Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics - Basic Principles

Basic Principles

Canadian "syllabic" scripts are not syllabaries, in which every consonant–vowel sequence has a separate glyph, but abugidas, in which consonants are modified in order to indicate an associated vowel—in this case through a change in orientation, which is unique to Canadian syllabics. In Cree, for example, the consonant p has the shape of a chevron. In an upward orientation, ᐱ, it represents the syllable pi. Inverted, so that it points downwards, ᐯ, it indicates pe. Pointing to the left, ᐸ, it is pa, and to the right, ᐳ, po. The consonant forms and the vowels so represented vary from language to language, but generally approximate their Cree origins.

*The obsolete sp- series, which is not supported by Unicode, is here represented by Latin and Cyrillic letters; there is no good substitution for spi. (It can be seen in the 1841 version at right.) The clockwise 90° rotation relates vowels as the later series sh- does, but unlike later Inuktitut consonants.

Because the script is presented in syllabic charts and learned as a syllabary, it is often considered to be such. Indeed, computer fonts have separate coding points for each syllable (each orientation of each consonant), and the Unicode Consortium considers syllabics to be a "featural syllabary" along with such scripts as hangul, where each block represents a syllable, but consonants and vowels are indicated independently (in Cree syllabics, the consonant by the shape of a glyph, and the vowel by its orientation). This is unlike a true syllabary, where each combination of consonant and vowel has an independent form that is unrelated to other syllables with the same consonant or vowel.