His first essay was natural enough.  He tried to invent symbols to represent words.  These he sometimes cut out of bark with his knife, but generally wrote, or rather drew.  With these symbols he would carry on a conversation with a person in another apartment.  As may be supposed, his symbols multiplied fearfully and wonderfully.  The Indian languages are rich in their creative power.  By using pieces of well-known words that contain the prominent idea, double or compound words are freely made.  This has been called by writers treating this subject, the polysynthetic.  It is, in fact, a jumbling of sentences into words, by abbreviation, the omitted parts of words being implied or understood.  There is one important fact which I will merely note here that is generally overlooked.  These compounded words, to a large extent, represent the intrusive or European idea.  The names the Indians gave many of the European things were mere definitions.  Such as “Big Knives,” etc.  Occasionally they made a dash at the French or English sounds, as in the word “Yengees” for English, which has finally been corrupted in our language to Yankees.

Of course an attempt at fixed symbols for words was an unhappy experiment in a language one prominent element of which is, the facility of making words out of pieces of words, or compounded words.  Besides this difficulty, no language can be taught successfully by means of a dictionary, until the human memory acquires more power.  Three years of hopeless struggle with the mighty debris of his symbols left him, although in the main reticent, a mighty man of words.  But his labors were not lost.  Through that heroic, unaided struggle he gained the first true glimpses into the elements of language.  It is a startling fact, that an uneducated man, of a race we are pleased to call barbarians, attained in a few years, without books or tutors, what was developed through several ages of Phoenician, Egyptian, and Greek wisdom.

Se-quo-yah discovered that the language possessed certain musical sounds, such as we call vowels, and dividing sounds, styled by us consonants.  In determining his vowels he varied during the progress of his discoveries, but finally settled on the six—­A, E, I, O, U, and a guttural vowel sounding like U in Ung.

These had long and short sounds, with the exception of the guttural.  He next considered his consonant, or dividing sounds, and estimated the number of combinations of these that would give all the sounds required to make words in their language.  He first adopted fifteen for the dividing sounds, but settled on twelve primary, the G and K being one, and sounding more like K than G, and D like T. These may be represented in English as G, H, L, M, N, QU, T, DL or TL, TS, W, Y, Z.

It will be seen that if these twelve be multiplied by the six vowels, the number of possible combinations or syllables would be seventy-two, and by adding the vowel sounds, which maybe syllables, the number would be seventy-eight.  However, the guttural V, or sound of U in Ung, does not appear as among the combinations, which make seventy-seven.