What language/script is this?

Factual Questions
1

Whilst rifling through another Dope thread, I came across this website: The Northern Strategy (A Nunavut Gov’t Website)

My question is that in some of the pages, there’s what I can only call “glyphs”. What are they? Are they Inuit or Nunavut writing?

Tripler
Enquiring minds want to know.

2

I’ve seen that script before in my travels up north, and I believe it is a modern, artificial script for Iqualit. Nunavut Boy should be able to clear this up post haste, as I’m sure he sees it every day. Yo, NB, you up yet?

Vlad/Igor

3

If you look at the unicode charts, they are in the section called “Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics”:

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1400.pdf (note the PDF!)

4

The alternate text for the button to switch to that language is “Inuktitut”, to switch to English it is English and to switch to French it is Francais, so I would wager that Inuktitut is the name of the language.

5

That may be the official name, but the locals call them syllabics.

6

And here’s some information on the writing system itself. It’s used (in variously modified forms) to write Blackfoot, Ojibwe, Carrier, Slavey, Naskapi, and (Canadian) Inuktitut.

7

But why? Is there some reason Roman letters are not up to the tast of rendering Iqualit or Ninuktitut phonemes?

8

IANA Inuit linguist (what a surprise)…but on that PDF, the explanations below the chart suggest that it’s an attempt to comprehensively cover pronunciations, particularly where they differ between tribes. After all, different dictionaries are published for American and Real ( :stuck_out_tongue: ) English, despite being the same language - imagine if we wanted to codify the difference between Tomato and Tomato?!

9

Well, if you read the pages on omniglot, here’s why:

James Evans, a Wesleyan missionary working at Norway House in Hudson’s Bay, invented a syllabary for the Ojibwe language in about 1840. He had tried to produce a Latin-based orthography for Ojibwe, but eventually gave up and came up with a syllabary, based partly on Pitman shorthand.

Evans’ syllabary for Ojibwe consisted of just nine symbols, each of which could be written in four different orientations to indicate different vowels. This was sufficient to write Ojibwe, but Evans’ superiors were not keen on his invention and would not allow his to use it. He later adapted it to write Cree.