From: William J Poser (wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu)
Date: Sun May 29 2005 - 11:22:17 CDT
Almost all of the native languages of British Columbia are written
in some variant of the Roman alphabet. Indeed, the practical writing
systems tend to avoid non-ASCII characters. The exceptions are:
(a) Carrier has been written in the Carrier "syllabics", which are a
subset of the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics range;
(b) Two languages that spill over into BC, Cree and Slave, are sometimes
written in their versions of the "syllabics", which are also
covered by the CAS range.
(c) The trade language Chinook Jargon, as well as Latin, English, and
several Salishan languages, most prominently Shuswap, were written
in what is usually known as the "wawa writing". ("wawa" is Chinook
Jargon for "word, language, to speak".) This is a slight adaptation
of Duployer shorthand. As far as I know, this has not yet been
encoded. To my knowledge no one uses the wawa writing anymore, but
a fair amount of material written in it survives.
Bill
-- Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer@alum.mit.edu
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