--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Jason Glavy" <jglavy@...> wrote:
> >
> > What about the Hocak (Winnebago) syllabary? Does that count as a
> syllabary?
> > Seems to have evolved from Roman script handwriting. The one

used by

> > Blowsnake in Susmans analysis. (see Willard

Walker "Anthropological

> > Linguistics, Vol.16 No.8). Or the Masquakie syllabary

reproduced in the

> > same volume.
> >
> > Please confirm that the Potawatomi syllabary at this URL is in

error

> as you
> > say.
>
> I think greater heed should have been paid to Suzanne's smilie.

I was only half-joking . Of course, it is the roman alphabet
arranged in syllables. (For those for whom this was a non-functional
link.)

They

> look like PR jobs to me:
>
> 'You can't handle a paleface alphabet? OK, try a syllabary.

That's

> the Native American thing!'

I am uncomfortable with that interpretation - did Evans think of it
as a native American thing? Was he familiar with the Cherokee
syllabary?

In the first half of the 19th century syllabic shorthand was well-
known and some of the first Braille was syllabic but this was
dropped.

There was also a fascination with the scripts of India.

But most important, universal literacy at all cost. The missionaries
must show that their converts were literate. This was the 1830's -
the time of the Sunday School Movement in the Methodist Church in
England which was apparently for the purpose of teaching reading.
When discussing Cree Syllabics H. Gleason used to talk about the
influence of a certain Rev. Park, around the 1830's who helped found
the Sunday School movement.

The catch was - how did you have your students demonstrate literacy
in the least possible time when they tended to move around a lot.
Was the syllable chart, as a strategy, actually more successful?
Possibly.

Why were certain systems successful? W. Walker claimed that Cree
syllabics survived because of institutional support from the
Anglican church after Evans, a methodist, was discredited and left.

However, John Murdoch and John Berry say that it was successful
because 'syllabic literacy' could be learned and transmitted very
quickly. Supposedly a significant portion of the Cree nation were
literate in syllabics _before_ the Anglican Church supported it with
Bible publications, (and after Evans was gone).

The following webpage has an interesting article on Inuit Syllabics.
It is a non-technical history and near the bottom is a section on
learning syllabics from parents. Also an image from a syllabic novel.

http://www.collectionscanada.ca/2/16/h16-7301-e.html#Inuktitut%
20Syllabics:%20the%20Origins

> Perhaps the word alphabet is also avoided because of the

elimination

> of phonetic information, most obviously the removal of voicing
> contrast from the script.

Maybe there is no phonological voicing contrast. Syllable charts
were called syllbaries, that's all. It was a syllabary, in the other
sense of the word.

Suzanne