Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics facts for kids

The Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics is a unique writing system. It was created in the 1800s for several Algonquian languages spoken near the Great Lakes. These languages include Fox (also called Meskwaki), Sac, Kickapoo, and Potawatomi. Later, it was also used for the Siouan language Ho-Chunk (also known as Winnebago). Some people think it might have been used for the Ottawa language too, which is a dialect of Ojibwe, but there isn't much proof.

This writing system is interesting because it mixes ideas from an alphabet and a syllabary. In an alphabet, each letter usually stands for a single sound. In a syllabary, each symbol stands for a whole syllable (like "ba" or "ko"). Great Lakes syllabics groups letters for consonants and vowels together to form syllable units.

It's important to know that this system is completely different from Cree syllabics. Cree syllabics was invented by James Evans for the Cree people in Canada.

How the Great Lakes Syllabics Began

The Great Lakes syllabics system was based on a cursive (flowing handwriting) style of the Roman alphabet used in Europe. The way vowels are written suggests it might have been influenced by French writing. Also, the order of consonants in the syllabics tables hints that the people who created it might have known about the Canadian syllabics system from Canada. This makes some experts think it might have started in Canada.

We don't know exactly how this writing system first developed. But by 1880, when it was first noticed, many Fox and Sac speakers were already using it. Potawatomi speakers also started using it around the same time.

One interesting clue about its origin comes from the Potawatomi language. Potawatomi doesn't have an "h" sound like Fox does. Instead, it often uses a glottal stop (a sound made by briefly closing your throat, like in "uh-oh"). In the Great Lakes syllabics, the glottal stop is the only consonant not written in Potawatomi, and the "h" sound is the only one not written in Fox. This suggests the system might have been made for Potawatomi first, and then shared with Fox, Sac, and Kickapoo speakers.

How the Syllabics Work

In Great Lakes syllabics, each syllable is separated by a space. Sometimes, a dot or other mark is used to separate words. This is similar to how early Westerners wrote down Native American languages, often using hyphens between syllables.

Even though it's called "syllabics," it's actually an alphabet because it has separate letters for consonants and vowels. However, these letters are grouped together to form syllable blocks, much like the Korean alphabet.

Here's a key feature: the vowel "a" is usually not written if it's part of a syllable. For example, the letter for "k" can stand for both the "k" sound and the syllable "ka." Also, the letter for the vowel "i" often becomes just a dot placed on the consonant of the syllable. These features, where a main vowel is understood and other vowels are added as small marks, are found in a type of alphabet called an abugida.

Sometimes, the difference between sounds like "p" and "ph" (an "aspirated" p, with a puff of air) isn't always shown clearly. This means the script isn't always perfect at showing every sound difference.

There are different versions of this writing system. Examples of the Fox alphabet can be found in old writings and books. These often include handwriting samples from different Fox writers from the early 1900s.

The Fox Alphabet

The symbols used by the Fox, Sauk, and Kickapoo groups are very similar, with only small differences. The Fox alphabet is the one we know most about. Fox speakers call their script pa·pe·pi·po·, which refers to the first row of consonant-plus-vowel syllables in the traditional way the script is presented.

The Fox alphabet usually has 48 syllables. These are arranged in twelve rows and four columns. One row has the four vowel letters by themselves. The other rows each have one of the eleven consonant letters by itself (with the "a" vowel understood) followed by each of the three other vowel letters. The script can write almost all the consonant sounds in the Fox language, except for the "h" sound. It also doesn't show the difference between long and short vowels. If you see two identical vowel letters next to each other, it means two syllables, often with an "h" sound in between.

Syllables are separated by spaces. For punctuation, a word divider is used. This divider can look like a dot, a small line, an "X," or a "+." However, many writers don't use the word divider, especially at the end of a line. Some writers never use it at all.

There were also some secret versions of the script used by Fox speakers. These used different symbols for consonant and vowel combinations. They were not widely used. Kickapoo speakers, especially those living in Mexico, also made small changes to the script based on Spanish.

Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) People Adopt the Script

The Fox alphabet was later adopted by speakers of Ho-Chunk (also known as Winnebago). This happened after some Ho-Chunk people met Fox speakers in Nebraska in 1883–1884. The Fox speakers told them about their new writing system. Later, in 1884, a Winnebago speaker visited Fox territory in Iowa and learned how to write in the script. Reports from that time say that Winnebago speakers in Nebraska and Wisconsin quickly started using the script.

The Ho-Chunk language has many more consonants and vowels than Fox-Sauk-Kickapoo and Potawatomi. So, the script was changed to fit these differences.

A famous anthropologist named Paul Radin worked with a Ho-Chunk speaker named Sam Blowsnake. Blowsnake wrote his autobiography, Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian, using this script. However, over time, fewer and fewer people used the syllabics. By 1912, Radin reported that only a small number of people in Winnebago communities still knew how to use it.

Possible Use by Ottawa People

There are some comments by an Ottawa speaker named Andrew J. Blackbird. He remembered his father, Mackadepenessy, "making his own alphabet which he called 'Paw-pa-pe-po'." His father taught it to other Ottawas from the L'Arbre Croche village in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. Some people think this might mean Ottawas used a syllabic writing system earlier in the 1800s. However, Blackbird himself didn't use this script. His own Ottawa writings used a mix of French and English writing styles, not the Great Lakes script. We don't have any known Ottawa texts written in the Great Lakes syllabics.

It has been suggested that Blackbird's father might have been talking about a different writing system. This system was developed by French Roman Catholic missionaries. A missionary named August Dejean arrived in L'Arbre Croche, Michigan, in 1827. He wrote a primer (a basic textbook) and a catechism (a book of religious teachings) using a writing style similar to other French missionaries.

Ojibwe Use

In 1932, a researcher named Huron H. Smith wrote about the "Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians." He mentioned that the Ojibwe people had been writing their language for a long time. He said they used a "script" to write to each other, but it wasn't very useful for studying their culture. In his notes, Smith clarified what he meant by "script" and provided a table of the script.

Written Stories and Records

In the early 1900s, Truman Michelson, a linguist from the Bureau of American Ethnology, asked several Fox speakers to write stories using the Fox script. Some of these stories were very long, filling hundreds of printed pages. A large collection of these handwritten stories is now kept at the Smithsonian Institution National Anthropological Archives.

There's a photograph of Michelson with a very productive Fox writer named Albert Kiyana. Kiyana wrote many stories for Michelson between 1911 and his death in 1918. One of his most important stories, "Owl Sacred Pack," has recently been published in a new, edited version.