Ojibwe writing systems
Ojibwe is an indigenous language of North America from the Algonquian language family. Ojibwe is one of the largest Native American languages north of Mexico in terms of number of speakers and is characterized by a series of dialects, some of which differ significantly. The dialects of Ojibwe are spoken in Canada from southwestern Quebec, through Ontario, Manitoba and parts of Saskatchewan, with outlying communities in Alberta and British Columbia,[1][2] and in the United States from Michigan through Wisconsin and Minnesota, with a number of communities in North Dakota and Montana, as well as migrant groups in Kansas and Oklahoma.[2][3]
The absence of linguistic or political unity among Ojibwe-speaking groups is associated with the relative autonomy of the regional dialects of Ojibwe.[4] There is no single dialect that is considered the most prestigious or most prominent, and no standard writing system used to represent all dialects.[5] Ojibwe dialects have been written in numerous ways over a period of several centuries, with the development of different written traditions reflecting a range of influences from the orthographic practices of other languages.
Writing systems associated with particular dialects have been developed by adapting the Latin script, usually the English or French orthographies.[6] A widely used Roman character-based writing system is the double vowel system, attributed to Charles Fiero. The double vowel system is quickly gaining popularity among language teachers in the United States and Canada because of its ease of use.
A syllabic writing system not related to English or French writing is used by some Ojibwe speakers in northern Ontario and Manitoba. Development of the original form of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics is credited to missionary James Evans around 1840.[7]
The Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics are based on French orthography with letters organized into syllables. It was primarily used by speakers of Fox, Potawatomi, and Winnebago, but there is indirect evidence of use by speakers of Chippewa ("Southwestern Ojibwe").
Romanized Ojibwe systems[edit]
Modern Latin alphabets[edit]
The different systems used to write Ojibwe are typically distinguished by their representation of key features of the Ojibwe inventory of sounds. Differences include: the representation of vowel length, the representation of nasal vowels, the representation of fortis and lenis consonants; and the representation of consonants which require an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol that differs significantly from the conventional alphabetic symbol.
Ojibwe is also written in a non-alphabetic orthography, often called syllabics. Wesleyan clergyman James Evans devised the syllabary in 1840–1841 while serving as a missionary among speakers of Swampy Cree in Norway House in Rupert's Land (now northern Manitoba). Influences on Evans's creation of the syllabary included his prior experience with devising an alphabetic orthography for Eastern Ojibwe, his awareness of the syllabary devised for Cherokee, and his familiarity with Pitman shorthand,[48] and Devanagari scripts.[49]
The syllabary spread rapidly among speakers of Cree and Ojibwe and is now widely used by literate Ojibwe speakers in northern Ontario and Manitoba, with most other Ojibwe groups using alphabetically based orthographies, as discussed above.[7][48]
The syllabary is conventionally presented in a chart, but different renditions may present varying amounts of detail.[50]
The syllabary consists of (a) characters that represent a syllable consisting of a vowel without any preceding consonantal onset, written with a triangle rotated through four positions to represent the vowel qualities /e, i, o, a/; (b) characters that represent consonant-vowel syllables for the consonants /p t k tʃ m n s ʃ j/ combined with the four vowel qualities; (c) characters called finals that represent syllable-closing consonants both word-finally and word-internally; and (d) modifier characters for /h/ and /w/.[52]
The characters representing combinations of consonant plus vowel are rotated through four orientations, each representing one of the four primary vowels, /e i o a/. The syllabic characters are conventionally presented in a chart (see above) with characters organized into rows representing the value of the syllable onset and the columns representing vowel quality.
