Most writing systems evolved over thousands of years, built up gradually by entire civilisations. Nobody designed them. They just grew.
Then there's Sequoyah. A man who had never learned to read or write, who watched European settlers use what he called "talking leaves," and decided to build something equivalent for his own people from scratch.
What he created is one of the most remarkable things in the history of language.
The Cherokee Syllabary: Written by One Man
Sequoyah was a Cherokee silversmith, born in Tennessee around 1770. He spoke no English and had received no formal education. But he had watched literate Europeans communicate across distances using marks on paper, and he was convinced Cherokee could do the same.
He started work around 1809. His first attempt was a logographic system with thousands of characters, one for each word. It was unworkable. He scrapped it.
His second approach was different. Instead of representing words, he noticed that Cherokee speech was made up of a limited number of syllable sounds. If he could create one symbol for each syllable, a reader could sound out any word in the language. He developed 85 characters covering every syllable in Cherokee.
He finished in 1821. His daughter Ayoka was the first person he taught to read it.
Why is this fascinating?
The result was extraordinary. Within a few years, thousands of Cherokee people had learned to read and write using Sequoyah's syllabary. By 1828, the Cherokee Nation was publishing its own bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix.
The literacy rate among Cherokee speakers briefly exceeded that of neighbouring white American communities.
The Cherokee syllabary is still in use today. The city of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, displays Cherokee script on public signage. It is a living script, invented by one person, still being read nearly 200 years later.
The word "muscle" comes from the Latin musculus, meaning "little mouse."
Roman anatomists noticed that the movement of a muscle under the skin looked like a small mouse moving beneath a cloth. The rippling shape, the quick movement, the way it seemed to live just under the surface. They called it musculus, the diminutive of mus, mouse.
The same root gave us mussel, the shellfish, because its dark, elongated shell reminded someone of a little mouse. So muscle and mussel are, etymologically, the same word.
Every time someone flexes at the gym, they're showing off their little mice.
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