Talk:Canadian Aboriginal syllabics

Title

This page replaces Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, which is not what anyone except the Unicode committee calls syllabics writing. Diderot 10:12, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I dislike this redirect. The Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646 call it Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics because that's what the Canadian government's CASEC committee called it when they engaged in the unification of the different varieties of "Canadian Syllabics". What you've written "syllabics writing" isn't what people say. People just call them Syllabics, generally. You've kept "aboriginal" which is governmentalese at its best. I think this should be reverted. Evertype 22:24, 2004 Nov 28 (UTC)

I disagree. UCAS is a code block in the Unicode standard. It is not a writing system. It would be as inappropriate as replacing Roman alphabet with ISO Latin 1. "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" would be acceptable, but the "unified" part is purely a matter of Unicode blocks. It is not unified in anyone's practice except standardisation bodies. Users think of it as various kinds of Cree syllabics, Ojibwe syllabics, Dene syllabics and Inuktitut syllabics. Diderot 06:19, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The alphabets

They all become squares on my computer. Is that normal?

Yes. Download and install the fonts here and the problem will go away. Diderot 23:02, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Requested move 14 May 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. While there are some good arguments here on both sides, it seems overall consensus points to leaving the page as it is. (closed by non-admin page mover) Garsh (talk) 00:06, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

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Canadian Aboriginal syllabics → Canadian Indigenous syllabics – There doesn't seem to be any precedent for this naming other than Unicode—for which there is already a unique page—and the fact that most google results for "Canadian Indigenous syllabics" instead reflect "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" (likely a product of Unicode & Wikipedia's naming). However, most sources seem to refer to the linguistic system based on the particulars of the language at hand (e.g. "Cree syllabics", "Inuktitut syllabics") or even simply "(the) syllabics". Some articles also do, in fact, use "Canadian Indigenous syllabics". Even this book on Evans' invention of the system at no point uses the phrase "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics", exclusively using "Cree syllabics" or just "syllabics". The article Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics also previously used "Aboriginal" rather than "Algonquin". Ultimately, it seems as though this title (as a whole) is not an official linguistic term (i.e., proper noun), but rather a descriptor for the specific alphabetical system—with the lone "syllabics" being the standard term used to discuss the system, while "Canadian Aboriginal" is added to the article title for clarity and specificity (not because it is the official title), further evidenced by the use of the lowercase "syllabics". As such, it would be reasonable to change the title to "Canadian Indigenous syllabics", in line with the move towards using "Indigenous" rather than "Aboriginal" in Wikipedia titles. Fakedaen (talk) 04:21, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

There is precedent for using the label "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics". The name "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" is used by a number of sources, some using the term in their titles:

• Bhambra, Nishaant, Jobanpreet Dhillon, Sidrat Rahman, and Christian El-Hadad. "Development and validation of the first Canadian Aboriginal syllabics visual acuity chart." Canadian Journal of Ophthalmology 59, no. 2 (2024): e117-e123.
• Gnanadesikan, A. "Amodal morphology: Applications to Brahmic scripts and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics." University of Maryland (2022).
• Santos, Eddie Antonio. "Cree SRO/Syllabics Documentation." (2021).
• Iyengar, Arvind. "The rise and spread of Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics: Perspectives for minority-language writing systems." HASSE Resear
• Unseth, Peter. "The international impact of Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary." Written Language & Literacy 19, no. 1 (2016): 75-93.ch Week 2019 (2019).
• Aliprand, Joan M. "Scripts, languages, and authority control." Library Resources & Technical Services 49, no. 4 (2011): 243-249.
• Hare, Jan, Ron Darvin, Liam Doherty, Margaret Early, Margot Filipenko, Bonny Norton, Darshan Soni, and Espen Stranger-Johannessen. "Digital storytelling and reconciliation." Reflections of Canada: Illuminating our opportunities and challenges at 150 (2017): 200-205.

