An awesome read that brings home the point of the people trying to keep their native languages alive.
Other missionaries and bible translators came up with their own writing systems also. the very first attempt 200 years earlier also looked interesting. and Larry Wall also had his ideas on this problem.
it is extremely simple, and reminds me on modern Hangul, but is probably more related to japanese. https://omniglot.com/writing/syllabaries.htm
On a technical level, of course, it’s awesome that Unicode enables this kind of thing.
There is almost no analog in the US
Its so different, from the bad things to the good things, but just right there up north
Really fascinating and inspiring for me about how much is possible given that there are so many cultures here that have almost nothing to do with each other, just grouped together as “indigenous”
But... as a parent of a kid with dyslexia... I can't imagine teaching him this alphabet: he'd be shooting in the dark on vowel choices. After many months of deliberate effort, he can distinguish d/b from p/q but within those groups, he's completely lost. Sometimes, I've learned, beauty of symmetry comes at a cost.
One symbol im the title stands out: ᐦ appears to be missing from that chart -- any chance you know what's going on there?
> A glottal stop or /h/ preceding a vowel is optionally written with a separate character ⟨ᐦ⟩, as in ᐱᒪᑕᐦᐁ pimaatahe 'is skating'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics#...
While it's sad that a language like Auvergnat will likely die in a generation or two, it almost feels like less of a loss because other Langue d'Oc languages will likely survive (e.g., Gascon probably).
But the northern (a)nishn[aabe|abe|ini]m(o)w[e|i]n languages (Ojibwe, Oji-Cree, Odawa, Chippewa, etc.) are so much more endangered, have so little learning material, and are fragmented, making a concerted effort to save any one of them almost doomed to failure, let alone all of them.
I'm not saying linguistic ethnicide is acceptable, just that linguistic genocide is so so much more heartbreaking. An entire line of peoples will lose their connection to their ancestors in just a generation or two.
My step-father was Odawa. He never spoke it. But I try to study it some, to honor his memory. The Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar and Odawa Language and Legends book are... helpful but hardly sufficient.
From listening to The Blindboy Podcast I'm interested in learning some Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic) for the same reasons.
[0] library reference: https://www.worldcat.org/title/on-the-trapline/
I can hear she speaks it with a massive USA accent, even though I don’t know squat about Oji-Cree. It is weird how we can hear an accent even without knowing anything about a language.
As an American, it's true that if I heard her recording without context I'd probably guess she's from Michigan or Minnesota, but I could convince myself to go with urban Ontario if I thought about it more. Unless you are making a deeper point about the lack of a distinct Canadian identity?
I wondered, after getting the key languages spoken here (English being #1 by far) about Blackfoot, but see that there is no version of Wikipedia in that language. I wonder if they have any first nations languages (and yes, I understand that it depends on volunteers writing the articles in those languages, and that they almost certainly speak English better).
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
2. https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Wp/...
This article could have been about any topic, and the tone wouldn't change - as the bulk talks about the author themselves.
There seems to be no historical background or linguistic reason whatsoever?
Except there is this one reason: when English- (and French) -speakers made the phonetic writing system for Latin alphabeth, it became batshit crazy and quite unreadable.
anishinaabemowin -> ᐊᓂᐦᔑᓈᐯᒧᐎᓐ
makade-mashkikiwaaboo -> ᒪᑲᑌᒪᔥᑭᑭᐙᐴ
As an anecdote: if the English had invented the writing system of Finnish, regular Goodnight ie "Hyvää Yötä" would have been written "Hiouaa'aa Io'ootaa". This is why these written Native American languages look so bad.
https://www.jw.org/en/library/?contentLanguageFilter=crk-x-c...
As more human languages go extinct, I wonder if people in the future will forget where some unicodes come from and if they will try to repurpose some codes
We have unicode for Sumerian, so I don't think that will ever happen.
