Ojibwe Writing Systems - Ojibwe Syllabics

Ojibwe Syllabics

See Canadian Aboriginal syllabics for a more in-depth discussion of Ojibwe syllabics and related scripts

Ojibwe is also written in a non-alphabetic orthography often called syllabics. Wesleyan clergyman James Evans devised the syllabary in 1840-1841 while serving as a missionary among speakers of Swampy Cree in Norway House in Rupert's Land (now northern Manitoba). Influences on Evans' creation of the syllabary included his prior experience with devising an alphabetic orthography for Eastern Ojibwe, his awareness of the syllabary devised for Cherokee, familiarity with Pitman shorthand, and Devanagari scripts.

The syllabary spread rapidly among speakers of Cree and Ojibwe, and is now widely used by literate Ojibwe speakers in northern Ontario and Manitoba, with most other Ojibwe groups using alphabetically based orthographies, discussed above.

The syllabary is conventionally presented in a chart, although different renditions may present varying amounts of detail.

The syllabary consists of: (a) characters that represent a syllable consisting of a vowel without any preceding consonantal onset, written with a triangle rotated through four positions to represent the vowel qualities /e, i, o, a/; (b) characters that represent consonant-vowel syllables for the consonants /p t k tʃ m n s ʃ j/ combined with the four vowel qualities; (c) characters called finals that represent syllable-closing consonants both word-finally and word-internally; and (d) modifier characters for /h/ and /w/.

The characters representing combinations of consonant plus vowel are rotated through four orientations, each representing one of the four primary vowels, /e i o a/. The syllabic characters are conventionally presented in a chart (see above) with characters organized into rows representing the value of the syllable onset and the columns representing vowel quality.

A glottal stop or /h/ preceding a vowel is optionally written with a separate character ⟨ᐦ⟩, as in ᐱᒪᑕᐦᐁ pimaatahe 'is skating'.

The syllable-closing characters referred to as finals (called "terminations" by Evans, with "final" being a later terminological innovation), occur in both word-final, and, less frequently, word-internal positions. The finals are generally superscripted, but originally were printed or handwritten mid-line. There are two distinct sets of finals in use, a Western set and an Eastern set. The Western finals are accent-like in appearance, and are unrelated to the other characters. The Eastern finals occur in two different forms. The more common form, the a-position finals, uses smaller versions of the characters for syllables containing the vowel /a/; the less common i-position set uses smaller versions of the characters for syllables containing the vowel /i/. Use of the i-position series is common in some communities particularly in handwriting. The Western finals were introduced in the earliest version of the syllabary and the Eastern finals were introduced in the 1860s.

The examples in the table are cited from Neskantaga, Ontario (Lansdowne House), a community assigned to the Northwestern Ojibwe dialect.

The sound /w/ is represented by adding a diacritic ⟨'ᐧ⟩, sometimes called the w-dot', to a triangle or consonant-vowel character. Several different patterns of use occur related to the use of western or eastern finals: (a) Western, w-dot added after the character it modifies, with western finals; (b) Eastern, w-dot added before the character it modifies, with eastern finals; (c) Mixed, w-dot added before the character it modifies, with western finals.

Vowel length is phonologically contrastive in Ojibwe, but is frequently not indicated by syllabics writers; for example the words aakim 'snowshoe' and akim 'count him, them!' may both be written ᐊᑭᑦ. Vowel length is optionally indicated by placing a dot above the character, with the exception of /eː/, for which there is no corresponding short vowel and hence no need to indicate length. The practice of indicating vowel length is called 'pointed syllabics' or 'pointing'. In the pointed variant, the word 'snowshoe' would be written ᐋᑭᑦ.

The fortis consonants are generally not distinguished in the common unpointed writing from the lenis ones, and thus both /d/ t and /t/ ht are written t, etc. However, some speakers will place the h initial before another initial to indicate that that initial is fortis rather than lenis.

The h initial and final are also used to represent the glottal stop in most communities, but in some, a superscript i is used as a glottal-stop letter.

Not shown in the sample table are the characters representing non-Ojibwe sounds f th l r. All syllabics-using Ojibwe communities use p with an internal ring to represent f, typically ᕓ, ᕕ, ᕗ, ᕙ and ᕝ, and use t with an internal ring to represent th, typically ᕞ, ᕠ, ᕤ, ᕦ and ᕪ, but variations do exist on the placement of the internal ring. However, method of representing l and r varies much greatly across the communities using Ojibwe syllabics.

The syllabics-using communities can be classified into:

• Finals use
  • Eastern A-Finals—consonant in a-direction shown as a superscript; most common finals in use
  • Eastern I-Finals—consonant in i-direction shown as a superscript; used in some communities of Ontario and Quebec
  • Eastern Mixed Finals—consonant in i-, o- or a-direction shown as a superscript with choice dependent upon the word's root; typically found in James Bay Cree influenced communities
  • Western Finals—typically found in Saulteaux (ᑊ ''p'', ᐟ ''t'', ᐠ ''k'', ᐨ ''ch'', ᒼ ''m'', ᐣ ''n'', ᐢ ''s'', ᐡ ''sh'' and ᕀ ''y'')
• W-dot positioning
  • pre-glyph—most commonly associated with Eastern communities (ᐌ)
  • post-glyph—most commonly associated with Western communities (ᐍ)
• L/R representation
  • independent Sigma form—shaped like Greek capital letter sigma (ᓬ for l and ᕒ for r).
  • nesting Sigma form—similar to above, but nesting on the N-shape with superscripted sigma-form alone as finals
  • N-shape modified form—most common form, created by an erasure of part of the N-form (ᓓ ᓕ ᓗ ᓚ ᓪ for l and ᕃ ᕆ ᕈ ᕋ ᕐ for r)
  • Roman Catholic form—most often found in western communities (ᕃ ᕆ ᕊ ᕍ ᔆ for l and ᖊ ᖋ ᖌ ᖍ ᙆ for r)

Not part of the Unicode standard, thus not shown in the sample table above, is an obsolete set of syllabics form representing šp-series, or the sp-series in those communities where š have merged with s. Originally this series looked like "Z" or "N" and had the same orientation scheme as ᔐ še, ᔑ, ši ᔓ šo and ᔕ ša. This obsolete set has been replaced with either ᔥᐯ/ᐡᐯ špe, ᔥᐱ/ᐡᐱ špi, ᔥᐳ/ᐡᐳ špo, and ᔥᐸ/ᐡᐸ špa; or by ᐢᐯ spe, ᐢᐱ spi, ᐢᐳ spo and ᐢᐸ spa.

Also, not shown are the alternate y, written as a superscripted w-dot or w-ring, depending on if a medial or a final respectively, in words where w has transformed into y. In Evans' design, the y-dot was part of the original syllabics set, but due to ease of confusion between it and the w-dot in handwritten documents, most communities abandoned the y-dot in favour of the y-cross ⟨ᕀ⟩, which is still being used among communities using Western Finals.