Cherokee

Cherokee is the rarest kind of invention — a working script devised, from scratch, by someone who could not himself read. Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith, knew that white people made marks on paper that carried speech, but not how; over about a decade he worked out a system of his own, arriving not at an alphabet but at a syllabary of 85 signs, one for each syllable of the Cherokee language.

He borrowed the shapes of some letters from a Latin/Greek spelling book and from numerals, but assigned them entirely new sounds — so a sign that looks like "D" is not d, and "4" is not four. The eye recognises the forms; the ear finds them unrelated to anything it knew.

A man who could not read invented a way for a whole nation to.

Once shown, Cherokee spread through the Nation with astonishing speed; within years the Cherokee were more literate than many of their neighbours, with a printed newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, from 1828. Sequoyah's is the only case the Institute records of a fully functional script invented by a single person with no prior literacy — see the Inventors' Room in the Hall of Lineages.

Sequoyah's decisive insight was to write not sounds but syllables: one sign for each spoken syllable, rather than one per consonant or vowel. That is why the system needs 85 signs and not 26 — and why it fits Cherokee, whose syllables are simple and regular, so exactly. Some of the sign shapes were borrowed from a Latin/Greek spelling book and from numerals, but their Cherokee sounds have nothing to do with the letters they resemble.