--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> >

> It was a while ago, but I think the pagination didn't change,

Here is a paragraph from Fevrier on Cree and Cherokee.

"The two priniciple syllabic scripts of North America, that of the
Cree and that of the Cherokee are more in the nature of a curiosity,
but this interest is real.

They both, in effect, have been devised by people who knew the Latin
alphabet, obviously much simpler; if they have created, without
realizing it, an archaic and outmoded form of script, it was
certainly for reasons of an educational order, because the
decomposition into vowels and consonants demands an effort of
abstraction, whose difficulty all teachers know, while the
separation of a word into its constituent syllables is more easily
understood.

This script has served for religious propaganda, (New Testament, Old
Testament, works of piety) certain books have even been printed in
this script for the use of the natives."

p.528 I think the pagination is the same.

So Fevrier may say 'outmoded' but he does recognize that a syllabary
is good for literacy.

Compare with these quotes.

Andre Sjoberg. 1966. Socio-cultural and linguistic factors in the
development of writing systems for pre-literate peoples. In W.
Bright ed. Sociolinguistics (Januarum Linguarum XX) p. 260 – 273

According to this article the alphabet was the highest and most
modern type of writing and therefore the

"most suited to mass literacy and modernization, the goals of a
democratic society."

Wouldn't this represent the predominant thinking of the time? And
wouldn't this kind of thinking have an effect on practise?

and

A History of Science Volume I
by Henry Smith Williams 1904 also

Henry Smith Williams' History of the Art Of Writing, 4 vols, New
York and London, 1902-1903.

"The alphabet made possible for the first time that education of the
masses upon which all later progress of civilization was so largely
to depend."


I have always thought that those who wrote that the alpahbet was the
culmination of a unidirectional development contributed to the the
notion that the alphabet was the best vehicle for mass literacy.

Regards,

Suzanne McCarthy