ᐊᐣᑕᔚᐣᐦᐃ ᐁᐏᒋᑭᐍ ᐅᑕᐱᓇᒪᐣ ᓂᒪᒪ ᐅᑎᔑᑭᔑᐍᐏᐣ ᒷᔦ ᐃᐡᑿᓭᐠ
cbc.caFor those less comfortable reading Oji-Cree, CBC has helpfully published a translation in English: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/first-person-roch...
The CBC has never done this before: posted a complete article in an indigenous language on the main English site.
An awesome read that brings home the point of the people trying to keep their native languages alive.
technically only the language is indigenous, but the script you were reading here not. this is a syllabic script and was invented by an English missionary who wanted to teach the tribes the bible. so he (Evans) came up with these extremely simple phonetic symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems
Other missionaries and bible translators came up with their own writing systems also. the very first attempt 200 years earlier also looked interesting. and Larry Wall also had his ideas on this problem.
it is extremely simple, and reminds me on modern Hangul, but is probably more related to japanese. https://omniglot.com/writing/syllabaries.htm
Does an article in a non-English language belong on a site for an English-speaking audience? Just seems weird, like having an article about football in a basketry journal.
On a technical level, of course, it’s awesome that Unicode enables this kind of thing.
In this case, I would argue there isn't a problem with it - as there is an English translation available and the article itself is about the author learning her heritage language.
Yes as it introduces a larger audience to the language.
I like the representation pushes Canada achieves with some of their pre-colonial communities
There is almost no analog in the US
Its so different, from the bad things to the good things, but just right there up north
Really fascinating and inspiring for me about how much is possible given that there are so many cultures here that have almost nothing to do with each other, just grouped together as “indigenous”
Yeah, I was confused when first looking at this. But, the title of the English version is "Why I am reclaiming my mother's language before it's too late". So, pretty cool on CBC's part to put make a translation like this.
Perhaps we could get Google to add it to Translate.
Wow, Go generics really have got complicated.
There was actually a pre processor that used the characters ᐸ and ᐳ as part of faked generics.
I'm pretty sure that was the joke.
I assumed it was APL at first.
That or BQN! I know APL enough to know it wasn't, but still, funny how quickly my mind tried to identify it.
That was my first thought as well. Only saw a language with those inverted triangle.
You can stick to ASCII if you wish.
An aunt who teaches Ojibwe was showing me how the alphabet uses symmetries for its phoenetics https://www.kercstore.com/product-page/ojibwe-syllabic-chart...
That's so beautiful. I especially love how syllables are encoded as single symbols. Phonetic writing systems are amazing and this one is especially neat.
But... as a parent of a kid with dyslexia... I can't imagine teaching him this alphabet: he'd be shooting in the dark on vowel choices. After many months of deliberate effort, he can distinguish d/b from p/q but within those groups, he's completely lost. Sometimes, I've learned, beauty of symmetry comes at a cost.
One symbol im the title stands out: ᐦ appears to be missing from that chart -- any chance you know what's going on there?
Looked up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems#Ojibw...
> A glottal stop or /h/ preceding a vowel is optionally written with a separate character ⟨ᐦ⟩, as in ᐱᒪᑕᐦᐁ pimaatahe 'is skating'
I'm interested in learning Ojibwe and I've been planning to look into a tutor soon. If you don't mind me asking, how does your aunt teach? Does she work online or locally? Is she teaching only as a volunteer or professionally?
Awesome, thanks for sharing.
Why does the U not follow the other rules?
They messed up the chart, your intuition was right:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics#...
I feel like there's a deep deep tragedy in the loss not just of individual languages, but of entire language families.
While it's sad that a language like Auvergnat will likely die in a generation or two, it almost feels like less of a loss because other Langue d'Oc languages will likely survive (e.g., Gascon probably).
But the northern (a)nishn[aabe|abe|ini]m(o)w[e|i]n languages (Ojibwe, Oji-Cree, Odawa, Chippewa, etc.) are so much more endangered, have so little learning material, and are fragmented, making a concerted effort to save any one of them almost doomed to failure, let alone all of them.
I'm not saying linguistic ethnicide is acceptable, just that linguistic genocide is so so much more heartbreaking. An entire line of peoples will lose their connection to their ancestors in just a generation or two.
My step-father was Odawa. He never spoke it. But I try to study it some, to honor his memory. The Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar and Odawa Language and Legends book are... helpful but hardly sufficient.
I feel similarly. I have no indigenous Turtle-Islander roots, as far as I know, except some cultural absorption having grown up fairly open-minded in northern Minnesota. I've been practicing the animate and inanimate Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) color-names with my child who really likes colors. I like that such distinction exists, and I'm curious what else is out there in other languages that will help me experience existence in healthier, richer ways. "In living color", if you will. There are more and more children's books in English that also include earlier languages. One of our favorites is On the Trapline, by David Robertson and Julie Flett [0].
From listening to The Blindboy Podcast I'm interested in learning some Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic) for the same reasons.
[0] library reference: https://www.worldcat.org/title/on-the-trapline/
There is a recording “Rochelle Bragg speaks Oji-Cree”.
I can hear she speaks it with a massive USA accent, even though I don’t know squat about Oji-Cree. It is weird how we can hear an accent even without knowing anything about a language.
