Re: Sequoyah the Great?

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dan Moonhawk Alford wrote:
> 
> Stolfi and Dennis,
> 
> In *Tell Them That They Lie*, Sequoyah's descendants paint their side of
> the picture, which includes ancient legends of how, long ago, a smaller
> tribe came from the north with a writing system and joined the Cherokees,
> and before Sequoyah you couldn't learn the writing unless you were of the
> minor tribe. He was and a member of the Scribe Clan, and when he found
> that everyone else who knew the writing except him had been massacred,
> that he was the last one living who could write it, he relaxed the
> hereditary requirement and everyone learned it in 3 yrs. They date it to
> at least 5 (or 7?) years before Columbus.

	They know the date with quite a bit of precision!  Is
it coincidental that it was just before Columbus?

> And they say the writing system
> was inscribed on sheets of gold which were later stolen by a preacher
> whose insights from "the angel Moroni" founded a church in Utah; the
> tablets disappeared but are said to have been written "in a primitive
> script" and about "an ancient history of North America." See my webpage
> for more. (Sequoyah)

	I'll have to look at your web page later.  But you're
saying that Joseph Smith did actually see golden
plates, which he said were "reformed Egyptian
characters".  Hmmm.  I was tempted to say that Smith
pulled off a bogus decipherment that makes Newbold,
Brumbaugh, and Levitov look like amoebae.  But in my
opinion he just made up a story that had nothing to do
with any gold plates.  Why didn't the Cherokee come
forth and expose his hoax?  It wouldn't have been a lot
of trouble before the Mormon church got established. 
Did the gold sheets contain Cherokee wisdom that the
Cherokee wanted known only to themselves?  In that case
they would simply have remained silent.  
 
> It's a syllabary because that's what Pre-Columbian North American writing
> systems were -- syllabaries! The Algonquian people north of them had one
> or more. See my webpage for more. (Blackfoot syllabary).

	As we've said before, syllabaries aren't practical for
all languages.  Also, Cherokee is a tone language, and
the Cherokee syllabary doesn't denote tones.  The
Cherokee call this "book Cherokee".

> As to looking
> inspired by European alphabetic letters, allow yourself to consider the
> heretical idea that our alphabetic letters were derived from original
> syllabaries [uncontestable so far!] which originated in North America and
> spread to the rest of the world 7000 years ago or so (strong case), or at
> least were shared with North America around that time (I've seen the
> evidence).

	Do share the evidence -- and it'd better be good! 
However, ~7000 years could put us at the time of the
very ancient cities found at Jericho and Catal Huyuk,
which predate currently known recorded history.  If
you're right, we might yet find writing in them, which
would be very interesting indeed! 

	There was a Scientific American article which proposed
a Nostratic supergroup of Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic,
and Dravidian.  Indo-European came from Catal Huyuk,
Afro-Asiatic from Jericho, and Dravidian from a yet
undiscovered site presumably to the east of Jericho. 
If we could find true original Indo-European writing by
looking further at Catal Huyuk, that would be an
immensely important discovery.  

	However, Jacques has had much to say about the quality
of what appears in Scientific American, and your theory
definitely needs more proof, which I eagerly await.

With tongue firmly in cheek,
Dennis