| Interesting, I thought they had already agreed on a standard a few years ago In any case, Syllabics are a very interesting writing system. I'm planning on doing an in-depth video about them at some point, but Tom Scott's introduction is great [1]. There are some major advantages to using Syllabics. Consider that the languages that use them are polysynthetic, meaning that the 'words' are quite large and encompass a lot of information, and that they mostly use a Consonant-Vowel syllable structure that is perfect for a syllabary, where one character represents both a consonant and its vowel [2], or an abugida, where the consonant is the important part of the character, and the vowel markings are secondary [3]. An alphabet creates large, unruly words. Qaliujaaqpait and Ojibwe also double their vowels to lengthen them, making romanized text very long. Look at this Ojibwe word for coffee: "makade-mashkiikiiwaaboo", in syllabics, it's the much less unruly "ᒪᑲᑌᒪᔥᑮᑮᐙᐴ". And Syllabics themselves are amazing, there are different shapes for the consonants, and their rotation determines the vowel sound [4]. Just awesome, and very easy to learn However, sadly, there are many disadvantages to the awesome system. For one, roman letters are everywhere, there's good software support, there's always going to be a need to know them as the new generation learns English and French. Not to mention rotation-based characters are no good for, say, someone with dyslexia. I'm not shocked at this decision, it was the right call. First Nations and Inuit languages need standardization, and more importantly, as much literature as possible, to compete. That's hard to do when everyone is writing in a different way. I'm writing syllabic converter software that should hopefully be more accurate than the current ones online today, if you're interested in helping or learning about it, feel free to send me an email 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW4hI_METac
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Ojibwe_... |