--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...>
wrote:

>
> And I think that it *could* be possible that something like that

can be put

> in place for Canadian Syllabics too. But someone (Unicode? ICU?)

should

> first publish a language-independent collation of the syllables

where, e.g.,

> the difference between pointed and unpointed syllables is ignored.
>
> Thinking of that, considering that Qalam seems to have a couple of

members

> with a good working knowledge of Canadian Syllabics and languages

which use

> it, such a collation specification could be a nice contribution

from the

> Qalamites to the world...

I have been in touch with Chris Harvey of languagegeek.com and he
feels he same as I do about it so we may try to work on it. He
agrees that there is no standard right now and something should be
done. We will need to get in touch with the authors of the
dictionaries I accessed as well.

If anyone in this list has experience working with the Cree
encodings or fonts or can give assistance in approaching Unicode on
this I would approeciate hearing from them.

>
> > How did you eliminate YU-W as an alternative to YUU? Word

finally,

> > the examples showed Naskapi -YU-W corresponding to Eastern Cree -

YUU.

Okay, this is not an alegbra problem - I appreciate the commentary
but let's not quibble. SUU/SUW and TII/TIY seem to me to be
acceptable variations. Sometimes there are also differences in
pronunciation so spelling isn't completely standardized.

Briefly, from my field work in 1990/91,
1. labialization should be represented,
2. preaspiration represented only rarely (optional and not always
phonemic, sometimes represents emphasis)could be represented but not
part of sorting and searching.
3. representing long vowels is a personal stylistic element
not "spelling".
4. Eastern and western finals should absolutley be neutralized for
searching, that's like differentiating between fonts!

Is the neutralization of preaspiration, #1426, a major difficulty?
This is ridiculous really because in '91 the authors of the Eastern
Cree dictioanry offered to withdraw this symbol from all print text
except the dictionary!

Suzanne