Vai Syllabary - Possible Link With Cherokee

Possible Link With Cherokee

In 1967 P.E.H. Hair and Svend Holsoe, working independently, suggested that the Cherokee syllabary of 1819 provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary (Tuchscherer 2002). P.E.H. Hair, suggested that the link was missionary groups working with both peoples. A different link was suggested by Svend Holsoe, who discovered a Cherokee (possibly half-Cherokee) man named Augustus or Austin Curtis who had settled in the Vai region at least four years before the invention of the script. He married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. The "inscription on a house" that drew the world's attention to existence of the Vai syllabary was in fact on the home of Curtis. Both ideas have been mentioned by various authors since. In 2002 Tuchscherer and Hair, in a detailed analysis of the evidence (and noting that the evidence is only circumstantial), wrote:

What we can be reasonably sure about is that Curtis was not only a well-connected and influential man within the Vai community, but one who spoke the Vai language and adopted Vai customs, who settled in Vai country some four years before the invention of the Vai script, and who later appears to have welcomed the use of the script on his house. If Curtis was informed about the Cherokee script, if he was already resident at Cape Mount by 1827/28, and if he made contact with any of the mission party at Big Town - Revey or even his Vai-speaking assistants - it is conceivable that the notion of a syllabary reached the Vai by this route - but perhaps not very likely. Finally, whether the argument from coincidence should have any weight is difficult to say, but that two new scripts sharing the same basic structure, invented a continent apart within little more than a decade of each other, can each be linked, however tenuously (given the limited evidence), to the same individual, may reasonably be regarded as at least singular.(Hair 2002)