# What does "wau" mean in place names like Milwaukee, Waukegan, and Waupaca?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231
**Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
**Created:** [October 29, 2003, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231 "2003-10-29T14:33:45Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@gmeazell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gmeazell)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2003, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231/1 "2003-10-29T14:33:45Z")
[http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1\_286b.html](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_286b.html)
In Cecil’s answer, he states that all North American Indian languages were oral. I’ve always been told that the Cherokee language was written. Were the people telling me that wrong?
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### Author:  [@Myron\_Van\_Horowitzski](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Myron_Van_Horowitzski)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2003, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231/2 "2003-10-29T14:39:32Z")
I don’t have a cite, but I thought I heard that somebody invented written Cherokee not too long ago, to keep the language from being lost completely.
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### Author:  [@zut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zut)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2003, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231/3 "2003-10-29T15:52:20Z")
I am not a linguist or historian, but I do know that Cherokee script was invented by Sequoyah in the early 19th century. From [www.cherokee.org](http://www.cherokee.org/Culture/HistoryPage.asp?ID=56):
> [@](#):
>
> In approximately 1809, Sequoyah gathered with some friends in his shop, and the conversation led to a discussion regarding the non-Indian’s method of communicating through writing. Many thought that it was some sort of witchcraft, but Sequoyah seemed to understand that the writing stood for words. He pondered devising a way for the Cherokee to be able to do the same thing, although many of those around him were skeptical…
>
> In 1815, Sequoyah was married to Sally Waters of the Bird Clan. He parents were Robert and Lydia Otterlifter and her brother was Michael Waters, whose family later settled near the Sallisaw area. After his marriage, he continued to study the idea of a way to write the Cherokee language. The first attempts were to make a symbol for each word in the language, but very quickly the number of symbols was becoming astronomical. This caused him to become more selective in the form of writing the language, and he began listening more intently to the individual sounds that made up the words. After a long study, he realized that there were 85 individual syllables, which were used to make up the many words of the Cherokee language. He was then able to limit the symbols to a much smaller number than he originally developed and they could be used in combinations to form any word. His first student was his brother-in-law, Michael Waters, and the first to read and write with the invention was his daughter, A-Yo-Ka.
It should be noted that Sequoyah [never learned to read or write English](http://www.tiro.com/syllabics/Cherokee/Sequoyah.html); he created the Cherokee alphabet from the ground up. There was a short discussion of Sequoyah in _Guns, Germs, and Steel_; I mention this because this puts in context just how absolutely incredible Sequoyah’s achievement was. He single-handedly re-created thousands of years of alphabetic development _just because he knew it **could** be done_, even though he didn’t know up front how to do it. Simply amazing.
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### Author:  [@gmeazell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gmeazell)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2003, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231/4 "2003-10-29T16:23:00Z")
So, I guess the question is when did the written form of the Cherokee language get adopted in wide use among Cherokees. Since it apparently happened after the appearance of the white man and the subsequent comingling, then it probably doesn’t count.
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### Author:  [@zut](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zut)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2003, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231/5 "2003-10-29T19:07:48Z")
From [this biography](http://www.lehigh.edu/%7Eejg1/natimag/Tommy.html) of Sequoyah:
> [@](#):
>
> In early 1821, twelve years after the notion of written language had taken [Sequoyah], this “madman” invented a tool by which, within one year, 98% percent of his nation became literate in their own language which had never before existed in written form. He didn’t steal the talking leaves back from the white man; he wrote his own and enabled the rest of the Cherokee to do the same.
This was most definately well after the arrival of Europeans. In fact, Sequoyah had the idea to create a written language _because_ he knew that English was a written language.
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### Author:  [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)
#### Post date: [October 29, 2003, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231/6 "2003-10-29T20:25:22Z")
> [@](#):
>
> In fact, Sequoyah had the idea to create a written language because he knew that English was a written language.
And anyone who has seen the Cherokee syllabary can tell that Sequoyah based its esthetic, though not its operation, on the printed two-case Latin alphabet. See [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13A0.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13A0.pdf)
Recent thought is that the _idea_ of writing may have arisen only once in the Old World, in Mesopotamia, and once in the New World, in Mesoamerica. (Amerind legends of bearded white men who brought language might even mean, I suppose, that it was only invented once.) Some peoples, like the Egyptians or Sequoyah, took only the idea. Others, like the West Semites, the Greeks, the Etruscans, the Romans, and the Anglo-Saxons, adapted or adopted an entire system.
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### Author:  [@AquaPura](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AquaPura)
#### Post date: [October 30, 2003, 5:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231/7 "2003-10-30T05:11:41Z")
But I just think it is neat that Unca Cece is writing about my home town, and other places here in Wisconsin!
The history of our unusual city names is something facinating for many of the people here!
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### Author:  [@rickschu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rickschu)
#### Post date: [November 4, 2003, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-wau-mean-in-place-names-like-milwaukee-waukegan-and-waupaca/210231/8 "2003-11-04T06:06:07Z")
The way I heard it (from an Ojibwa (Chippewa) elder woman), “waukee” means earth or land, and “waubin” means light or white (or the direction of the rising sun). Kudos to uncle Cecil for a correct translation of Milwaukee. An astonishing number of people suffer under the delusion that it means “gathering place of the waters”. There’s a town near my home (and probably near AquaPura’s) which gets a double “wau”: “Wauwatosa” means “firefly”.