You have a good point about carry-over accents, but since she's Canadian she might take offense that you think her accent is clearly from the USA: "Rochelle Wabunn Bragg is a band member of Muskrat Dam First Nation and currently lives in Mississauga, Ont., with her family."
As an American, it's true that if I heard her recording without context I'd probably guess she's from Michigan or Minnesota, but I could convince myself to go with urban Ontario if I thought about it more. Unless you are making a deeper point about the lack of a distinct Canadian identity?
Thanks for the correction. I’m from New Zealand so (a) I don’t always recognise the difference, and (b) I know how it feels to be called the wrong nationality (when travelling, I sometimes get asked if I am Australian - grrrrr!)
Wait, isn't New Zealand a province of Australia?
runs
Interesting. I've been looking up at setting up Internet-in-a-box for a what-if scenario (ex. what if people can charge their phones but have no internet access), and am amazed that you can download wikipedia in well over a hundred languages.
I wondered, after getting the key languages spoken here (English being #1 by far) about Blackfoot, but see that there is no version of Wikipedia in that language. I wonder if they have any first nations languages (and yes, I understand that it depends on volunteers writing the articles in those languages, and that they almost certainly speak English better).
There is no Ojibwe Wikipedia [1], but there is one in the incubator [2]. There are also small versions for Cree (which is in the same family) [3], and Inuktitut [4], both of which use the syllabic script.
1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias
2. https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Wp/...
I have noticed an unsettling trend in journalism towards self-referential piece. In this article the author refers to "I", "Me" or "My" over 50 times. Despite being on a news site, yhis isn't a journalistic piece - its a blog post that just serves to allow the author to talk about themselves (framed around some topic).
This article could have been about any topic, and the tone wouldn't change - as the bulk talks about the author themselves.
The article is part of a column called "First person" which invites guest authors to write about their experiences.
I feel like articles like this could really benefit from a translated reader function. allowing one to simultaneously swap between languages and get phrases
"Invented by white christian missionary James Evans around 1840".
There seems to be no historical background or linguistic reason whatsoever?
Except there is this one reason: when English- (and French) -speakers made the phonetic writing system for Latin alphabeth, it became batshit crazy and quite unreadable.
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
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.
I once tried to understand the Haida Gwaii writing system. I learned that Finnish/German "ä"-sound was written as "aa" and double "aa"- sound was written as "a'a" and quite normal-sounding consonants were frequently decorated with 'x and 'z to indicate some minute difference from English. Madness.
Books & videos in Cree Plains:
https://www.jw.org/en/library/?contentLanguageFilter=crk-x-c...
I'm surprised obscure languages like Oji-Cree have unicodes
As more human languages go extinct, I wonder if people in the future will forget where some unicodes come from and if they will try to repurpose some codes
it's one thing Unicode does well. I haven't come across a living natural language, that's not represented in Unicode, but some extinct languages are too. there's hieroglyphics (classic and demotic), Sumerian, etc. Mayan and Aztec logosyllabary don't seem to be officially allocated yet, but there's a proposed range for them.
We even have Unicode codepoints for alphabets like Shavian or Deseret which were never in widespread use but currently exist as linguistic curiosities.
I suppose that's the point, it's not just Unicode being quirky, imagine trying to publish a paper on language X and its unique, dead, script. It'd be harder now in the 21st century without it being in Unicode than it would've been in the early 20th (without Unicode existing at all). What would you do? Append an image and refer to the characters numerically?
Probably, preferably as a vector file, and then reference it with latex (or whatever you're typesetting your paper with) so it shows up as part of the rendered document. I.e. same way you include non Unicode items in your paper.
There's ~130 known unencoded scripts, about 70 historical and 60 modern (some of which are extinct, most of which just don't have that many users). Most of these have proposed ranges, but aren't actually in unicode yet. See https://linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/index.html, which is the main group working to get the rest finished.
I'm trying to think of an example of a standard where the fixed sized index got full but re-use was a viable long term solution instead of either extension or complete replacement. It seems if that point gets hit the amount of effort to reuse isn't worth the short amount of time it gains. In IPv4 for example we reached the second level of NAT before anyone even tried to start using 0/8 which was set aside simply to not be used not even assigned and forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics
We have unicode for Sumerian, so I don't think that will ever happen.
That's just for debugging Hammurabi's code.
They added a Linear A block despite the language still being undeciphered, so not having living speakers is not a barrier to being in Unicode.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This language looks cool as hell. Is it difficult to learn?
extremely so, iirc. both because of the complex agglutinative and polysynthetic grammar, and the dearth of teaching material.
I don't know any of those words :D
The basic jist is that Ojibwe (and many American languages) have very long, complex words that are formed in a much different way to English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxARj07jFp0
I see, thanks for the info, lots to read up on!
The writing system (Syllabics) is quite simple [1]. The languages that use the writing systems, like Inuktitut, Cree, Ojibwe, and Oji-Cree (aka Severn Ojibwe; the language in the article) are not related to English and are difficult to find comprehensive resources for online.
Thought this was about Earthbound at first.
I for one welcome our alien overlords and want to let them know that I am available if they require any information on humanities weaknesses.