r/linguisticshumor • u/Puzzleheaded_Fix_219 〇 - CJK STROKE Q + ɸ θ ʍ > f + č š ž in romance languages!! • 5d ago
Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics: Rotate the letters for vowels!
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u/Rejowid 5d ago
Inuktitut syllabics is THE PERFECT writing system, prove me wrong. The only thing it's lacking is that in its glorious geometric harmony it forgot to think about handwriting, the only shortcoming in the otherwise PERFECT writing system.
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u/Superior_Mirage 5d ago
I am not dyslexic, but if you told me the system was invented specifically to mess with people with dyslexia, I'd believe you.
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u/SomeAmigo 5d ago
Wait till you see what Mandombe looks like.
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u/MarcHarder1 xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ 5d ago
I'm not a fan of the ᖃ & ᖓ series (/q/ & /ŋ/), which use diagraphs of ᕐ & ᒃ(/ʁ/ & /k/) and ᖕ & ᒡ (/ŋ/ & /g/) respectively, instead of there own letters
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u/EducatorDelicious355 5d ago
It's not perfect. It's really easy to confuse different syllables and it's very limited in use since it lacks consonant clusters. Idk what you mean by perfect, it's really bad for other languages, but if you mean it's perfect as a syllabary, then again, it's confusing. Japanese does a MUCH better job
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u/PulsarMoonistaken 5d ago
Consonant clusters can be made with final characters. If you have a word like "stop" that you need to transcribe into syllabics you can just write it as ᐢᑐᑊ. Clusters are not a problem.
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u/EducatorDelicious355 5d ago
But what about languages that heavily use syllabic consonants? Or abjad languages that don't care about vowels because you can deduct them from context? This syllabary is only useful for its own language, and while it's very good, i doubt that it's perfect. Some people may find it confusing like me
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u/PulsarMoonistaken 5d ago
Again, just use the final characters like ᑊᐟᐠᐨᒼᐣᐢ and ᐩ. They're all single consonant sounds, rather than syllables. Abjad languages absolutely care about vowels, they just don't write them (you don't find Arabic-speakers speaking in just consonants.), Syllabics are fine for transcribing words into indigenous languages, especially since those languages don't really have much in terms of words for modern items like computer or artificial intelligence, which they would instead loan from languages like English which are heavy with clusters.
In practice any Indigenous linguists would probably transliterate in Latin, though, because alphabets are generally better for transliteration than abugidas are.
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u/EducatorDelicious355 5d ago
I didn't say that they don't speak vowels. I meant that they don't write them. We're talking about writing systems here after all
Again, i don't say that you can't use it properly or that it's bad, it's just that i think abugida is the best type of script. It can work as a syllabary or alphabet depending how you interpret it. And it is the most efficient script type, much more efficient than any syllabary
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u/PulsarMoonistaken 5d ago
When you write another language with a different writing system you usually try to approximate the sounds, rather than converting it one-to-one based on letters, which is why I brought up that Arabic-speakers use vowels which means you can use Canadian syllabics to write it, hypothetically.
Canadian Syllabics is an abugida, not a syllabary, though, so by your own logic it should be one of the best one to write with.
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u/EducatorDelicious355 5d ago
It's an abugida?
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u/PulsarMoonistaken 5d ago
It is. It has base characters for natural vowels, and, unlike Devanagari, rather than add diacritics to change which vowel, you change the orientation of the character to change the vowel, or add a dot above to make it a long vowel. There are also final characters which represent singular consonant values. In Indigenous languages they usually occur at the end of a sound like "mask" which would be "ᒧᐢᐠ". The system is essentially as agglutinative as the languages themselves.
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u/MarcHarder1 xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ 5d ago
Then just use one form of each letter, so instead of ᑕᒧᕆᑲᓕ (examplish word) with each vowel indicated, do ᑎᒥᕆᑭᓕ all in the same orientation so no vowels can be read
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u/PulsarMoonistaken 5d ago
As an example, gbwegbwe, Tree in gbari, could be written as ᐠᐻᐠᐻ. Inuktitut also has a lot of consonant clusters, and uses Canadian syllabics so I can assure you the problem with them lies not there :P
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fix_219 〇 - CJK STROKE Q + ɸ θ ʍ > f + č š ž in romance languages!! 5d ago
And there is Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers in Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics!
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u/dubovinius déidheannaighe → déanaí 5d ago
Much as it is aesthetically beautiful and consistent and easy to learn, it does strike me that it could be easy to mistake characters that are identical save for rotation, especially if you're dyslexic.
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u/Successful_Pea7915 5d ago
Well there are some letters that are identical save rotation in the Latin alphabet too q,p,d,b and W and M and u and n for example and I don’t often mix them up.
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u/Lecontei 5d ago
I was forced for a while to write in cursive as a kid, because I was still mixing up bdqp at 10. I explicitly changed the way I write q, so that I could do math problems (in 7th grade, p and q were frequently used variables in math class, and I was spending more time coloring letters than doing the math, because I couldn't really tell the variables apart). I think I would have just been illiterate if I had grown up with Canadian syllabics.
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u/kannosini 5d ago
That's not even 30% of the alphabet though. I don't think it's truly comparable.
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u/dubovinius déidheannaighe → déanaí 5d ago
I've often had similar thoughts about the Latin alphabet too
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u/MarcHarder1 xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ 5d ago
I picked up a souvenir while at my local natural history museum today
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u/1Dr490n 5d ago
Wait is this where /ʃ/ comes from or is it a coincidence?
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u/dubovinius déidheannaighe → déanaí 5d ago
It was probably inspired by ʃ. The IPA character predates even the IPA; see Pitman's English Phonotypic Alphabet.
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u/1Dr490n 5d ago
I just looked at the Wikipedia article of the syllabic, it was created in 1840 by a Canadian, so I guess you’re right.
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u/dubovinius déidheannaighe → déanaí 5d ago
Yeah and worth noting that the phonetic character itself is inspired by the long-s which has its origins in Roman cursive. So long before CAS.
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u/Portal471 5d ago
The graph is wrong for saying the third vowel is /o/. Isn’t it /u/?
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u/Puzzleheaded_Fix_219 〇 - CJK STROKE Q + ɸ θ ʍ > f + č š ž in romance languages!! 5d ago
This makes the writing system perfect for retro game consoles to save space since we can mirror and rotate the letters.