From: William J Poser (wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 27 2005 - 21:36:38 CST
Treating the various writing systems derived historically
from the Cree syllabics as a single system is roughly
comparable to treating the Roman alphabet, the Greek alphabet,
and Cyrillic as a single writing system. In fact just the
core Cree-Ojibwe-Inuktitut-Dene branch is probably as diverse
as these three together. Lumping them all into one range saves
codepoints since there is a fair amount of overlap in glyph shapes
but makes little sense from a linguistic point of view. Of course
if one is concerned with names, the fact that none of these systems
is actually a syllabary is also a problem. Since, for sound
reasons, the existing Unicode ranges and names are fixed,
there is no point in worrying over this, however much some
may be attracted to the "rectification of names".
In the case of French, where this range has no established
name, if one is not constrained to a close translation of
the English name, one might take these facts into consideration.
Leaving aside the problem of writing system typology, which
has no solution since (a) the systems are probably not of
homogeneous type and (b) there is no standard name for one
of the types, one could recognize the fact that the range
really contains multiple writing systems. My own preference
for referring to this range in French would be to make
"syllabaire" plural: "Syllabaires Autochtones Canadiens Unifies".
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