"The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings."
from: The Walrus and the Carpenter, by Lewis Carroll
I'd be happy to talk about several of those things, but will try to be more focused. Instead, we will talk of (wait for it) . . . phonologies.
A phonology, for the non-linguists, is the collection of sounds that occur in a given language. Udugi, for example, has a phonology that does not include bilabial stops (the "p" and "b" sounds). It does include a bilabial continuant ("m"), which is rather infrequent. There are only five natural languages known that have phonologies that do not include any bilabial stops: Wichita (Caddoan family), Aleut (Eskimo-Aleut), Cherokee (Southern Iroquoian), Eyak, and Hupa (the last two are Na-Dene). One of these languages, Wichita, is phonologically more extreme than Cherokee, in that it does not even include the "m" sound. All of these languages are indigenous to North America and the Aleutian Islands. Both Wichita and Cherokee are part of the Keresiouan macro stock, within the Almosan-Keresiouan super macro stock, so they are distantly related. Linguistically, at least, they are "Plains Indians."
All that I've said above regarding Cherokee is also true of Udugi, since its vocabulary comes from Cherokee. But there is more. Both Cherokee and Udugi are, unlike English, composed mostly of open syllables (consonant plus vowel). In both cases it is possible for a syllable to end in "s," if it is followed by another (open) syllable, This CV syllable structure gives both Cherokee and Udugi a pleasing sound. There are also no consonant clusters (except for "s" plus following consonant) in either Cherokee or Udugi, but they are very common in English.
I mention all this because it explains why the Sequoyah syllabary simply won't work for most of the languages in the world. You can't use it for English. It works just fine, though, for Cherokee and Udugi. The syllabary, representing whole syllables at a time, is also more efficient, which is why we use it.
