No overt relation between Cree syllabics & Duployan

[Mike Cleven]

Dave Robertson wrote:
>
> Klahowya, Liland,
>
> Sounds like you're providing the answers to your own questions!  You clearly know more than I do about all this, and the reason I've referred to "East Cree" is that that website is the only exposure I've had to Cree syllabics.  It's really an excellent work-in-progress, by the way, an interactive grammar of that dialect of Cree, additions to which are being made as time goes by.
>
> Kloshe nanitch,
> Dave
>
> "Liland Brajant Ros'" <lilandbr at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi, Dave, I'm just wondering: What exactly do you mean by "East Cree
> > syllabics"? As far as I have ever been able to discern the syllabary that is
> > used for the Eastern Cree dialects is to all intents and purposes the same
> > as the one used in Plains Cree, and for that matter in some Ojibwe circles,
> > as well as for Chipewyan and Inuktitut, among others. The differences (even
> > across language-family boundaries) don't seem any greater than, say, the
> > forms of the Latin alphabet used in Italian, Swahili and Vietnamese. I
> > always just say "Cree syllabics", and "East Cree" here makes me think there
> > must be a distinct and separate set of "West Cree" syllabics (or, if I
> > didn't know better, might lead me to suppose West Cree was not written
> > syllabically).
> >
> > lilEnd

I've been web-searching for the character set for Dogrib and Slavey and
- I suppose - Chipewyan and had drafted another note on this in Chinook
which I hadn't quite finished because of the incomplete search.  I know
that there's such a script used in the NWT, where IIRC all these are
official languages (the NWT almost got renamed Denendeh, a name has
political overtones regarding northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba; the
territory very nearly got named "Bob" but the referendum was won by "the
Northwest Territories").  I was unable to find any examples via
http://www.gov.nt.ca/Lang_Com/links.htm as I'd hoped; it's often visible
on CBC North TV broadcasts and I know I've seen it in advertisements for
northern jobs.  Maybe it _is_ the same system as Cree and Inuktitut, but
I'd thought it was different as it doesn't quite look like Inuktitut,
which is also featured on northern newscasts etc.  What prompted my
original comment was indeed - read somewhere - the premise that the
phonetic values of one of these northern syllabics in another shorthand,
which I thought was Gregg; not the same system as Kamloops Wawa-Tzum,
which occasioned my remarking on it at the time; at the lost possibility
of a similar phonetic symbol-set between native languages east _and_
west of the Rockies.  The northern scripts, however, have relatively
flourished and become modern, including developing typography as well as
(of late) font sets; Duployan, because it's a shorthand -script- and not
a syllabic, would be hard to turn into a normal font; Marv Plunkett was
working on this at one time but I don't know of late.  The two available
routes seem to be to make common-combination characters with individual
characters available for each sound; or else a whole character set
formed of Duployan forms but based directly on the word-catalogue, as
with Chinese and Japanese.  Or else the construction of a "New Duployan"
similar to the syllabics you've mentioned re Cree Inuktitut.

Whether there's a different font/symbol set for the Denendeh languages
than for Cree/Inuktitut, I don't know, but my point is I do I believe
one or the other of them (if there's a difference) to be based in a
European shorthand, or at least one based in the same principles and
perhaps also devised by a non-native; something tells me this may have
been a priest or preacher as in the case of the Duployan's
popularization in the Interior of BC.  The difference east of the
Rockies and in the North is that this script took root and are
relatively widely-used, unlike Duployan/Kamloops Wawa-Tzum.  The idea
that use of such a script might have remained in use for native
languages in central and northern BC is very intriguing; Kamloops Tzum
was already used for Secwepemc and other languages; the difference in
situation also had to do with the fact that there's nothing like CBC
North and other native-language media programs in the provinces, despite
a much  That it might have been the _same_ script as that used.

Naika kwatah; I'll send the Chinook version of this I wrote earlier on
later.

Mike

I had a look around the Web for examples of the NWT Dogrib-Slavey
script/text but haven't found anything as yet despite about 20 hits.