The
Cherokee syllabary is a
syllabary invented by
Sequoyah to write the
Cherokee language in the late 1810s and early 1820s. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy in that he could not previously read any script. He first experimented with
logograms, but his system later developed into a syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a
syllable rather than a single
phoneme; the 85 (originally 86) characters in the Cherokee syllabary provide a suitable method to write Cherokee. Some symbols do resemble
Latin,
Greek and even the
Cyrillic scripts' letters, but the sounds are completely different (for example, the sound /a/ is written with a letter that resembles Latin D).