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Cree SyllabicsCree syllabics are the variations on Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics that are used to write Cree language dialects. This writing system was devised for the Cree language in the mid-1840s by James Evans, an English Wesleyan missionary working in northern Manitoba. His native students had difficulty understanding how the same letters could have different sounds in English and in Roman alphabet writing systems designed for Cree, so he created a new writing scheme for them based on Pitman's shorthand. The new syllabary was quite simple; it consists of just 9 basic shapes representing syllables, which can be rotated to distinguish between different vowels and adorned with a diacritic dot to distinguish vowel lengths. (Since syllables beginning with a given consonant have a similar shape, the writing system is, strictly speaking, not a syllabary but an abugida.) Evans's syllabary was so easy to learn that it caught on quickly, leading to an incredibly high literacy rate among the Cree and adaptations of the script to be used to write native languages all over Canada, including Athabaskan languages, Inuktitut, and others. Some of these languages have changed to a Roman orthography, but many still use the syllabary today. There are, in the main, two major families of Cree syllabic writing. Eastern Cree syllabics are used by Cree dialects east of the Manitoba-Ontario border, and Western Cree syllabics are used by Cree speakers west of that line. Not all eastern Cree dialects are written with syllabics - the dialects of eastern Quebec use the Roman alphabet. The two syllabic writing systems diverge primarily in the way they indicate consonants appearing at the ends of syllables, the way they mark the semi-consonant /w/, and in order to reflect the phonological differences between Cree dialects. See also External links
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