You think Hebrew is hard? Try Cherokee.

Many of you know, and you're probably getting tired of hearing about it, that I am trying to learn to read Hebrew. I have now completed eight of the 11 lessons. The goal is that when I finish I will be able to read the Old Testament in Hebrew out loud (or even silently) and be confident that I am pronouncing everything correctly. Of course, this is quite a different skill from knowing what I am saying. I will still need to refer to the English version for that. I will not understand Old Testament Hebrew any more than I understand New Testament Greek but I want to be able to read them both. I hope this makes sense to you. If it doesn't, it simply can't be helped. I think it must be satisfying some deep inner need.

Learning to read Hebrew proved very interesting because we didn't learn the alphabet in alphabetic order. To be exact, we tackled N first, moved on to H, and jumped around in what seemed like random fashion.

I am fascinated by languages. For example, the Cherokee Indians' language had no written form until an illiterate Cherokee man named Sequoyah captured its sounds painstakingly syllable by syllable. He began his work during the 1810s and completed it in 1821. Literacy then spread so rapidly among the Cherokee nation that by 1825 a newspaper in the Cherokee language was being published. Sequoyah had come up with a "syllabary" consisting of not letters but syllables using characters of his own invention as well as some of the conventional letters used by his English-speaking neighbors even though he did not retain their original sound. The word "Cherokee" itself, for example, which in the Cherokee language is not "Che-ro-kee" but "tsa-la-gi", looks like this using Sequoyah's characters:

Here is the entire Syllabary of Sequoyah in the order he originally put it:

One word comes to mind. Mind-boggling. Another word comes to mind. Indecipherable.

Someone came along and lent some order to Sequoyah's work, which was very helpful. The result is a grid with consonants down the left side and vowels across the top. Every syllable in Cherokee consists of a consonant followed by a vowel. The first row displays the six Cherokee vowels a, e, i, o, u,, and the unaccented "schwa e" sound (nasalized) represented by the character v. Down the left side of the Syllabary are the Cherokee consonants. The grid shows the characters for every combination of every consonant with every vowel.

Can you find "tsa-la-gi" (Cherokee) in the more organized Syllabary?

The more anal among you may notice that Sequoyah's original list had 86 symbols and the later organized one has 85. One syllable became obsolete.

Thank God for small favors (British, favours).

Finally (and I can hear you breathing a sigh of relief), did you notice that every syllable in Cherokee ends in a vowel? Well, so does Japanese! So you should say "sa-yo-na-ra" instead of "sy-o-nar-a", "To-yo-ta" instead of "Toy-o-ta", and "Mi-tsu-bi-shi" (which means "three diamonds", by the way) instead of "Mit-su-bish-i".

You have made it all the way through another post by rhymeswithplague.

I wonder what Tasker Dunham will make of it?