--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...>
wrote:
> suzmccarth wrote:
> > Very cute! The difference is that in this case we do, in fact,
know
> > where these symbols come from. For Brahmi and Cree we don't
know how
> > the system was thought up.
>
> That's true. Yet, some hypothesis sound intrinsically more naive
that
> others...

Like this one, you mean! :)

"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."

>
> It is sad that Evans, or people who worked with him, left no
account of how
> he made up the script.

I guess it is not so mysterious now that I have been looking at the
roman orthography already available for Ojibway developed by Peter
Jones, an Ojibway, well educated in English. Evans was able to use
that as a base although he also had his own roman orthography for
Ojibway. It is not very attractive with lots of trigraphs!. Evans
very much disliked the length of the Ojibway words, which in his
orthography sometimes took more than one line of text. Maybe that is
what drove him to a syllabary.

When Evans came up with his syllabics they were not at that time
accepted by the Ojibway. However, when he moved north to work among
the Cree, who did not yet have a roman orthography, they adopted the
syllabics. More recently Syllabics have become a pan-Canadian
aboriginal symbol. They are also used for Inuktitut, an official
language of Nunavut.

> Did anyone ever investigate the local newspapers of his time, to
see whether
> he ever released interviews? Such an investigation could be a good
> graduation thesis for a Cree student of linguistics did you try
looking up
> the archives of paste theses in Canadian universities?

I scanned a lot of it a few years back and have read a couple of
recent articles but I am not really up to date. No chance of finding
the time either. However, the things that crop are are just what I
mention, shorthand, systems for the blind, south Asian scripts, etc.
>
> > I am not so much talking about the shapes
> > of the discreet units but the idea that there should be a series
of
> > regular combinations which could be displayed in a matrix.
>
> To me, that seems like a very intuitive idea, that could have
occurred to
> many people. But perhaps that's just becaused I'm used to it.

Maybe naively, I am thinking about a matrix, or an array, a table,
whatever you call it, as an invention, something like the concept of
zero. I imagine that it is not a universal but that it had an origin
and spread from that origin.
>
> > BTW, did you say that there was a syllable chart for Italian or
was
> > it just a strategy to teach the syllables systematically.
>
> Actually, it was not really a matrix. It was rather a kind of
drill that we
> were required to do:

Yes, that is what my children had for learning French, a drill and
list but not an array. SOmeone mentioned learning the syllables for
Hebrew to but I wasn't sure if that was a table of syllables, I
can't imagine it.


> I have no idea however, what the earliest instance of
> > arranging a writing system into a matrix would be and whether it
> > appeared independently in different lgs and cultures. I suppose
CJK
> > have these charts also but where was it used first?
>
> Do you mean Chinese characters? No, how could they have such a
chart? It is
> a logographic script, so there are multiple characters for each
syllable.

I guess I have really mentioned Chinese because they were the ones
who invented the use of the matrix for solving equations. That and
the magic square, the concept of the matrix.

Suzanne