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Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of abugidas (consonant-based alphabets) used to write a number of Aboriginal Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and (formerly) Athabaskan language families. They are valued for their distinctiveness from the Latin script of the dominant languages and for the ease with which literacy can be achieved;〔 indeed, by the late 19th century the Cree had achieved what may have been one of the highest rates of literacy in the world.〔Henry Rogers, 2005, ''Writing systems: a linguistic approach'', p 249.〕 Canadian syllabics are currently used to write all of the Cree languages from Naskapi (spoken in Quebec) to the Rocky Mountains, including Eastern Cree, Woods Cree, Swampy Cree and Plains Cree. They are also used to write Inuktitut in the eastern Canadian Arctic; there they are co-official with the Latin script in the territory of Nunavut. They are used regionally for the other large Canadian Algonquian language, Ojibwe in Western Canada, as well as for Blackfoot, where they are obsolete. Among the Athabaskan languages further to the west, syllabics have been used at one point or another to write Dakelh (Carrier), Chipewyan, Slavey, Tłı̨chǫ (Dogrib) and Dane-zaa (Beaver). Syllabics have occasionally been used in the United States by communities that straddle the border, but are principally a Canadian phenomenon. ==Basic principles== Canadian "syllabic" scripts are not syllabaries, in which every consonant–vowel sequence has a separate glyph,〔For example, in a true syllabary ''pi'' would have no graphic connection to ''pa.''〕 but abugidas,〔Bernard Comrie, 2005, "Writing Systems", in Haspelmath et al. eds, ''The World Atlas of Language Structures'' (p 568 ''ff).'' Also Robert Bringhurst, 2004, ''The solid form of language: an essay on writing and meaning''. Comrie and Bringhurst use the term ''alphasyllabic,'' but the terms are essentially synonymous.〕 in which consonants are modified in order to indicate an associated vowel—in this case through a change in orientation, which is unique to Canadian syllabics. In Cree, for example, the consonant ''p'' has the shape of a chevron. In an upward orientation, ᐱ, it transcribes the syllable ''pi''. Inverted, so that it points downwards, ᐯ, it transcribes ''pe''. Pointing to the left, ᐸ, it is ''pa,'' and to the right, ᐳ, ''po''. The consonant forms and the vowels so represented vary from language to language, but generally approximate their Cree origins.〔 :: * Because the script is presented in syllabic charts and learned as a syllabary, it is often considered to be such. Indeed, computer fonts have separate coding points for each syllable (each orientation of each consonant), and the Unicode Consortium considers syllabics to be a "featural syllabary" along with such scripts as hangul, where each block represents a syllable, but consonants and vowels are indicated independently (in Cree syllabics, the consonant by the shape of a glyph, and the vowel by its orientation). This is unlike a true syllabary, where each combination of consonant and vowel has an independent form that is unrelated to other syllables with the same consonant or vowel.〔(The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0 ), 2003:149〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Canadian Aboriginal syllabics」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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