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Font: Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
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The core of the script now known as “Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics” was first conceived in the mind of one James Evans in the early 1800s. Evans certainly was well prepared for the task. He had previously devised a Latin-based script for the native American language Ojibwe, and was also knowledgeable in Devanagari and Shorthand scripts. Around 1830, Evans devised a new syllabary for the Cree language. The new script was widely accepted and, over the years, was gradually extended to support many other indigenous, North American languages. Eventually, this system of writing came to be known as “Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics”. Today, it supports a broad range of languages belonging to the Algonquian, Athabascan, and Inuit families. In the recently declared (1999) Canadian region known as the Nunavut Territory, Canadian Syllabics shares the title of “Official Script” with the Latin script, and is used for the writing of the Inuit language.
As originally devised, the Cree Syllabary was extremely frugal in its use of symbols. The system consisted mainly of symbols representing open syllables, i.e. consonant-vowel pairs. In addition, there are distinct symbols for word-initial – also known as “independent” – vowels, as well as syllable-final consonants. In total, the symbols numbered 76. Evans’ minimalist approach is well demonstrated by the symbols for the independent vowels. The four vowels [e], [i], [o], [a] are all represented by the same geometric form (a triangle) rotated in each case to a distinct orientation. This same paradigm of identical shapes in varying orientations made the syllabary easy to learn, resulting in a high rate of literacy among the Cree people. What began as the Cree Syllabary, grew incrementally into the contemporary Canadian Aboriginal Syllabary, consisting of more than 600 symbols.
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