stop ([?], as in the unspelled first sound of uh-oh), and the distinctive pitch that may distinguish one word from another. Sequoyah knew that his syllabary did not spell Cherokee words exactly as they sounded, but for a speaker of Cherokee who knew how the words should sound there was no serious problem, just as writing without vowels was no obstacle to native speakers of ancient Egyptian. More important, Sequoyah felt, was a system that could be easily memorized.

  A CV syllabary (including word-initial V symbols) encodes the smallest consistently pronounceable units of a language, since many consonants (the ones known as plosives) cannot be pronounced without an accompanying vowel. As Sequoyah spoke the words of his language aloud to himself, CV chunks would have been the smallest pieces he would consistently have observed, and so his system encoded those CV chunks. Nevertheless, Sequoyah employed one brilliant exception to the syllabic structure of his script, one that would have stood the ancient Mycenaeans in good stead. He included one phonemic (nonsyllabic) symbol, for the hissing sound [s]. The [s] sound is one that is used by many languages, including English, Greek, and Cherokee, at the edges of syllables to make other, longer syllables. In English, for example, we can add [s] to either side of park to get parks, spark, or sparks. Thus the [s] can be either a prologue or epilogue to a normal syllable. It is not a plosive, so you can say [s] and go on saying it, with no need for a vowel. In sounding out his words Sequoyah must have noticed the special qualities of [s] and tarried thoughtfully over its hissing sound. He assigned this sound a symbol of its own, making it the only consonant phoneme in Cherokee to have its own symbol. He must have lingered over its sound in his own name, as he always wrote , s-si-quo-ya, with an extra initial s.

  The use of the symbol goes a long way toward making the Cherokee syllabary fit Cherokee syllables. When syllables are closed by consonants other than [s], a dummy vowel is used, as in Maya. The selection of the vowel varies: if a related word includes a vowel in that position, that vowel will be used, but otherwise the selection is up for grabs. Unlike English, Cherokee has never been subjected to authoritative spelling rules.

  Satisfied that his system worked, Sequoyah taug
ht some relatives and neighbors in Arkansas the new system. He then traveled back to the Cherokee Nation, bearing letters from Arkansas Cherokees to their friends and family back east. He gave a public demonstration of his syllabary before the tribal council in 1821, assisted by little Ahyokeh. His initial reception was deeply skeptical. How were his listeners to know he wasn’t merely remembering his own words? As a test, Sequoyah and Ahyokeh were placed out of earshot of each other and instructed to take dictation. Much to the surprise of everyone present except Sequoyah and Ahyokeh, when the messages were exchanged father and daughter could read each other’s writing back word for word. Was there some sort of witchcraft at work? Or was the accomplishment natural and replicable? For answer, Sequoyah taught the syllabary to a number of young lads, and they could soon replicate Ahyokeh’s feat with no signs of occult disturbances.

  After that, interest in the new technology took off. Previously illiterate Cherokees found that they could learn to read and write in a matter of days. In fact, the Cherokees with the least schooling in English often proved the most adept at the new system. The syllabic nature of the system and the consistency of its spelling meant that it was much easier to learn to read Cherokee than English. Sequoyah stayed east to teach his script, then returned to Arkansas, again carrying letters.

  The letters were crucial to the acceptance of Sequoyah’s syllabary. He had done his work at the most strategic historical moment: Cherokee families and clans were for the first time divided, with substantial numbers of tribe members now living out west. Miraculously, they were now able to stay in touch and communicate directly with their distant friends. In this context, the new literacy spread like wildfire. Formal surveys were not conducted, but some estimated that by the late 1820s a majority of Cherokees could read and write the syllabary.