Setting the Record Straight About Native Languages: Writing Systems
Q: Were Micmac,
Cree, or other Amerindian writing systems invented
by European missionaries?
A: It's doubtful at best. Most North American Indian tribes did not have any writing systems for their
languages before the arrival of Europeans, and so white missionaries and linguists created writing systems for
them--in almost every case, sensibly enough, by adapting the European alphabet of the language they spoke
themselves (English, French, or Spanish.) A few North American tribes do have traditions of literacy which they
claim predate Columbus, however, and coincidentally enough, the writing systems in those tribes are drastically
different from European languages--pictographs
in the case of Mi'kmaq, and a syllabary with rotating vowels
in the case of Ojibway and Cree. It's theoretically possible that those tribes just happened to have been visited by
very creative, iconoclastic missionaries, but it's more likely that the missionaries simply recorded and adapted
an existing Native American writing system to serve their purposes (teaching Indians prayers, primarily.)
Q: What about Cherokee?
Scholars and most Cherokee believe the Tsalagi syllabary was invented by a Cherokee
man named Sequoyah after he noticed Europeans communicating by writing. Some Indians think
this syllabary predated European arrival, which is also possible, but the Cherokee do not
have a strong tradition claiming so and their neighbors never remarked on this skill before
that, so the likeliest thing is that the story of Sequoyah is true. Either way, the Cherokee
syllabary was certainly not invented by missionaries.
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