It seems to me there was a Straight Dope article about a Native American who, having learned to read English using the standard Latin alphabet, returned to his native lands and invented a phoenetic transliteration for his own language.
I recall many of the characters being very similar to Latin characters, although some of them were simply reversed left-to-right.
Anybody remember what it is? I can’t seem to find a reference for it.
Sequoyah invented the Cherokee alphabet.
References, well, anywhere.
Thanks for the quick response. I must be misremembering the characters that I saw, because I could’ve sworn there were some back-to-front Latin versions.
Looking at the complete syllabary, there are several which resemble Latin characters and Arabic numerals. And there are few which look like familiar characters mirrored, rotated or both. For example, da looks like a backwards J, hu resembles an upside-down rotated L and lv seems like a mirrored f.
Are you perhaps thinking of the Cree syllabary? Or Inuktitut? Some of them look a little like backwards Latin characters, I suppose, though to me they look a lot more like shorthand.
Sequoyah could not read English, as far as I know. He simply saw and used some of the letterforms. The sound values he assigned are completely unrelated.