Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Rendello 1536 days ago
Syllabics are an abugida, so they map to the structure of Cree, Oji-Cree, and Ojibwe quite well. In these languages, syllables tend to have a single consonant followed by a single vowel (with some exceptions; this applies less in non-syncope dialects as well). Words that are unwieldy in the Latin script are less daunting in syllabics:

anishinaabemowin -> ᐊᓂᐦᔑᓈᐯᒧᐎᓐ

makade-mashkikiwaaboo -> ᒪᑲᑌᒪᔥᑭᑭᐙᐴ

1 comments

As is Finnish. And we do well. But the writing system was invented 600 years ago. So those Siberian-Eskimo-etc weird plosives and ingresses slowly disappeared, even if they were originally coded in the script.

As an anecdote: if the English had invented the writing system of Finnish, regular Goodnight ie "Hyvää Yötä" would have been written "Hiouaa'aa Io'ootaa". This is why these written Native American languages look so bad.