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Cree syllabics were developed for Ojibwe by James Evans, a missionary in what is now Manitoba in the 1830s. Evans had originally adapted the Latin script to Ojibwe (see Evans system), but after learning of the success of the Cherokee syllabary, [additional citation(s) needed] he experimented with invented scripts based on his familiarity with shorthand and Devanagari.
Eastern Cree dialects write finals with a superscripted a-syllabic. ᒫᔅᑰᒡ /māskōc/ has two finals, ᔅ /s/ and ᒡ /c/. Other differences are placing the diacritic for labialization (/w/) before rather than after the letter—ᑖᐺ /tāpwē/ (Western Cree ᑖᐻ),—and several additional series for consonants not found in Western Cree.
Later, he modified syllabics slightly and applied it to Cree, a related language. The syllabic writing system was inspired in part by Pitman Shorthand. They were easy to learn and led to almost universal literacy among the Canadian Ojibwe and Cree within a few years. [citation needed] Evans's other missionary work was scarred by turmoil.
Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics is a Unicode block containing syllabic characters for writing Inuktitut, Carrier, Cree (along with several of its dialect-specific characters), Ojibwe, Blackfoot and Canadian Athabascan languages.
Recognising the relationship between the th and y sounds, Cree writers use a modification of the y-series. In addition to these characters, western Cree syllabics indicates the w phoneme by placing a dot after the syllable. (This is the reverse of the Eastern Cree convention.) Thus, the syllable wa is indicated with ᐘ, pwi by ᐽ and so on.
East Cree marks its possessions on the nouns by adding a secondary suffix to a possessed noun with a third-person prefix. See examples below that indicate the addition of suffixes and prefixes. There is a difference in which suffix and prefix you use if the noun in questions is animate or inanimate.
Sam wâpam- ew see- 3SG Susan- a Susan- 3OBV Sam wâpam- ew Susan- a Sam see-3SG Susan-3OBV "Sam sees Susan." The suffix -a marks Susan as the obviative, or 'fourth' person, the person furthest away from the discourse. The Cree language has grammatical gender in a system that classifies nouns as animate or inanimate. The distribution of nouns between animate or inanimate is not phonologically ...
Carrier syllabics is designed so that syllables which begin with the same consonant have the same basic form. Depending on the following vowel, this form may be rotated, flipped, or a diacritic may be added in the centre which is a short stroke for e and a centre dot for i . There are special characters for consonants that do not immediately ...