In the 1960s scholars began suggesting that the
Cherokee syllabary of North America may have provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary in Liberia. The Vai syllabary emerged about 1832/33. This was at a time when American missionaries were working to use the Cherokee syllabary as a model for writing Liberian languages. Another link may have been
Cherokee who emigrated to Liberia after the invention of the Cherokee syllabary (which in its early years spread rapidly among the Cherokee) but before the invention of the Vai syllabary. One such man, Cherokee Austin Curtis, married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. The romantic "inscription on a house" that first drew the world's attention to the existence of the Vai script was in fact on the home of Curtis, a Cherokee. 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. (Tuchscherer and Hair 2002) ==Syllables==