Cree Syllabics (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Cree Syllabics (2002)

omniglot.com

53 pointseindiran13 comments

Tangential comment, but since this is Hacker News I just want to remind everybody of that legendary Reddit post that used Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (which the Cree Syllabics are part of) to mock "generic" looking types in Go before they were allowed in the language.

Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20230218214823/https://old.reddi...

Along similar lines, there was a security vulnerability in Netscape Navigator because its HTML parser treated Single Left-Pointing Angle Quotation Mark as if it were Less-Than Sign and Single Right-Pointing Angle Quotation Mark as if it were Greater-Than Sign, presumably because they looked the same and the developers somehow thought that it would be helpful. Of course no markup sanitiser behaved the same and it became a really easy XSS vector because an attacker could use those to give markup to Netscape that would pass through any sanitiser unmodified. There’s loads of examples of Postel’s Law causing security vulnerabilities like this.

As paper was scarce at the time, they wrote on birch bark with soot from burnt sticks, or carved messages in wood, and nicknamed James Evans 'The man who made birch bark talk'.

There is also a Native-centric origin story in the piece, which is a nice touch.

This was also done 1000 years ago, in Novgorod

Tangential comment, but considering there are many computer people here, I would highly recommend Jon Corbett's talk at Causal Islands on Indigitalization: Indigenous Computing Theory, which features a Cree-language keyboard design of his own making!

https://youtu.be/SWVLwxwcl1Q

And an interview with Corbett, focusing on his programming language built on it, Cree# https://esoteric.codes/blog/jon-corbett

It’s still used. Search for James Vukelich on TikTok or YouTube or Facebook. It appears in his Ojibwe vocabulary of the day.

Also examples on his Instagram feed: https://www.instagram.com/jamesvukelich/

An article in Cree posted here in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30807401

Submission link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/%E1%90%8A%E1%90%A...

> Evans' syllabary for Ojibwe consisted of just nine symbols, each of which could be written in four different orientations to indicate different vowels.

I've always have trouble remembering .. Graphemes .. signs .. that only have orientation differences. For example Japanese maマ and muム . L<ess than and >grater than. I think this Cree script would be a challenge for some people. ᐆ ᐋ which way was o and which was a again. More recently I was trying memorize Korean script and come up with some visual mnemonics for the same things. ㅏㅓ which is 'a' and which is 'oe' ㅗㅜ which is 'u' and which is 'o'. I resorted to drawing the letters on top of an vowel articulation map of the mouth, and discovered that korean script was designed to correspond exactly to this.

Do you have trouble with "n" vs "u"? How about "b", "d", "p", "q"?

I did have trouble with b and d as a child.

I still do! I also wrote 5s backwards sometimes.

Armenian is absolutely full of these. There's ս, ո, մ, and ն (one word that has three of them is տոմս, pronounced as "toms"). Also Գ and Ժ. And Ի and Կ, also looking similar enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com