Pete unseth (talk) 14:56, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

• Support per nom. Yuchitown (talk) 14:58, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose the call for renaming the article made claims that are not correct, "There doesn't seem to be any precedent for this naming other than Unicode". Contrary to the claims made, the title of the article is actually used in many places.
• Lean oppose but open to better evidence and alternative proposals. I'm sympathetic to the arguments but it's not clear the proposed name is more widely used. "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" has 485,000 hits on Google while "Canadian Indigenous syllabics" returns just 107 hits, many of which, as the nom pointed out, include sources that primarily use "Aboriginal". I can't speak to the quality of the sources but certainly some are discussing the Unicode Standard and some are influenced by Wikipedia's usage. On Google Scholar, "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" has only 164 hits and "Canadian Indigenous syllabics" has zero."Canadian syllabics" has 76 hits on Google Scholar and just looking at the first page, many of them like this and this are referencing Unicode standards, which we have established are officially and more commonly known as Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics. Perhaps there is no established common or official name, in which case we might come up with a better descriptor than "Aboriginal" but so far this is at least the most common.--MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 17:21, 16 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose The original reason behind the request to change the name of the article has been shown to be incorrect: there are many uses of "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics", very few that use the suggested replacement "Canadian Indigenous syllabics". So why is this still being debated?Pete unseth (talk) 18:08, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

@Pete unseth @Yuchitown I agree, "no precedent" was poor phrasing on my part—it was the first way of making the statement that came to mind when I started writing and I never came back around to rephrase it. Nevertheless, the actual reasoning I offered for the change remains true. I think a better way to put it would be to say that there doesn't seem to be any apparent original source for the title.

Of the articles you cited @Pete unseth, none actually offer a citation directly explaining their usage of "Canadian Aboriginal": Bhambra et al. (2024: note 17) cite a 1981 master's thesis which at no point uses the phrase "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics"; Santos (2021:5) primarily refers to "Cree syllabics", only using "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" in reference to Unicode; while Iyengar (2019) doesn't seem to be published anywhere, his 2023 article "More matters of typology: Alphasyllabaries, abugidas and related vowelled segmentaries" also uses "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics"—but, once again, primarily relies upon "Cree syllabics", and cites Unicode for the name Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (Iyengar 2023:50); your article cites Ethnologue.com, which itself at no point uses "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" and whose script section points to ScriptSource.org, which cites unicode—and, moreover, several of the other sources cited therein (such as, for example, the immediately subsequent Lewis & Dorais 2003:278ff) make no reference to "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" and instead use "Canadian" or "Cree" syllabics; Aliprand (2011) cites unicode; Hare et al. (2017:204) cite a UBC Github project focused on making the Little Cree Books collection available in markdown format, yet primarily uses "syllabics" to refer to the script, only referring to "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" in reference to Unicode; and Gnanadesikan (2022: note 4) references... Wikipedia. In fact, your own article references "Great Lakes Aboriginal Syllabics" (Unseth 2016:78), which itself has been changed on Wikipedia to Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics. This lends credence to the idea that "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" is not the proper-noun title for the script, but rather an identifier which (like the rest of the articles that previously used "Aboriginal") can be changed to Indigenous and still be a correct title—meaning that the primary reason offered in the original move decision on this topic was incorrect and should be disregarded.

In the absence of an original source, we might defer to an authoritative source (as per the original move decision). However, "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" is used only once on the government of Canada website, and that's in reference to an Indigenous advisory committee evaluating the Unicode set, while the rest of page references "Indigenous [characters and] syllabics". In other words, while no official title has been promulgated, the Canadian government refers to the script using Indigenous rather than Aboriginal.

While many sources also point to the Unicode standard (as per above), there is already a page specifically for Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (the Unicode block) on Wikipedia. Considering that this page is not referring specifically to the digital use of syllabics, Unicode is not the authoritative source on this subject.

@Myceteae I definitely recognize that the current title is used in many places, but I disagree that this is a basis to keep the name as-is. The term "Aboriginal" (and, before it, "Indian") was, at one time, the standard term for Indigenous peoples in Canada. However, it is clearly now an objectively outdated and somewhat offensive term in the Canadian context, and should be avoided; Wikipedia is likely at least partially responsible for the term's current popularity (cf. Gnanadesikan 2022: note 4), and should thus take the step to correct this error. There has already been a wide-scale shift towards the use of "Indigenous" rather than "Aboriginal" in Wikipedia article titles, but this article was exempted from that shift primarily on the grounds that it was read as the proper-noun title for the script; considering that this logic is likely incorrect (as "Canadian Aboriginal" is, like other articles that previously used it, clearly being used solely as an identifier in this context), this article should nevertheless be moved in line with previous policy.

