When responding to Monty’s question about Nunavut’s official languages in another thread, I was reminded of a question I’ve wondered about: why was it necessary to develop syllabic alphabets for some North American indigenous languages? Was the Latin alphabet not flexible enough to represent those languages?
For an example, see this page from the Nunavut government web-page, which is in Inuktitut.
I think one needs a Nunavut font installed to display that link.
I wonder if it was a matter of simply following an existing lead: The first written transcription of an Indian langauge was Sequoyah’s Cherokee Syllabary. Is it possible that having the first Indian language be written as a syllabary, it became the “accepted” manner of transcription?
Alternatively, it might be posible that most Indian nations simply perceive their languages differently. Using the Latin alphabet, they would (particularly in Canada) have had to deal with the different pronunciations of the same letters in French and English. (E.g., should the Indian language use the letter “G” to identify the sound in God, Gaol, enouGh, or gendarme (to the extent that it differs from the pronunciation in gaol)?) If they think of their languages as composed of discrete syllables, rather than of phonemes, it might have made more logical sense to use a syllabary.
Is there possibly an element to it that learning a syllabary is easier for those who aren’t used to the concept of “written language”.
I’ve found that my daughter has a surprisingly hard time picking out that Julia,juice and joke all start with a “juh” sound … but she sure knows that “James” starts with a “J”
Well, when we learned to read Spanish in class, we started with
a
e
i
o
u
then next
ma
me
mi
mo
mu
then we could read “mi mamá me mima” (my Mom pampers me) and “amo a mi mamá” (I love my Mommy)
next was pa pe pi po pu…
So at least for one instance of a Western language where 99% of the times you see a certain group of letters it’s pronounced the same way, we actually worked through “writing” as being syllable-based, not letter-based. Now with computers you’re highly unlikely to see a word that’s split between two lines, but the rule for doing that is that the split has to be between two syllables; the syllable is an important unit. Our poetry is counted in syllables as well.
My main character in WoW is called Corazon. I had to ask my guildies to please call me Cora because “Cor” is an impossibility in Spanish - it breaks the syllables! You don’t break the syllables!
Hmm - works fine for me and I’ve not installed a special font. What does it show for you? those little blank squares?
I think there are two issues here:
One, why did Native Americans create new scripts after having been introduced to the alphabet?
Two, having decided to invent a new script, why do those scripts tend to be (or are universally) syllabaries?
Those questions may have very different answers–I have no idea what the answer might be to the first, but for the second I do know that different types of language work better with different types of scripts–it depends on the number of phonemes and how syllables are constructed (i.e, Japanese’s CV-CV-CV approach lends itself to a syllabary: Hewbrew’s consonant-rich sound makes an alphabet more efficient.) However, I don’t know enough about Native American languages to even guess what form would be most efficient for them (and the answer might well vary by language)
Yep.