s 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.

Still his work was not complete. The hissing sound of S entered into
the ramifications of so many sounds, as in STA, STU, SPA, SPE, that it
would have required a large addition to his alphabet to meet this
demand. This he simplified by using a distinct character for the S
(OO), to be used in such combinations. To provide for the varying sound
G, K, he added a symbol which has been written in English KA. As the
syllable NA is liable to be aspirated, he added symbols written NAH,
and KNA. To have distinct representatives for the combinations rising
out of the different sounds of D and T, he added symbols for TA, TE,
TI, and another for DLA, thus TL