The Cherokee ‘vulgate’. A critical premise to the historical study of the Cherokee writing system

The essay proposes a critical premise for the historical study of Cherokee writing. The Cherokee syllabary can only be historically understood if it is brought back to the historical dynamics of the time in which it was designed. The history of writing systems, however, has been primarily concerned with the invention of the script, often giving uncritical credit to reports about the biography of its inventor. In particular, we critically consider the important work of I. Gelb, who saw the process of invention of the Cherokee (and other comparable scripts) as confirming the evolutionary history of writing. Anecdotal evidence around Sequoyah proves central to understanding the reception of the syllabary and its invention at the academic level. Our conclusions provide an outline of the interrelationship among the different themes of the vulgate and identify Sequoyah's métissage theme as a mirror image of the hybrid nature of the script. This parallelism tells a great deal about the dynamics, including tragic ones, of the history of the period, a topic we will address in a future paper.