Question

Sequoyah’s System

[1]
In the early nineteenth century, a Cherokee silversmith named Sequoyah became convinced that written language was the key to his people’s political and cultural survival. Watching European settlers communicate across great distances using what he termed "talking leaves"—written pages—Sequoyah resolved to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. Despite having no formal education and speaking no English, he began his work around $1809$.

[2]
Initially, Sequoyah attempted to create a unique pictographic symbol for every word in the Cherokee language. This approach quickly proved unmanageable, as he amassed thousands of drawings that were too complex for others to memorize. Realizing the limitation of this method, he shifted his strategy. Instead of representing whole words, he began listening to the individual sounds that made up Cherokee words, dividing the spoken language into distinct syllables.

[3]
By $1821$, Sequoyah had completed a syllabary consisting of $86$ characters, which represented all the vocal sounds of the Cherokee language. Some characters resembled English letters, Greek symbols, or Hebrew numerals, though he assigned them entirely different phonetic values. The system was remarkably intuitive; unlike English, which requires years to master, a Cherokee speaker could learn to read and write using Sequoyah’s syllabary in just a few weeks. Within a decade, the Cherokee Nation established a bilingual newspaper, the *Cherokee Phoenix*, and achieved a literacy rate higher than that of neighboring white settlers.

Suppose the writer's goal had been to write an essay that documents the challenges and eventual success of creating a phonetic writing system for a previously unwritten Native American language. Would this essay fulfill that goal?