Unicode Demystified

Canadian Aboriginal Syllables

The Canadian aboriginal syllabary is used to write various Native American languages in Canada.^[4] It was invented in 1841 by the Wesleyan missionary James Evans to write Cree and Ojibwe, and the letterforms were based on a form of British shorthand. The characters generally represent syllables (combinations of an initial consonant and a vowel), but additional characters are used to represent syllable-initial vowels and syllable-final consonants. The basic Cree syllabary consists of 63 characters (Figure 11.3).

^[4] My source is John D. Nichols, “The Cree Syllabary,” in The World's Writing Systems, pp. 599–611.

Figure 11.3. Cree syllabary

The vowels alone are represented with triangles pointing in various directions. ...