The New York Times has an article by John Noble Wilford on Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee script today; in the online version, the Cherokee text that appears in the article – maybe the first Cherokee to have appeared in the Times? – seems to have fallen out. It should look like this:

By some accounts, Sequoyah was a kind of Professor Henry Higgins who enlisted family members who had sharper ears for discriminating distinct sounds. They helped him divide spoken words into their constituent sounds, and to each sound he assigned a symbol drawn mostly, it is said, from an English spelling book. In the script, for example, Sequoyah’s own name reads:

ᏎᏉᏯ

The 15 characters on the cave wall —

Ꭱ,Ꭴ,Ꮇ,Ꮨ,Ꮹ
Ꮰ,Ꮋ,Ꮴ,Ꭵ,Ꮊ,Ꮶ,Ꭹ,Ꮗ,Ꮀ,Ꮻ

— do not spell any words. “They read almost like ABCs,” Dr. Tankersley said in the magazine article, suggesting that someone taught by Sequoyah may have been “practicing drawing them out just as we would practice our ABCs.”

(You’ll probably need Plantagenet Cherokee (standard with OS X; or see here) active to see the Cherokee text. The Times also seems to have used a Roman “G” rather than “Ꮹ,” Cherokee letter wa. Sequoyah’s invention of the Cherokee script, the article notes, might be “the only known instance of an individual’s single-handedly creating an entirely new system of writing.”)