TL;DR: Overall, it seems that the proper term for the script as a whole is simply "syllabics", with "Canadian [Indigenous/Aboriginal]" added to the title as a general identifier for clarity, while specific uses of the script are delineated by the language with which they are being used. My point isn't necessarily that "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" is a title with no history, precedent, etc.—just that it's not a proper-noun title, which was the primary reason in the original decision given to not change the name. Considering this fact, it seems best to change the title to better align with similar articles. Fakedaen (talk) 23:30, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

I agree with your assessment that this was wrongly excluded from the original mass Aboriginal → Indigenous move, so now we are left to assess the article's title on its own merits. It is simply not true that "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics" is a title with no history, precedent, etc. It is used in a number of sources, as has been shown, and from the evidence appears to be the most common name. Even if Unicode and this very Wikipedia article have had an outsized influence on usage, we can't simply ignore usage found "in the wild." It's possible there is no true "common name" for this subject, although some words appear more frequently than others in describing it. If that's the case—and I'm not sure it is—then we must come up with a reasonable descriptive title, and "Indigenous" is certainly better than "Aboriginal." --MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 19:29, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

Strongly agree. Fakedaen (talk) 20:40, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose it is simply the term used fsource) like.... Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics - Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Extended - Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Extended-A....no WP:OR or.WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS Moxy🍁 04:47, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

  Did you actually read any of the reasoning provided...? All of that has been addressed thoroughly. This is not the page for the Unicode block, and Unicode is not an authority on the nomenclature for entire scripts. This is neither WP:OR nor WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. There is no original research here, and this move is fully in line with the previous large-scale move towards the use of "Indigenous" in article titles. Fakedaen (talk) 04:56, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

  We dont makeup names here - we simply regurgitate sources (Google search Canadian Indigenous syllabics) all direct us to articles about "Canadian Aboriginal syllabics". If one of our readers is looking for a keyboard they need to search Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics keyboards....thus no we should not use a term that will not help facilitate learning and research. We should not go out of our way to mislead our readers about a change or use of term when one has not happened yet - Wikipedia:Advocacy Moxy🍁 05:24, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

  This isn't making up a name. It's completely in line with what was discussed in the original large-scale move against the use of "Canadian Aboriginal"; this isn't Wikipedia:Advocacy, it's Wikipedia:Article_titles#Consistency. I would once again encourage you to actually read through the reasoning I've provided above, both in my recent comment and the original move request (in which I cite several sources which use the term "Canadian Indigenous syllabics"). If you'd prefer something with more authoritative origins, then go with the Canadian government title of "Indigenous characters and syllabics". Fakedaen (talk) 05:34, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

  I am one of many that made all the moves and write articles like Canadian genocide of Indigenous peoples. Like Canadian Indian residential school system some terms have not changed in academic usage ....some due to historical significants or simply no broad change yet.

  • Bhambra, Nishaant; Dhillon, Jobanpreet; Rahman, Sidrat; El-Hadad, Christian (2024). "Development and validation of the first Canadian Aboriginal syllabics visual acuity chart". Canadian Journal of Ophthalmology. 59 (2). Elsevier BV: e117–e123. doi:10.1016/j.jcjo.2023.01.009. ISSN 0008-4182.
  • Nauendorff, Marvin (2024-04-02). "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics: The Untold Story of Canada's Indigenous Writing System". Linguaphile Magazine. Retrieved 2025-05-19.
  • "Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: Indigenous and minority writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them". 2018-12-18. Retrieved 2025-05-19.
  • "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Script Resources". W3C. 2024-11-14. Retrieved 2025-05-19.
  • "North American Syllabics". UCDA. Retrieved 2025-05-19.

  - Moxy🍁 06:04, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

  Moxy, I assure you I recognize your Wikipedia status and appreciate the work you've done. I also recognize the importance of using dated terms in certain articles, especially those which are specifically addressing the terminology used at the time they are describing (nb. this article is not doing so). However, I will again direct you to please actually read my comments, as they fully explain the actual logic behind this change—I even already directly addressed the Bhambra et al. (2024) article. TL;DR: the reasoning of this article's exception from the move was primarily based on it supposedly being a proper-noun title. It is not. Therefore it is eligible to be moved in accordance with the rest of that move.

