Explanation: Sequoyah was a Cherokee man who invented a new system of writing for Native American peoples - whilst being (initially) illiterate himself! He saw the potential in, and was deeply impressed by, the 'talking leaves' of European colonists - being able to transmit information perfectly, across great distances and long periods of time, with infinite recitations? Writing is often underappreciated by those raised in highly literate societies! He took a large number of European texts, which he could not read, and used the symbols as the basis for an entirely new method of writing - including mixing letters from the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets. The letters are thus recognizable to European eyes, but each represents very different sounds than in their original alphabet.
Sequoyah had to fight his society's preconceptions about the written word initially, but inside of a decade, the vast majority of the Cherokee nation was literate - having learned Sequoyah's syllabary!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