A glottal stop or /h/ preceding a vowel is optionally written with a separate character ⟨ᐦ⟩, as in ᐱᒪᑕᐦᐁ pimaatahe 'is skating'.[53]
The syllable-closing characters referred to as finals (called "terminations" by Evans, with "final" being a later terminological innovation),[54] occur in both word-final, and, less frequently, word-internal positions. The finals are generally superscripted, but originally were printed or handwritten mid-line.[55] There are two distinct sets of finals in use, a Western set and an Eastern set. The Western finals are accent-like in appearance and are unrelated to the other characters. The Eastern finals occur in four different forms. The more common form, the a-position finals, uses smaller versions of the characters for syllables containing the vowel /a/; the less common i-position sets use either smaller versions of the characters for syllables containing the vowel /i/ or their full height forms. Use of the i-position series is common in some communities particularly in handwriting.[55][56] The least common are those who use a mixture of a-position, i-position, and o-position series in their smaller version as finals, dependent on the word root. The Western finals were introduced in the earliest version of the syllabary and the Eastern finals were introduced in the 1860s.[57]
The examples in the table are cited from Neskantaga, Ontario (Lansdowne House), a community assigned to the Northwestern Ojibwe dialect.[58]
The sound /w/ is represented by adding a diacritic ⟨ ᐧ ⟩, sometimes called the 'w-dot', to a triangle or consonant-vowel character. Several different patterns of use occur related to the use of western or eastern finals: (a) Western, w-dot added after the character it modifies, with western finals; (b) Eastern, w-dot added before the character it modifies, with eastern finals; (c) Northern, w-dot added before the character it modifies, with western finals.[59]
Vowel length is phonologically contrastive in Ojibwe but is frequently not indicated by syllabics writers;[60] for example, the words aakim 'snowshoe' and akim 'count him, them!' may both be written ᐊᑭᑦ.[61] Vowel length is optionally indicated by placing a dot above the character, with the exception of /eː/, for which there is no corresponding short vowel and, therefore, no need to indicate length.[62] The practice of indicating vowel length is called 'pointed syllabics' or 'pointing'. In the pointed variant, the word 'snowshoe' would be written ᐋᑭᑦ.
The fortis consonants are generally not distinguished in the common unpointed writing from the lenis ones and so both /d/ t and /t/ ht are written t, etc. However, some speakers place the h initial before another initial to indicate that that initial is fortis rather than lenis.
The h initial and final are also used to represent the glottal stop in most communities, but in some, ⟨ᐞ⟩(superscript i) is used as a glottal-stop letter.
Not shown in the sample table are the characters representing non-Ojibwe sounds f th l r. All syllabics-using Ojibwe communities use p with an internal ring to represent f, typically ᕓ, ᕕ, ᕗ, ᕙ and ᕝ, and most use t with an internal ring to represent th, typically ᕞ, ᕠ, ᕤ, ᕦ and ᕪ, but variations do exist on the placement of the internal ring; in some communities where the s have transitioned to th, ᑌᐦ, ᑎᐦ, ᑐᐦ, ᑕᐦ and ᐟᐦ sequence is instead found. However, the method of representing l and r varies much greatly across the communities using Ojibwe syllabics.
The syllabics-using communities can be classified into:
Not part of the Unicode standard, thus not shown in the sample table above, is an obsolete set of syllabics form representing šp-series, or the sp-series in those communities where š have merged with s. Originally this series looked like "Z" or "N" and had the same orientation scheme as ᔐ še, ᔑ, ši ᔓ šo and ᔕ ša. This obsolete set has been replaced with either ᔥᐯ/ᐡᐯ špe, ᔥᐱ/ᐡᐱ špi, ᔥᐳ/ᐡᐳ špo, and ᔥᐸ/ᐡᐸ špa; or by ᐢᐯ spe, ᐢᐱ spi, ᐢᐳ spo and ᐢᐸ spa.
Alternative y ⟨ᣟ⟩ (superscripted w-dot) or ⟨ᣞ⟩ (superscripted w-ring), depending on if a medial or a final respectively, in words where w has transformed into y. In Evans' design, the y-dot was part of the original syllabics set, but due to ease of confusion between it and the w-dot in handwritten documents, most communities abandoned the y-dot in favour of the y-cross ⟨ᕀ⟩, which is still being used among communities using Western Finals. In Moose Cree-influenced communities, the superscripted ring can also be found as a ring diacritic in words such as ᐊᐦᐸᢹ (apakway, 'cattail') instead of ᐊᐦᐸᑾᣞ or ᐊᐦᐸᑾᔾ.