  On another note, it should be recognized that Indigenous-based organized crime was also previously exempted from the move (being named "Aboriginal-based organized crime") but has since itself been moved—leaving this article as the only article in the original move list to not be renamed. Even completely disregarding the substantial reasoning I've previously proposed, a move should be considered regardless on the grounds of Wikipedia:Article titles#Consistency. Fakedaen (talk) 06:27, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

  I believe that the evidence presented above shows that "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" is indeed a proper-noun title. We may or may not like the article's title, it may or may not be in harmony with what some want, and it may be a bit anachronistic, but the title is clearly established, used by a variety of reliable sources. Pete unseth (talk) 00:36, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  What evidence? I'd say it's been pretty clearly indicated it's anything but. None of your sources indicate that fact, and there's no authoritative source on it. Fakedaen (talk) 00:40, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  I don't know what else would count as evidence. I've listed a number of publications that use the title as a proper noun. What else would count as evidence? As far as I can see, there is only one editor rejecting the presented evidence and continuing to push for this change to the article title. Pete unseth (talk) 01:28, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  Not only did I previously address each article you cited, but that statement isn't even true. The only articles to use the uppercase "Syllabics" are: yours, which should be prima facie disregarded as a COI for the purpose of this particular point; Gnanadesikan (2022), which cites back to Wikipedia; and Aliprand (2011), which is not only (as previously stated) speaking in reference to Unicode, but moreover outdated considering the shift towards "Indigenous" rather than "Aboriginal" mostly heavily took place from ~2014 onwards. On the other hand, Bhambra et al. (2024), Santos (2021), and Hare et al. (2017) all use the lowercase "syllabics".

  My authorship of an article and my user name are clearly linked, no attempt to hide. If I edited using a pseudonym (like 99.9% of wikipedia editors), nobody would accuse me of Conflict Of Interest. Pete unseth (talk) 18:21, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  I'm also happy to (again) point to a number of sources that indicate "syllabics", "[nation] syllabics", or "Canadian Indigenous syllabics" are all standard titles, not that it's even extremely relevant to the discussion as it's already been clearly demonstrated that this article's exclusion from the June 2017 move was in error. Nevertheless:

  Fagnan, Luc. 2020. “Decolonizing Description: First Steps to Cataloguing with Indigenous Syllabics.” Pathfinder: A Canadian Journal for Information Science Students and Early Career Professionals 1(1):33–40. doi: 10.29173/pathfinder21.

  Pharo, Lars Kirkhusmo, and Vincent L. Wimbush. 2015. “Authorities of Scriptural Technologies in America.” in Scripturalizing the Human. New York, NY: Routledge.

  Rigby, Carol. 2015. “Nunavut Libraries Online Establish Inuit Language Bibliographic Cataloging Standards: Promoting Indigenous Language Using a Commercial ILS.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53(5–6):615–39. doi: 10.1080/01639374.2015.1008165.

  Jobin, Shalene Wuttunee. 2023. Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships: Nehiyawak Narratives. Vancouver: UBC Press.

  Once again, please actually engage with the content of what you're replying to rather than continuing to assert your position. There are an equal number of editors (3) both favouring and opposing the change. Considering it seems as though you have a vested interest in retaining the current title, I'd also advise disclosing a COI before continuing this discussion. Fakedaen (talk) 06:25, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose no return on ngram - canadian aboriginal, cree, inuktitut etc are the usual modifiers — kwami (talk) 02:17, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  In fairness, there are also no hits for "Aboriginal syllabics", but it is used elsewhere, though by no means universally. --MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 05:06, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  I don't think ngram is a valid metric in this instance. Looking to the previous move request, we can draw an example: "Canadian aboriginal law" has been declining since 2017; yet "Canadian indigenous law" returns no hits. (ngram). Fakedaen (talk) 05:24, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  Canadian Aboriginal law and Canadian Indigenous law are two different things . Moxy🍁 12:08, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Insulting mention of native origin.

So, apparently, some native descendant(s) are trying to push the "narrative" (as is now entirely the fashion to say) that Evans' creation was actually related to him by the spirit of some ancient tribesman. This scholarly spirit nevertheless had to await the arrival of a convenient coloniser so that he could relay the astounding, if delayed by thousands of years, discovery of writing to his own people.

Come on. That the descendants of natives feel the need to indulge in some form of myth so as to soothe the shame of lagging forever behind in reaching one of Humanity's basic milestones is completely understandable. But to allow this otherwise fine article to get contaminated by such a suggestion is insulting to its authors, and, more importantly, to the memory of Evans. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.133.2.27 (talk) 18:49, 18 June 2025 (UTC)