Cree Syllabics - History

History

Cree syllabics were developed by James Evans, a missionary in what is now Manitoba, during the 1830s for the Ojibwe language. Evans had originally adapted the Latin script to Ojibwe (see Evans system), but after learning of the success of the Cherokee syllabary, he experimented with invented scripts based on his familiarity with shorthand and Devanagari.

When Evans later worked with the closely related Cree, and ran into trouble with the Latin alphabet, he turned to his Ojibwe project and in 1840 adapted it to the Cree language. The result contained just nine glyph shapes, each of which stood for a syllable with the vowels determined by the orientations of these shapes. With the 1841 publication of a syllabics hymnbook, the new script spread quickly. The Cree valued it because it could be learned in just a few hours, and was visually distinctive from the Latin script of the colonial languages. Virtually all Cree became literate in the new syllabary within a few years. Evans taught by writing on birchbark with soot, and he became known as "the man who made birchbark talk".