Cree Syllabics

Cree syllabics is one of the most elegant pieces of script engineering in this room. Designed by the missionary James Evans around 1840 for the Cree language — and quickly extended to Ojibwe — it is a featural syllabary: each consonant is a simple geometric shape, and you rotate or flip that shape to show which vowel follows it.

The triangle ᐸ is "pa"; turn it and it becomes ᐯ "pe", ᐱ "pi", ᐳ "po". Learners master a small set of shapes and four orientations rather than a large table of separate signs, which made it fast to teach and fast to learn.

Turn the letter a quarter-turn, and its vowel changes with it.

It spread widely across the Canadian north and was adapted for many languages; the Inuktitut form is today an official script of Nunavut. The script belongs to the family of designed scripts documented in the Inventors' Room, where its debt to earlier shorthand systems is set beside the wider question of attribution.

In Cree syllabics a single consonant is one shape, and the direction that shape faces tells you the vowel. Rotate the sign through four orientations and you have read out its whole series — no separate letter to memorise for each syllable. The triangle series below is the clearest case.