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