A friend showed me a recent xeet by Brett Chapman of this picture. I wanted to repost it here because I figured we'd all find it interesting, and I wanted to avoid the

Apparently this picture was posted to Reddit last year as well. I managed to find a 1989 article about the origin of this eye chart:

Cherokee Eye Chart Eases Translation Optician Hopes Care to Improve

Robby Trammell for The Oklahoman

TAHLEQUAH Cherokee optician John Sixkiller hopes a unique eye distance test chart he has developed will help elderly tribal members, who cannot speak English, to obtain quality eye care.

Sixkiller's chart is composed of native Cherokee language characters, and is modeled after the traditional nine-letter English chart.

"This (Cherokee chart) has a lot of potential," said Dr. Earl P. Schmitt, professor and director of clinics at the College of Optometry at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah.

He estimated that 5 percent of the some 20,000 patients last year at the Chester H. Pheiffer Optometry Clinic of the W.W. Hastings Indian Health Service Hospital could not speak or understand the English eye chart.

"A lot of rural Cherokee families are more familiar with the Cherokee syllabry than the English language," Schmitt said. "I could not take an eye test using the Cherokee chart, which I can't read, and get valid results."

Sixkiller, 38, of Kenwood said while working as an optician at the clinic from 1984-88 he was asked by doctors many times to translate for elderly Cherokee patients.

"A lot of the elderly Cherokees I know have a respect for doctors, and they don't want to get embarrassed because they do not know the English language as well," he said. "Sometimes they can not read an "E' from an "R' on the English chart, and it would be very difficult in communicating that to the doctor, and it slowed down the examination."

Dr. Hank Van Veen, a Holland native and NSU optometry professor, said the Cherokee chart "is a good thing, which will be reassuring for Cherokee speaking patients."

"It will show the doctor made an effort to meet the patient halfway," he said.

Sixkiller speaks fluent Cherokee and worked for months using various combinations of the 86-character Cherokee syllabry to develop the chart. He recently had it copyrighted.

He also has developed an English translation for the nine-character Cherokee chart so English-speaking doctors can understand their Cherokee patients.

Schmitt and Sixkiller now plan to test the Cherokee chart against the English chart using some 50 bilingual Cherokee patients.

"We want to attempt to validate the chart ... to see if test results are equal or comparable on both," Schmitt said.

About the Cherokee script

The Cherokee script is a syllabary created by Sequoyah (1770-1843). The script was inspired by symbolic rock art already familiar to the Cherokee, and was stylistically inspired by European scrips. Work on the script finished in the 1820s and literacy in it spread like wildfire, with the bilingual newspaper the Cherokee Phoenix printing its first issue already in 1828.

As a syllabary, most of the letters of the Cherokee script represent a consonant followed by a vowel, except the letters Ꮝ /s/ and Ꮐ /nah/. However, despite this apparent simplicity, Cherokee orthography is not wholly phonetic in fact: Cherokee writing generally does not mark the tone, vowel length, or syllable finals heard in spoken Cherokee; and consonant clusters are generally written with epenthetic (often etymological) vowels to boot. Nevertheless, for someone proficient in spoken Cherokee, the script is beyond satisfactory. Much like the issue of gemination not being marked in Amharic orthography.

Sequoyah is popularly described as having been "illiterate" prior to inventing his syllabary, but this is disputed: small Native YouTuber and anthropologist-archaeologist Twin Rabbit made a video back in 2020 called "Plains Sign & the Myth of Indigenous Illiteracy" (includes ENG subs; click "show transcript" in the description if you'd rather read the text at your own pace) in which they^[Pronouns unknown.] argue that Sequoyah actually had studied Latin and Cyrillic, and that what are often called "petroglyphs" and "proto-writing" among Native groups were oftentimes really pretty advanced forms of symbolic communication. Quoting the video, "[M]aybe, just maybe, they [the Cherokee Nation] were already familiar with symbolic communication and Sequoyah’s true genius was adapting the printing press to their needs."

See also Momolu Duwalu Bukele and the Vai syllabary of Liberia, which was likely partially inspired by the Cherokee script (see: Americo-Liberians). See also Tenevil's Chukchi script in the early USSR, inspired by the symbols on shamans' drums. Tenevil's script unfortunately never saw widespread use among the Chukchi and was only ever used by a handful of people.