Documents produced by the Legislative Assembly, including Hansard, Committee transcripts, Bills and news releases are produced in English, using roman orthography, and in Inuktitut, using
syllabics.
On the right-hand side of the layout, the translators provide two transcriptions of the
syllabics in Roman characters: one a direct transcription from the original
syllabics, and the other transcribed into modern standard rendering of Plains Cree.
Indeed, to this reviewer (who is an expert neither in Cree
syllabics nor in Catholic liturgy), the most illuminating parts of Print Culture were its nominally peripheral components: the introductory essay by Patricia Demers and the afterword by Demers, McIlwraith, and Thunder.
James Evans--an English-born immigrant-turned-missionary--inaugurated Canadian type design by developing an indigenous
syllabic script for two closely related Algonquian languages, Ojibwa and Cree.
The
syllabic system, used today in the rest of Canada's Arctic, was invented later and adapted by missionaries from the Cree
syllabics.
Another method was to modify the output device (the screen or the printer) somehow, often by physically replacing the conventional roman characters with
syllabics. It was not until the later 1980s, with the simultaneous development of the IBM Personal Computer (PC) and the graphical user interface (the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems) that it became possible to produce a "software" solution to the problems of using
syllabics on a computer.
The first is his argument that all English meter is accentual-syllabic, and that quantitative, purely
syllabic, or purely accentual prosodies are not valid descriptions of English meter.
Could <ie> have been adopted early enough to capture a residue of the umlauted diphthongs -- and re-inforced by a need for <ie> for morphologically salient hiatus
syllabics?
In 1977, he completed an encyclopedia of traditional life, which he entrusted to Bernard Saladin d'Anglure; however, it was not actually published until later and then only in
syllabics. In 1979, Qumaq began to create a dictionary of Inuktitut as spoken in Nunavik, which he completed in 1981.
Syllabics are easier to read and write because you do not have to go letter by letter."
"For the last 15 years or so, they (translators) have produced a translation of the Sunday readings on the three-year Sunday lectionary that we use, and produce them in
syllabics and English," he said.
Text in English and Inuktitut
syllabics. 108 p., map, b&w illus.
Classes also include instruction in Cree
syllabics, since many middle-aged native people did not learn their written language in school.
All entries in the dictionary are written in both
syllabic and Roman characters.
