September 2002
Intermediate to advanced
896 pages
21h 3m
English
The Canadian aboriginal syllabary is used to write various Native American languages in Canada.[4] It was invented in 1841 by the Wesleyan missionary James Evans to write Cree and Ojibwe, and the letterforms were based on a form of British shorthand. The characters generally represent syllables (combinations of an initial consonant and a vowel), but additional characters are used to represent syllable-initial vowels and syllable-final consonants. The basic Cree syllabary consists of 63 characters (Figure 11.3).
[4] My source is John D. Nichols, “The Cree Syllabary,” in The World's Writing Systems, pp. 599–611.
The vowels alone are represented with triangles pointing in various directions. ...
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