suzmccarth wrote:

> In some ways that makes it more interesting that these systems were
> thought of as having pairs of vowels - why not just 7 vowels or 11
> vowels or whatever, depending on dialect. Economy I guess. English
> too. We like our vowels to multitask.

I always thought that the key idea of Cree script was to indicate vowels by
rotating the singns in each one the *FOUR* cardinal points north, east,
south and west.

So of course only four basic vowels can be indicated, and vowels in excess
of four must be indicated by some other means.

--
Marco