Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/115

107 He began to think and to ask questions about this strange fact, and slowly he grasped the idea of making characters which would represent the different sounds of the human voice. After months of study he found that eighty-five distinct sounds, or syllables, were used in Cherokee conversation, and that all the words with which he was familiar were combinations of these. He contrived eighty-five signs, or characters, which represented these sounds. This done, it was easy to put them together to make words; and the Cherokees had a written language so simple that under the guidance of Se-quoy-ah these Indians have gone beyond their white brethren, and in their system of phonetics have got rid of a world of rubbish, in the shape of useless or silent letters, with which our written words are encumbered.

Some have claimed that the Mayas of Yucatan—a people supposed to have descended from the builders of the magnificent cities now in ruins there—once had such a phonetic alphabet, but this cannot be proved until a key has been found to the records carved on their monuments. So far, these are still an enigma to the curious student. The Toltecs, Tezcucans, Aztecs, and other Nahua tribes, had a few symbols representing ideas, but most of the numberless manuscripts found at the time of the conquest were in picture-writing. It is not proved that they had the art of writing sounds, although they seemed to be rapidly working toward it.

The Aztecs were very skillful in representing the forms of birds, animals and fishes in gold and silver; but the same objects, when used in picture-writing, were strangely distorted. They made no difference in size between men, women and children, but indicated difference of age by dots near the head of the figure