The Cherokee language is written in a syllabary invente by Sequoyah (also known as George Gist or George Guess) in 1819. In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme. While the large number of syllables in English (tens of thousands) precludes the use of a syllabary, the 85 characters in the Cherokee syllabary provide a suitable method to write Cherokee. Some symbols do resemble Latin alphabet letters, but the sounds are completely different (the form of the letter for /a/ resembles Latin D, for example).