Re: Schwa vowel, which letter?

Tom Wier wrote:
> But when Sequoya (sp?) created the Cherokee alphabet, he didn't
> make any letters cross over whatsoever, because he couldn't read
> (or maybe even speak) English.  The story goes that one day he just
> realized that the White Man's strenght lay in his ability to record
> information, so he bought a local newspaper and took letters off
> the newspaper, and created his own phonetic alphabet for Cherokee
> (or maybe it was a syllabary, can't remember which) with 85
> characters (come to think of it, it was probably a syllabary).
Something like that.  Actually, he realized that writing was the
strength of whites, and so he tried to invent a syllabry for Cherokee,
but had a very difficult time; it's very hard to come up with 85
characters which are distinct enough to read without making them
difficult to write - just take a look at the Japanese syllabry, several
signs differ only by the addition of a small loop, for example /me/ and
/nu/.  Anyways, one day he saw found an English-language newspaper and
borrowed the symbols he saw there, and adding some modifications, and
randomly assigned syllables to the symbols.

--
"A silent mouth is sweet to hear" - Irish proverb
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