At 18:20 +0000 2005-08-31, suzmccarth wrote:

>I wrote my thesis on how the Cree encoding came to be what it
>now is.

How interesting.

>The Cree unicode characters came from one community where university
>linguists from a varitey of instituions were working. In this
>community Cree literacy was little used.

The CASEC reports I saw had submissions from a number of different communities.

>In other communities, Cree literates were reluctant to talk to
>linguists and non-natives in general. They are the big users of the
>script but their concept of how the script works was not encoded.
>They use pointing in much the same way it is used in Hebrew.

Well, that's a spelling issue, certainly.

>So it is what happens *before* the writing system gets near Unicode
>that concerns me. However, individual communities are working
>through the issues now.

The Canadian government's CASEC project assembled the CASEC reports.
Then I became involved, and the relevant committees cooperated to
complete the project. Subsequently I was involved in adding some
missing Inuktitut characters, and there are some Athapascan ones
(rather a lot of them) yet to encode.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com