| 词汇 | sequoia |
| 词源 | sequoia. The largest and tallest living things on earth, the giant sequoias of California and Oregon are named for the exalted Indian leader Sequoyah, who invented the Cherokee syllabary, which not only made a whole people literate practi- cally overnight but formed the basis for many Indian lan- guages. Sequoyah (also Sequoya, or Silwayi) was born about 1770, the son of a white trader named Nathaniel Gist; his mother was related to the great king Oconostota. Though he used the name George Guess, Sequoyah had few contacts with whites, working as a silversmith and trader in Georgia’s Cherokee country until a hunting accident left him lame. With more time on his hands, Sequoyah turned his attention to the “talking leaves” or written pages of the white man and set out to discover this secret for his own people. Over a peri- od of 12 years, withstanding ridicule by family and friends, he listened to the speech of those around him, finally completing a table of characters representing all 86 sounds in the Chero- kee spoken language. Sequoyah’s system was adopted by the Cherokee council in 1821; one story claims that his little daughter won over the council chiefs by reading aloud a mes- sage that they had secretly instructed her father to write down. Thousands of Indians would learn to read and write thanks to Sequoyah’s “catching a wild animal and taming it.” He joined the Arkansas Cherokee the following year, and in 1828 moved with them to Oklahoma after helping to negoti- ate in Washington, D.C., for more extensive lands. For the rest of his life he devoted himself to his alphabet and the study of common elements in Indian language, translating parts of the Bible into Cherokee and starting a weekly news- paper. Sequoyah was also instrumental in avoiding bloodshed and forming the Cherokee Nation when in 1839 the federal government heartlessly drove other Cherokee to Oklahoma from their ancestral homes in Alabama and Tennessee. He is believed to have died somewhere in Mexico around 1843 while searching for a lost band of Cherokee who were ru- mored to have moved there at about the time of his birth. It is said that he and his party of horsemen did ultimately find their lost brothers and taught them to read and write. Se- quoyah, legendary in his own time among Indians and whites, is one of a few men to invent an entire alphabet adopted by a people. In 1847, not long after Sequoyah’s death, the Hungarian botanist Stephan Endlicher gave the name Sequoia sempervi- rens to the redwood tree, and it is generally assumed, though not definitely known, that he had the great Cherokee leader in mind. There are three types of sequoias, all conifers. The red- wood species mentioned, native to the coast of California and a few miles into Oregon, includes probably the tallest tree cur- rently standing in the world: a sequoia in California’s Redwood National Park that stands 373 feet tall. (The tallest recorded tree of all time is probably an Australian eucalyptus that mea- sured 470 feet before it fell in 1885.) Another sequoia type is Sequoiadendron giganteum, which grows on the western slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada. These are generally called giant sequoias or “big trees,” not red- woods. They are not as tall as their relatives but are the largest plants on earth. Greatest among them, at 274.9 feet tall, is the General Sherman sequoia in California’s Sequoia National Park. This largest of all living things is popularly named for Union Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman (1820– 1891). It would take at least 17 adults with outstretched arms to encircle this tree, which contains enough timber to make 5 bil- lion matches. From its beginnings as a minuscule seed nearly 30 centuries ago, the massive General Sherman increased in weight more than 125,000 millionfold and in combined height and girth dwarfs any other plant. The General Sherman, 3,000 years old, is also one of the oldest of living things, but a bris- tlecone pine in California’s Inyo National Forest holds the age record: “Methuselah” has endured for more than 4,600 years on the windswept slopes of the White Mountains—since 2600 b.c. The third sequoia type is the “dawn redwood” or “living fos- sil,” Metasequoia glyptostroboides. Discovered growing in China in 1946, these trees are reputedly the ancestors of all sequoias, and their fossil remains date back 30 million to 50 million years. The dawn redwood is now grown in the United States. Inciden- tally, it is little known that some sequoias have been grown suc- cessfully in the East; one grown in Rochester, New York reached a height of more than 50 feet. Adrian Le Corbeau’s The Forest Giant, translated by T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), is a beautifully written appreciation of the giant sequoia. |
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